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.