The Christian Chronicle - Chronicle staff writer Erik Tryggestad wrote a story, excerpted below, for the Duncan (Okla.) Banner (www.duncanbanner.com), focusing on two Oklahoma churches and their involvement in relief and medical missions in Nicaragua. The story appeared Nov. 22, 2002.

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — Kent King pulls his tiny rental car into a gas station and darts inside to buy a Diet Coke (it's called "Coca-Cola Light" here). He's lost track of the truck he was following through the busy streets of Managua, and has arranged to follow a taxi to his destination — a farm outside city limits.

"I've got to have my caffeine if I'm going to keep up with this guy," he says, pulling past a line of merchants trying to sell his passengers bags of cashews and into traffic behind the lead-footed cabbie.

Before long the busy streets of Managua melt into winding roads framed by lush, jungle-like overhanging foliage and high mountains — even some volcanoes.

The people change, too. King's car passes carts drawn by horses and oxen. Houses pulled together from sheet metal and mud bricks dot the highway. Residents of this Central American country are among the poorest in Latin America.

King, a family physician in Duncan, Okla., comes here once per year for medical mission and relief work. He and other members of Duncan's Chisholm Trail Church of Christ, along with Church of Christ members from Durant and other parts of Oklahoma, are part of a mission group, "Los Niños del Rey" ("The Children of the King").

The cooperating churches, working with Christians in Nicaragua, have purchased two farms southeast of Managua. One will allow the poor to grow and sell their own crops. The other will house an orphanage.

King and fellow Chisholm Trail member Ray Collins, a firefighter in Lawton, visited the farms Nov. 5 while they were in Managua for the 40th annual Pan American Lectureship, a gathering of about 40 church of Christ members from the United States, mostly retired missions supporters, and Nicaraguan Christians.

Seven of the participants were from churches of Christ in Oklahoma, including Durant, Duncan and Edmond.

King and Collins have made several trips from Duncan to Nicaragua, but said the number of Christians they met at the lectureship amazed them. Neither did they realize that so many other church of Christ-sponsored ministries were involved in work there, they said.

Their church in Duncan will partner with the Seventh and Beech Church of Christ, Durant, in administering one of the farms. Billy Albright, an elder at the Durant church, and minister John Curtis accompanied King and Collins on their tour of the progress.

Local church members had cleared more than 50 percent of the land, and were growing rows of beans and coffee across from tall trees, beginning to bear bunches of bananas and plantains.

Speaking through interpreters, the Christians laugh and smile as they inspect the fruitful harvest to come.

"The people here ... you grow to know and love them greater than anywhere else I've been," Albright said.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, see www.losninosdelrey.org.