Doug and Julie Effinger in Nicaragua

I started writing this blog addition on June 5th, the day of our 34th wedding anniversary. What I began to write was that we were not together for our anniversary but I have never felt closer to her than today. After nearly three and a half decades being together, experiencing ups and downs, going through nearly marriage ending trials and coming through without calling it quits, we decided that it was time for an experiment. Actually, we didn't decide. Our daughter did. Here's what I started writing a few weeks ago...   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Great Experiment is coming to an end. Today officially marks Julie and my 34th anniversary and we are not together to enjoy it. But I can tell you I have never felt closer to her than I do today. She is a woman worthy of so much more than what I have given to her over the last 3 and a half decades. Yet, she chose me and ...

In our ministry, Nica Impact, we are much more than just a program for assisting young adults in their careers. We have expanded our focus to include other educational avenues. One way we do this is through a partnership with the William Minor Foundation. In this partnership have built a local library that we manage where we have books and computer access available to local students to support their studies. All the funding for the library comes from the foundation while Nica Impact manages it. It has proven to be an amazing resource to local young people, especially those from the poorer segments of society. We also have developed a relationship with the US Embassy where they provide daily English classes for teenagers sponsored by the Embassy program called Access English. This program provides scholarships to poorer students so that they can participate in a two year intensive English course. It is an amazing program and we are honored to host one of the classes in our library. ...

Casa Juan Marcos was our attempt to help students aging out from orphanages. We began with 3 young men from orpha #2 and one young man from orpha #1. We provided a rented home, a cook, a staff member as house leader, and food and educational expenses. It seemed to us to be a good program, but what we found was that the young adults from the orphanages did not like the discipline we were expecting from them. We required that they get good grades, communicate with the house leader, go to school daily, and do their chores and such. The four boys that we had lasted just over a year before one by one, they decided they would prefer to not be under our expectations for success that we had. A year after we opened the boys home, we opened one for girls. We rented a house, hired staff, and outfitted the home for four girls from the first two orphanages. When it was time for them to come, three decided not to participate, and the fourth came for two days, filled two backpacks with items from t...

When we arrived at the orphanage for our permanent mission, the first thing we noticed was our house. It was not finished. It was supposed to be finished but it was not. It was missing a lot of things. Doors, windows, a floor, and a ceiling. Over the next 6 months Julie and I completed the house that should have been completed before our arrival. We were disappointed but at the same time we were happy to be near the children. We moved into a small office space as a temporary sleeping quarters until I could get the house far enough along to move in. We also helped to facilitate some mission teams that came because of our permanent roles there. It didn’t take long before we began to realize that although the children loved having us there, many of the staff were suspicious of us. We started to feel tension. Maybe it was cultural, but over a very short period we found ourselves on the outside of staff meetings and ministry discussions. We were never sure why, but noticed that there were...

It was February of 2000 when our plane touched down in Managua, Nicaragua. We were a small group of 7. When we got off the plane we were greeted by 95 degree heat and 95% relative humidity. There was no jetway at the airport in those days. We walked down the portable stairs and were guided into an old, dank, light blue painted building with no air conditioning by two rows of military police all carrying AK-47 military rifles. It was somewhat intimidating. After passing through immigration and customs, we were picked up by two old pick up trucks driven by orphanage staff. Off we went on the 30 kilometer trip to our destination. I remember as we passed through the customs area, there was a wall of glass where families would pick up their loved ones. Faces would be pressed against the glass as literally a hundred or so people were squishing in trying to find their family member as they exited the customs agent. It was quite the first impression. While riding in the back of a pickup truc...

That weekend in Mexico at the orphanage never left my thoughts for very long. When I met Julie I had been sponsoring a little girl in Peru through World Vision. I had never met her and only had a small picture of her and a story. I always wondered what her life was like. Shortly after Julie and I married, my sponsored girl dropped out of the program and I chose not to continue with World Vision. Going to Mexico gave me a glimpse of what it might have been like for her. As my time in the Air Force was coming to an end, the Vineyard was starting a discipleship school at a ranch in the mountains of California about an hour away from our church. It was to be a communal living experience where we would spend time maintaining the ranch while studying and practicing the lessons of the bible. It was April 1984 when the school started and I was scheduled to be discharged from the USAF in June of '84. But as fate would have it (God's timing?), when I tacked my unused leave (vacation) t...

Making the decision to follow Jesus was a radical one for me. I continued attending every meeting I could and was reading my bible non-stop. My learning curve was vertical. Along with some single guys from Edwards AFB we would go drive out together to attend church. For about 9 months we did this religiously, to use a pun. It was hard for us to meet people our age because our commitment was to the military which made it difficult to plug in to ministries at the Vineyard. But we would make the services as often as possible. We also would visit other churches for evening services since the Vineyard did not have a Sunday evening service, and we were hungry for teaching. It was October of 1981 that we visited a church in Rosamond called the Wayside Chapel where after a few Sunday evening services I met the woman who 8 months late became my wife and still is today. We were married June 5th of 1982. Shortly after, we moved on to base housing and opened up a home bible study group in our hous...