Prayer in Ecuador by Emily Roche

Published: January 10th, 2007

Last year, I set out to Ecuador with eleven others, geared up to build two churches in four months with underprivileged communities in the sub-tropical town of Santo Domingo. Overwhelmed by the fellowship and family that we found in a church so far from home, we discovered the joy they found in serving others though they had nothing. We longed to serve their communities more.

 During our second project, 'Red Moon Rising' was making its way around the team, and had soon been read by almost everyone. The whole team felt encouraged and inspired by the book. After some evening devotions and much prayer, several felt they were being called to 24-hours of prayer in the church, the Iglesia Rosa de Saron. A couple of weeks went past, but God wasn't going to keep quiet: he called us up again and again until we got to work.

Explaining the concept of 24-hours of non-stop prayer in our broken Spanish was one of the hardest parts. We spoke at churches and meetings with the pastor to try and explain what we wanted to do. Still not sure if he understood, we made a sign-up sheet, and began to prepare one of the children's classrooms for the weekend of prayer.

Our room was modeled on Red Moon Rising. We made a bamboo cross with a metal crown, and and stuck news and maps to the wall. There was a wailing wall, paints, candles, drapes and an area for communion. 'The Vision' was meticulously copied-out and stuck-up.

The day prayer was due to start, everything seemed to go wrong! The pastor announced that we couldn't go ahead because we were living in such a dangerous area, and walking to the church in the middle of the night would risk us getting beaten up or even shot! We did it anyway.

People took a while to get the hang of things. They were used to all-night vigils, where the pastor and a team sang songs, preached and performed all night, but in our prayer room the only sound was the quiet hum of worship music. 5 or 6 people lay around absorbed in prayer or studying the Bible. Many of them wanted to talk to us. They wrote out prayer requests so we could pray for them, and would chat in the corner or ask us when the service was starting! But as the hours went on, the room filled not with our team but with the local people - painting, writing and just enjoying meeting with God. Many stayed through the night, and no one was harmed journeying to and from the church.

A couple of weeks later we ran another 48 hours of prayer - also a great success. We finished by praying for one local young man, who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer.

We were working up to a week of prayer, and had run out of time. But, on the last day, the pastor told us that he had never before seen people praying like that, and announced that one of the new rooms to be built on the roof we had constructed would be a permanent prayer room! Since returning, we haven't yet heard whether everything is up and running, but prayers for those people would be much appreciated.

My experience in Ecuador gave me a new-found reverence for God's way of doing things. He called us at a moment's notice to pray with those people, giving them everything we knew about prayer. He assured us it would work, and it did. One of the most amazing things I saw in my six months traveling around South American was that small room, filled with God's conversations.

Emily Roche is currently a student in Durham after finishing her Gap Year in South America with Latin Link, during which she also worked with Scripture Union in Greece. She loves art and sports and is currently telling everyone to read ‘The Vision and The Vow’.
 

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