Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Have I mentioned the food yet? How about the amazing staff that is caring for us? Wow, the food is just fantastic! We are eating typical Honduran food everyday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I understand most teams will ask for something familiar for a few of the nights, but not us. We eat whatever they put in front of us. The humility of this team is real and evident, in that the people we are relating to every day feel comfortable enough with us to feed us what they eat and they enjoy the intensity in which we devour their food and their culture! I can see each day how much more this team is drawing closer this country and La Providencia! Of course, the staff is making it a lot easier to love this place as they wait on us hand and foot! We are the ones, who are here to serve, and we do anything they ask us to do, yet, we have a cook, our own driver, a housekeeper, and a guide (Douglas) who stays with us during the work day! Doña Lucy and Don Jose have invited us to their home for dinner this weekend making us feel a part of this family here. God is working here with these people who serve Him with so much joy and love. Honestly it was hard to accept this type of service from the people we came to serve, but being able to accept grace and allowing someone else to bless us is a lesson that is hard to learn in our culture. So, we are not going hungry, nor are we spending time with just our little team. Man did I mention the fruit! We are fresh fruit junkies here, always eating fresh sweet pineapple, mango and banana! My mouth is watering just writing about it!

Day three started off as usual, breakfast, devotional time and then prayer. Every morning we gather on the porch of the house and we pray together as a team. Sometimes the staff will join us, and Douglas always prays with us. Sometimes, Rodain or Douglas will pray in Spanish while I pray in English, but it is a good time.

Our bodies for the most part felt fine, because normally the next day after a hard workout your body is sore... Cliff opted to spend the day sorting clothing for the Providence in a Box program, thus extending his life by a couple of days and Peggy stayed with her husband. Cliff is the senior member of the team and it is cool to hear the children we encounter call him Abuelo, which means grandfather. He has developed a friendship with the son of our housekeeper who is three years old. His name is Lesman. Lesman was given a squirt gun by Dave, so he now chases the team around the house squirting us at every opportunity! Cliff is a trooper, and is in every bit as good of shape as the rest of us, but there are multiple ways to serve here so it was good he and Peggy opted to help at the warehouse.

There are two holes that seem clear God has put them in our path to ensure we remain humble and allow Him the glory! They are both over solid rock and with a bar and pick we had tried to dig down two feet. Then we used a sledge and chisel that La Providencia had, but they were both too small. So on the way in, we stopped for a BIG HAMMER! Before that though, we dropped Cliff and Peggy off at the office and Peggy got on the Lakeside website to download a lesson for our Friday Project. We are hosting an impromptu Vacation Bible School for the 3 to 5 year olds in the community! 35 in all.

Somehow, it did not work out that Peggy and Cliff could go sort clothes, so they joyously came with the rest of us to dig more holes.

With our new Sledge hammer, Rodain and I started pounding away on the rocks; while Peggy, Amber, Cliff and Dave started the 24 other holes on the other side of the road. It seemed the digging was a lot easier than the rocks of the previous day, but the ground was wet from the rain, so there was substantial mud. That team finished about 6 holes in the time it took us to dig one inch in the rock we were trying to bust. That is how the morning went! The funny thing is, the foreman we are working with, Alejandro, had suggested to Douglas that maybe we could work on something easier today, because the work we are doing seemed to be taking its toll on our team! (There is a group of 25 college kids from Dallas working through a Christian program called Leader Trek and they are hardcore! They too were digging in front of the clinic to install wheelchair ramps. So I guess we were being compared to them!) I left it up to Alejandro, saying we are here to serve, so anywhere they need us we will go, but that we are quite content digging holes. So they let us stay. By lunch we had finished the 24 holes on the other side of the road and made some progress on the rock!

Alfredo visited us to see how we were holding up, and asked us if we would pray for Elsa, Lesman’s mother. It seems she was beaten last night by her husband and her husband’s mistress. He did not give us anymore details, but we did notice she had cuts and bruises this morning at breakfast. This behavior is pretty common, but not usually with the people who have given their lives to Christ, so it seemed Alfredo was particularly upset about it. He indicated that he and Mizael, whom I call brother, were going to go have “a talk” with him after lunch. So during our lunchtime prayer Peggy prayed a beautiful prayer of protection for Elsa and her kids, and we asked for grace and understanding for her husband.

After lunch we were expecting to be able to start setting posts for the fence. But our foreman, Alejandro had other plans.

Alejandro showed us the two holes on either side of the road, and said we needed to make them bigger, roughly 5 feet long by 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep! That is a HUGE hole, more along the size of a grave, than a hole for a fence post! I could see on the faces of our team, the morale deflated in an instant, as we thought we were done with the holes! Anyway, these holes were to support the giant 8” x 8” twin posts on each side of the gate that would in turn support the massive gate. Somehow, the team divided up into two groups – Dave, Cliff and Amber on one side and Rodain, me and Peggy on the other. It was amazing to see the transformation of 6 defeated people, turn into 6 people who had more to give! With the picks, shovels and steel bars, we tore through those holes the rest of the afternoon. For over 4 hours we worked the same holes as a team, and even had fun doing it! The team had allowed God to intervene and give strength, because I know these guys and girls were tired before we even started those big holes.

No rain came today to cool us off, but we left the jobsite a solid team, capable of anything, tired, dirty and full of bug bites. Yep, the bugs had found us, and we must taste good! Well, all of us but Cliff that is! He is bulletproof!

Dinner was awesome, chicken soup, but we had hoped it was rooster soup. We will see in the morning if it was chicken or rooster that keeps waking us up! Mizael, his wife Bessy and some of the interns from La Providencia came over for dinner. Of course Douglas was there too, as he stays with us until after dinner each night. Douglas is awesome, and we are learning a lot about Honduras from him. Bessy and the team talked about which lessons or stories from the bible to teach tomorrow at VBS. Noah, Jonah or Sampson are the stories we settle on. We know we only have about 5 minutes of attention span from the kids, so we decided on Noah, because Bessy knows some songs about him! VBS came together in about an hour, and we were ready to roll!