Final Days in Honduras

Not much time is left for us in Honduras.  We leave Canchias Tuesday morning to spend the night in San Pedro Sula in order to catch an early flight out of Honduras Wednesday morning.  Time has gone by very quickly and yet remembering some of the longer days, I can only remember how slow time went by.  We have a phrase that “Days go by slow and weeks go by fast.”  It seems very strange that only 10 weeks have gone by and at the same time that it seems like we only arrived a week or two ago.  

Our Model Home Project was finally completed last week. The entire home was finished last Tuesday.  The real project has now begun.  We are going to prepare a report with fully detailed material and work schedule sheets.  Our hope is that one day, Heart to Honduras will build another concrete block house of a similar (doesn’t need to be exact) design.  We only hope that the gifts and effort the American groups offer will be able to culminate in a house that the poorest of the poor in Honduras will use to help their children have a better life. 

The home might not seem like a lot to most people but to the Hondurans, this home is a gift from God.  The family we built this home for has 10 children of which 6 currently live with the family.  One brother lives in the States, one brother attends the Heart to Honduras Discipleship School in Canchias, and the two sisters who are married with kids often are at home.  All of them have become little brothers and sisters to us.  We decided to travel to Santa Cruz with two of the brothers, Mario and Christian, since they had only been to the city a few times in their life.  They had a blast coming with us eating pastries, getting haircuts, and eating pizza for the first time.  One the way back to Canchias, it started raining hard while we were riding on the back of the bus.  Mario curled up underneath me to stay dry and we all couldn’t help but feel like family.  We celebrated the birthday of Edgar (a now 11-year-old) last Thursday before we left for a trip to Copan.  In Honduras, it is a tradition to throw or break an egg on the person celebrating their birthday.   We bought the family a cake (and eggs.) Unfortunately, we had to leave before we could eat it.  But before we left on the back of a truck, the family gave us tamales and pieces of the cake which led to one of the strangest dinners and moments we had encountered since we have been in Honduras.  

This past weekend we took a trip to Copan, which has Mayans Ruins near the city.  It was quite strange standing in such an ancient place wondering what daily life was like thousands of years ago.  The scenery around the ruins was astonishing.  The ruins were built at the top of a mountain which led to beautiful views of the mountains and sky.  We also had one of the most interesting guides spend a lot of time discussing with us about blood, sacrifices, drugs, and marijuana... not quite what I expected.  We also got to see some of the coolest Macaw birds out in the wild. 

I am extremely excited to come back to the States and be able to sit down with a lot of you and talk about my experience.  Some might be interested in the places we visited or the project we worked on.  But if any of you were to ask us what our favorite part of the trip was, the answer would be the relationships we developed.  It will be extremely difficult for us to say goodbye to the friends we have developed and the family we have become a part of.   There are a lot of things that change in this life and one of the things that changes most often is the relationships that we develop.  We meet new people and say goodbye to friends.  Even as we say goodbye, we often want the goodbye experience to be perfect but honestly, I think that the perfection of the experience is the love that we had during the relationship.  There is never any real closure to a relationship since the love experienced will never end.  Our experience here has been as rough and as awesome as any experience I could imagine.  I wouldn’t change ANYTHING about it since the rough times made the good times even better.  Our sufferings grow us as close together as our joys do.  And as often as we say goodbye and our lives change, we an over-arching story of joys and struggles that write the story of our lives.  The best comfort and meaning I can draw from this conclusion is that God desires to experience the entirety of our lives with us.  Even though our relationships change and people come and go, God doesn’t.  He is here to love us in every moment of struggle and joy.  And, we never have to say goodbye ever.  This is the hope that is offered to us in Christ, that we would have a real relationship with the God of the Universe and be able to have real relationships with others through our relationship with God and never real say goodbye.  Jesus Christ opened up a relationship for us to God with His relationship with God, and suffered through it on the cross for us to experience God’s grace.  

Thank you to everyone that donated to our experience and prayed for us.  Thanks to the University of Dayton, the ETHOS Program, Heart to Honduras, and DSEC for the opportunity and the guidance during the trip.

Joe and Milena thank you very much for putting up with me and making this an experience I can’t ever forget. 

Moving Forward in Honduras

Hurry up and wait.  It seems to be a motto around here.  Everyone is very eager to help but very often setbacks occur.  Finally, after much heart ache, we are beginning our Model Home Project.  On Monday, we broke ground and set the foundation and surveyed the area.  It is amazing the way people work around here.  One of my biggest questions on building a house was setting a foundation.  It was as simple and obvious as using scrap pieces of wood, tie wire, and tubes filled with water to use as levels over a far distance (not exact but literally no one can tell the difference.)  Hondurans especially also don’t need anyone’s help working on projects.  None of us could work nearly as well or as fast as the people helping us.  It was slightly embarrassing.  Sometimes they can use guidance and direction, but can’t we all?

We officially moved out of the Heart to Honduras campus and into the town.   The house we are in is less than ideal (not two stories and no electricity, absolutely unacceptable in American standards... HA.)  It is funny, the house we are living in is much nicer than many houses around us but most people I know wouldn’t ever choose to live here.  It has been interesting and challenging for Milena, Joe, and I to fix things up around the house, cook, and clean.  One of us said that it was fun playing house... but I disagreed, we are definitely not playing house. 

As promised, we went to Punta Sol and Tela last weekend.  Tela is a beach side tourist city that it is Caribbean in culture.  It was quite an entertaining trip.  We arrived at Tela and proceeded to Punta Sol, a nearby peninsula and jungle that is nationally protected.  A boat took us to the peninsula from Tela.  The ride out was quite enjoyable.  When we arrived at Punta Sol, we took a long hike through the jungle and got to see monkeys and other wildlife.  We went snorkling and after a few minutes of frustration, we saw tons of coral and fish.  Then, we spent a relaxing lunch on the beach eating tilapia (My dream for those who know me well.)  The ride back was not nearly as enjoyable as the ride out.  We came across some pretty large waves and a ride that seemed short ended up taking hours.  All of us got sick.  The trip was still really beautiful and we all had fun and have a ton of great memories.   

I am trying very trying hard to upload pictures, so hold on and they will be up eventually.

Model Home Project

The construction for our project begins tomorrow.  The goal of the project is to change the current design which Heart to Honduras uses to build homes.  The currently design is a small home made of wood that a team of American workers can build in a week with help from the receiving family and members of the community.  In theory, it sounds like a great practice but has several flaws.  Wood is not a widely used material in Honduras and concrete blocks are vastly superior.  The concrete blocks are, however, very difficult for American workers to work with.  It is also a single room house.  The current design is essentially a $2000 home that families will gladly receive and very possible could then not use or sell for the money.  We are looking to change the design by building it out of concrete block and contains three interior rooms with the walls made of wood.  A problem with nicer homes is the desparity it creates within the community.  A local community development church, Salt and Light, has discovered that the homes that they have been building have created huge desparities in the community and they look to soon eliminate their home building projects within the next year.

Our project will cost roughly $3,500 and allow for American workers to travel down and install significant finishing touches on the interior wooden walls and aluminum sheeting roof.  Even though the construction end of the project is just starting, the majority of the project will be to change the way Heart to Honduras works with communities.

Our internet situation has changed and blogging will be difficult for a while.  I still need to share about our trip to Punta Sol and Tela.  If you want a preview, search for it on Google.

Peace

Progress and Adventure

Our project is moving forward finally in Honduras.  We have met with a few people that have helped us change our designs and plans.  Pastor Fredy in La Concepicion has largely been pushing our project and is very excited for us to move forward.  Pastor Fredy is an extremely energetic man that seems to have more energy than is good for him, and an addiction to coffee and baleatas (local food that makes me strong, not Milena and Joe.)  Also Pastor Erik, who is the pastor for La Lamintas where Kaleb and Stacey live, has also been helping us work on a few other projects.    Pastor Erik seems to match Pastor Fredy’s energy but seems more fitted as a television host than a pastor.  He looks like a model, well cut and always with neatly iron pants (that’s apparently possible in Honduras... who would of thought.)  We have been spending a lot time by ourselves in Santa Cruz which is the local town to Canchias where we are staying.  Our first encounter with Pastor Erik was when we were boarding on the bus to go back.  He tried to tell us that he would see us on Tuesday but none of us could understand his Spanish.  It led to a funny encounter when we met with Kaleb and Stacy the following week. 

Speaking of funny encounters, we have been spending a lot of time in San Isidro at the H2H office greatly to Milena’s annoyance.  The difficulty in Honduras is moving from place to place.  It has been easy for us to go to the cramped office and spend nearly half of a day waiting for a ride back to Canchias.  One day when we were stuck at the office, we were invited to a employees house for dinner.  I had to use the bathroom so I excused myself and quickly went to the bathroom. Unfortunately, the toilet had no running water and I was sure what to do.  I left the bathroom and ran into a female student at the Discipleship School named Wendy.  I swallowed my pride quickly and asked for helped using the toilet.  It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. 

Someone once said that to be a good man is more than just proving that you are one.  It has been convicting being in Honduras working with people who are experienced working with the poor.  Motivations can kill even the best project or idea.  When we originally were scheduled to come down, I went through several phases of attitudes.  At first, I had a mindset to only serve and help those who needed it the most.  The more I thought about this attitude, the more I realized that I was elevating myself above people and that I was pretending to understand other cultures.  After I made this realization, I decided I wanted to learn as much as I can from the culture but then I wasn’t really helping people as much as I needed to.  Did I really pay all this money to learn?  Would I have been more helpful using the money I spent to travel by donating to the ministry instead?  In the middle is the trick of “service-learning.”  I need to be able to expose myself to a different culture to learn but also serve in the ways I am skilled at the same time.  The end result is not always pretty but it will always results in changed hearts and minds.  If there is no struggle, there is no growth.  I pray that we can all grow and struggle together as a community.

Sorry for the lack of posts, hopefully I will be able to post another within the week.  

Clash of Cultures... Well Maybe Not

Things are very different in other cultures.  It is quite clear that football dominates the United States.  Everywhere else in the world soccer dominates.  Anybody that knows me well, knows that I do not watch soccer very much.  I enjoy playing it but never watching.  The girls in my can sit and watch soccer for hours and recently my brother got into soccer but I have never enjoyed it.  Sunday, we took advantage of an opportunity to see the Tegucigulpa Olympia to the soccer team from San Pedro Sula in the Honduran Championship.  The scene was absolute chaos.  I never appreciated turn styles before but in Honduras there are none and people are forced to come in a few people at a time.  When the doors opened it was madness (if Milena’s parents are reading I made sure that she was safe and that no one messed with her), people were waving their tickets in the air in vain attempts to get into the stadium and then the doors would shut tight.  It seemed that we were never going to get into the stadium in time to watch any of the game.  Luckily, another door opened and we were let into the stadium.  I have never seen a stadium more packed with people.  I wondered the entire time where our seats were but in stadiums like this one, there aren’t really any seats.  We basically had to be patient until halftime when we could grab a ledge to stand on.  A few of us got luckily and could stand up and have a good position to watch the game.  We left the game early to avoid traffic and any potential that could come from rowdy.

The drive to the game was very interesting.  It takes hours to get anywhere in Honduras.  It seemed that all we did for hours was make huge circles.  We ate at Burger King for lunch and Pizza Hut for dinner, a BIG time cultural immersion.  It was interesting to see that even here, sometimes cultures stay the same. 

It has been a while since I have posted a blog.  Since then, our project has really progressed.  The Model Home Project is officially under way and currently the Heart to Honduras staff is searching for a suitable family to receive the house.  All the funding is currently coming in.  A few changes have occurred to our original designs, but the house should serve as a great example of a more culturally appropriate house for Heart to Honduras. 

Over the past week, we had the pleasure of meeting a fantastic couple, Kaleb and Stacy Eldridge.  They are a couple around our age living in Las Lomintas in Honduras.  They completely engineered their own house with a rain catchment system.  It is an amazing example of living simply but still being an example of healthy, sustainable lifestyle to the Honduran people.  Their lifestyle and choices have had a big impact on all of us which helps us question the way we live in the United States.  Simple living has a profound impact on a community. 

Working Hard in Honduras

Being uncomfortable is something that we all have to deal with at sometime in our lives. To avoid it is to put off the inevitable. I am definitely not doing anything ground breaking but it is great to finally get out of my comfort zone. The first day we got here, the frustration with being alone and unable to communicate with anyone droves us to the brink of insanity. Luckily, we had two students from Oklahoma that spent a few days in Canchias before we got here. We have absolutely no idea where out project is going yet. We were told that in Honduras things go a lot slower. I was prepared for things to run slower but I wasn’t prepared to deal with the extreme frustration of not knowing what we are doing.
The camp that we are staying at this time is a discipleship school for young ministers to learn and serve the community of Canchias. The first day we kept almost entirely to ourselves, Americans on one side of the table and Spanish speakers on the other. That evening, we went to a service (un culto) in Canchias that in run by the students at the discipleship school. It was completely different from anything I could ever experience in the United States. Of course, it was difficult listening to the sermon and singing any songs but I listened patiently. The next day, we still quite didn’t know what was going with our project, but, we helped the staff and students garden and pull weeds. We started to get to know the students and push through our difficulties with speaking Spanish. Afterwards, we went with few of the guy students to play soccer in a nearby field. Milena, our girl teammate, came with us which grew a decent sized crowd. The crowd was absolutely intrigued that there were three Americans playing soccer with Hondurans (We sucked.) The crowd kept cheering for the players to pass to the “Yankees.” At one point one of the more chivalrous students asked Milena if she was tired (Estas cansada Milena?). It has become a running joke between all of us (Cansada sounds like casada which means married.) Our friendship with the students has grown a lot. Yesterday, we watched the soccer game between Chelsea and Spain. The students have nicknamed me Memo which is a nickname for Guillermo which is a translation of the name Guillermo. Last night, a group of 13 Americans came to start working on projects in Honduras and will be helping us out. After all of us, my team, the students, and the 13 Americans, ate dinner, myself and my team hung out with the students. It seems so strange to me that we actual chose to be with people that we couldn’t communicate well with over people who spoke English, but we were just so much closer to them.
In terms of the projects we are starting on, the Model Home Project is going slow but we got started on a project to connect two tanks that are on the camp site where we are staying. Chilo, our boss, constantly told us that we need to slow down and that we were working to fast (Descanzo!). Our work day was four hours in the morning, a two hour break for the Siesta, and then one more hour because it was going to get too hot. Absolutely hilarious considering the American work ethic. We will be working with the Americans that arrived yesterday to finish the project. I have lots of questions because of my engineering mindset, but I don’t quite know how to explain myself. I am working hard to struggle with my Spanish. Everyone appreciates our efforts to speak to them in Spanish and to teach them little bits of English (which we all agree is much harder than Spanish). It was funny talking them about Spelling Bees and that you had to be a genius just spell, write, and speak.
Easily the most difficult part of being here is the difficultly with communication. I am so glad that this experience has been able to open my eyes to the vastness of God’s kingdom. The students at the discipleship school are amazing people that work hard to serve everyone around them. They love each other and us so well. There is a completely different culture between us but there is only one God. When I go to the services they run, even though we don’t speak the same language, we praise with one voice. I was telling one of the students, Wendy, that I look forward to the day when we can speak perfectly when we are with God. Please pray for them, they are amazing testaments to God’s grace, power, and love. Truly His kingdom reaches far and is in the hearts of the ones who believe in Him.
I recently realized that communication is based on common experiences. The only reason that we are able to communicate to each other what an apple is, is because we have tasted, seen, and experienced. We can like it or dislike it but we know what is to do both and understand each other. Everyone has experienced the joy of having a conversation with someone who they have everything in common with and the difficulty of talking to someone they have nothing in common with. We are meant to be in relationships, it’s what we were created for, to have a relationship with God and each other. If we are meant to have relationships and to know how people are, then we need to focus on what we have in common. What is the only thing we have in common though? We were all created and all need love and forgiveness, of which God is the source for both. He created us in His image and no matter who we are, we will always have that in common. God is the source of unity for mankind but we chose to leave that behind and that caused a rift between us and God and between each other. Jesus came to bridge that rift with His sacrifice and the forgiveness that comes with it. We find our true identities with Him and real relationships with each other through Him.


Pictures to come letter

Departure

It's 5:13 in the morning and I am sitting at the airport waiting to board for my first flight to Houston to meet my team and then head to San Pedro Sula, Honduras.  Listening to Dawes (I thought I would mention that for the sake of my two sisters) while I wait.  The past month we have found out a lot of information about the projects that we will have a chance to work on in Honduras.  Not as bleak as my previous post but its always good to be prepared in terms of attitude because I think that expectation can really kill a lot of experience.  I just hope I have been harboring an attitude that is open to anything new that can come my way. 

Getting ready for the trip has been a foreign task for me.  I am usually very disorganized and usually unprepared.  It is great though to have a mother who is able to keep me on task and focused. I was especially excited yesterday when I bought a Frisbee as a gift while I am in Honduras.  In the shadow of my friend Tim during his work on the World Race, I will also be working to spread the influence of Ultimate Frisbee (Thought you would appreciate that Tim). 

By the way thanks to everyone liking the link I posted on my facebook.  Also special mention of Allie Beach, Julianna Stewart, and Greg Heimann for giving me a shout out yesterday.  I look forward to seeing Team Oakwood when I get back.

Encouragement for anyone worried either about me or anything else

1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you

There is a great God who cares for all of us.  He has done and will do anything for us.  He is a lot more powerful than any of us and does more than any of us can see.  I wish everyday I could apply this to everything instead of only realizing it in key moments of anxiety.  He cares for you a lot in the small, mundane, large and important.