Together in Honduras

There has been some stuff happening this month. Let me start at the beginning.

The trip to Honduras was rough. We left at 4:30am in a bus and a van. The border crossing took 2 hours and someone was almost sent to Mexico and back again because of a misprint on their visa. The 12hr drive somehow turned into 18hrs and the driver of the bus was almost falling asleep. The van driver was falling asleep and its only thanks to Joey sitting behind him and slapping him with his own hat and hitting his shoulders to help keep him awake. The driver thanked Joey every time. I wasn’t in that vehicle but I’m still thanking Joey every time I think about that trip and watching the van in front of us slow down and start swerving to the side. A short portion of the drive was right on the coast and after the beautiful views everyone was a bit stir crazy and so we had a dance party and someone even did some crowd surfing for a few seconds. The vehicles were supposed to have air conditioning but it didn’t work. We were told to leave the windows closed so the air conditioning could be felt but the sun beating through the window was so strong we were all roasting. We opened the window and the breeze from the moving vehicle felt amazing. 

We made it to our hotel in Honduras at 11pm. Rooms were assigned and we all crashed. We all found it hard to leave our air conditioned rooms to head up to our ministry site. An hour up winding mountain paths, holding on to the truck for dear life, brought us to a camp. A literal camp. The church was at the top and the kitchen at the bottom with individual campsites in between the two. 

We were warned that it rains by 4pm every day so we all moved fairly quickly to get our tents set up. It didn’t rain at all that day. I skipped lunch that day so I was excited to get supper only to find out it was a lot of beans…refried beans to be specific. And bananas. I think I ate 1 of the three things on my plate before passing it off to the others to finish because in Honduras it’s bad manners to leave food on your plate. 

Sunday morning we hiked down to a nearby farm and had our Sunday service. Well, everyone else hiked, I got a ride on a four wheeler because I was still limping so bad from my ankle locking up during that long bus ride. Shh, don’t tell. 

After the service we were shown around the farm. There were a few thousand coffee plants and we got to pick some of the fresh coffee beans. Then we were shown how they take the shells off. We only picked beans for a couple minutes and had maybe a pound of beans once they were deshelled. The big name coffee companies will by the beans for 1 Lempira per pound. A Lempira is 1/24 of an American dollar. Now you see just how ridiculous our coffee prices are. 

Also on the farm were corn fields. What I need you to understand is just how farming is done here. We are on a mountain so the farms are planted into the sides. It is very steep. So it shouldn’t surprise you when I say I fell and so did lots of other people as we made our way through the corn and down to the cabbage patch. We spent about 25min or so forming a line up the mountain and picking cabbage and tossing em up. That was quite fun. On through more corn and down into another cabbage patch and next to that were a few rows of carrots. I have never in my life tasted a carrot so sweet. Right next to the carrots was cilantro and below that was a stretch of cucumbers. I think we ate almost as many cucumbers as we plucked! At one point they had formed an assembly line for the cucumbers and someone wasn’t paying attention and got hit in the face! They were unhurt but very surprised and everyone got a good laugh out of it. 

That night Paul and Tanya sat us down in the church in front of a projector and played a slide show explaining the ministry and how it came to be. They talked about how they found the land through a set of twins that had come up the mountain before with thoughts of building a church. Of course they sent their own group to explore as well before deciding anything. Shortly after deciding where they wanted the church the first World race team came out. Most of them being my friends from my original route. They shoveled dirt out of the side of the mountain and hauled logs over a mile on their shoulders and planted all of the crops we got to harvest. They made the tables and benches we used for our meals. Besides the tables and benches they saw nothing but a carved section of earth and tilled ground and a pile of logs. One of the first things Jose and I did was take pictures of the church and community center and all of the vegetables and everything they didn’t get to see but that they laid the groundwork for. They talked about us doing a lot of house visits simply to help them build relationships to get people to come to the church and maybe a little bit of construction work just to finish up the railing on the community center and maybe make a couple benches for the church. After the meeting it was back to the tent for a fairly restless night listening to the stray dogs fighting over the trash behind the kitchen.

Monday morning everyone hiked higher up the mountain to get boards to bring back so we could start construction. I did not join that hike but stayed back and filled up their water bottles for them. That was a chore in itself. Jack was the first one done with his second load and proceeded to tell everyone that I had filled all the bottles even though he helped too. The next two days were full of thank yous for getting them fresh coolish water. Since then I have mysteriously found my own water bottle refilled. It’s fun to try and guess who filled it. Oh! And after that first day they hike to hike even further away to get the lumber and they did it at least a couple times each week. One week they did a lumber run in the morning and construction midday, only to end with vbs! Talk about being exhausted!

Most afternoons were spent doing construction. I joined up with a group to build benches for the church. With 3 people measuring and 3 people cutting we seemed to be zooming through the task. One problem. The legs were all different lengths. We had to go back and shave off a little bit off of almost every leg. It’s very difficult to shave wood with a hand saw. It took us all afternoon to even it out and nail the legs to the bench. Day two went much more smoothly. I was the only one measuring and the legs were all coming out the same size. We managed to get two benches made that afternoon after everyone had gone and hauled another load of wood from an even further location. That location is where they would retrieve wood from for the rest of the month. 

We made 7 benches, finished the railing and did another separate bamboo railing up at the church, measured out a front porch for the church, added slats to cover the gaps between the boards outside the community center, built and put up a couple of doors, made 3 sets of bunkbeds for 2 different rooms, painted a mural and a logo, and built a lot of stools. It’s crazy how much you can get done with 30 people that have no clue what they are doing.

The VBS averaged about 80 kids each night and while most of us did that our beauty for ashes reps held events for the moms. We rotated our stations each day so that no one team got stuck in a place like cooking in the kitchen every day or leading games which was exhausting.

Twice this month we went door to door. We felt pressured to get to all of the houses in our designated area and so spent only 10min or so at each home. We found out when we left that Pastor Paul and the group he went with only made it to 4 homes because they spent so long talking. After that day pastor had a workshop with everyone to teach them how to evangelize to the locals. I still find it strange he didn’t do that first but he seemed to have some sort of reason, it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I was busy with something and so couldn’t go to the second round of house visits but I heard it was even more awkward for some reason.

The only adventure day I participated in was when we went to a large waterfall and everyone did this hike under it that had people wondering if they were going to live through it, and that’s not an exaggeration. Meanwhile I ziplined over it. 4 of the 8 ziplines go out in front of the waterfall and it was gorgeous. Lindsey has a video of the group going on the hike under it. I’ll link it below.

One day pastor Paul asked us to go plant some trees near the river that we get our water from and we were told its only a 45min hike. I was naturally at the back of the group and soon Abby M. and some locals became a group all our own. We discussed turning back almost two hours in but decided we must be much closer to the end than the beginning so we should simply push through. The path, if one can call it that, was muddy and slick. At one point it split and we saw footprints on both. It made it very difficult to decide which way we needed to go. The locals didn’t know either because when I say “local” in this story I pretty much mean someone from the city of Comayagua. It was debated for a few minutes and we decided to take the steeper, thinner path. Just as it says in the bible that narrow is the path that leads to life.

Only 20 minutes later, we finally caught up to the group. My first thought was that we had made it to the end of the journey but that wasn’t the case. The path was so difficult that they had waited for us simply because we absolutely would not have been able to make it up that steep, soft, slippery hill if they hadn’t been posted to haul us up! We were hiking in midday through a jungle, on the side of a mountain, as it crumbled beneath our feet. I could never explain enough just how crazy this hike was. People were comparing it to hiking the volcano last month. And we were only halfway done.

The planting of the trees took only a few minutes and then it was back on the path. I feel like that part of the hike is the World Race. We travel long distances only to stop for short periods of time and hopefully plant a few seeds before we start the next journey.

We went back by a different route. We were already near the top of a mountain so we climbed straight up to the top. Then we had to scoot down the other side on our backsides! It wasn’t pretty and it certainly wasn’t graceful but we made it down covered in mud and sweat. Just like our lives in Christ aren’t always pretty and graceful. We are called children of God for a reason. Kids are messy and make mistakes and so do we.

Overall the month went better than I expected. Yes, I was tired from being around so many people all the time but I also had a chance to recoop when they went to go get wood. It rained a lot and people fell a lot. I fell twice. But I feel like we accomplished a lot as well. May God be with our team as we head to Costa Rica!