journey with danielle: day one twenty

sooo saturday night we had street church as usual and it was...una maquina!! so cool!! just hearing people´s hearts and desire to follow Christ. Frejol asked who wanted to go to the jail the next morning to visit and tell people about Jesus and pray with people and hand out soap. The next morning there were maybe ten of us who went. It was unlike anything i could have expected. It was like a whole community in there...with children everywhere and families. I feared at first that these kids lived here but later realized it was visiting day. One of the kids who always comes to street church, i learned has a father in the jail. The lives that these kids have...i cannot even imagine. We passed by the door of the maximum security cell, which...didn´t look so secure to me. This is where the worst of the worst of all of Riobamba go. People were playing soccer and basketball. There was a small church where some of us went to pray and sing songs for whoever cared to listen. These guys in the street church amaze me. These people in the jail are the people who nobody cares about. These are the people that nobody can trust. These are the ¨scum of Riobamba¨...but Blas and Frejol and Naomi and the rest just seemed to know them as friends, nothing else. I saw the love of God in action yesterday. When Blas went up to the small window in the door of maximum security, where noone is allowed to enter, and shake the hands of the guys who knew him by name, and hand them soap...fear just seemed to leave me. Of course being in a jail is never competely safe, but where in the world could be safer than in the will of God?

We were about to leave but for some reason we had to wait for someone, so we went to visit one of their friends...we went into this small room in a door right beside the maximum security cell. There was a guy sitting at a sewing machine, making shoes. Blas, Chuky, and I sat for a while and ate oranges, listened to music, and helped their friend for a while make shoes. I just love random, amazing experiences like this. None of it made sense to me...why was he making shoes here? was he in jail too? im not really a person of many questions though, i just take things as they are. And then i started to laugh. Here he was making shoes with vans and adidas logos..obviously not real, and he was making them in a jail. oh the irony.