Feliz Navidad!!

We'll it's Christmas time here in Honduras, I think I'm finally beginning to feel like it's Christmas time around here. However, it's definitely a slow process because it's always so warm here, it's still about 60 to 70 degrees here everyday. This past weekend all of the classes have been rehearsing for a Christmas pageant that was put on yesterday for an hour.

Each class had about 5 minutes of choriography to a Christmas song that they did. It was very frustrating though, because I basically have not been able to teach for the last two weeks, and I still have a pretty decent amount of material to cover before the semester is over. But the performance went well I guess, I never got to see it though, because I was supervising all the kids in the back before they went on stage, and my video camera ran out of tape after like the 2nd performance. But oh well, God is still good, and I'm going back to the States tommorrow, which is very exciting.

All the North American teachers here, including me, hosted a big Christmas Cookie party since Hondurans don't make Christmas cookies, we had to enlighten them. So we invited almost all of the Honduran teachers over, all the bus drivers, the maids, alot of different people. And we baked alot of cookies, probably about half to 3/4 of the people we invited showed up. So it was a pretty good turnout. I baked peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies, which turned out really well, and then I baked these frosted flake cookies (tiger cookies) I made a few minor modifications to them, added a little more chocolate, anyway to make a long story short, they turned out looking like a bunch of black pancakes. And whenever I asked someone to guess which cookies I made, they would always say the tiger cookies, immediately. The principal said that the cookies fit my personality, I'm not really sure what that means, but I took it as a compliment.

Anyway I had alot of good talks with teachers there, and it was a really good time overall. So now I'm packing up and getting ready to leave tommorrow, school ends today at 12:00 and then I'm gonna go to the grocery store and pick up some last minute things to take home. I gave a 5 minute devotion today which I felt like went pretty well, it was cut 10 minutes short because the doors were locked to the chapel, but the Lord was definitely with me and He helped me to summarize things on the fly pretty well.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been praying for me, I am very very thankful for them.

Camping Trip

Wow, it's almost time to go home, it's crazy how fast time has gone by here, and already I'm beginning to think and pray about if I should come back next year. I would really appreciate any prayers to this regard as well. As I'm pretty confused about it right now.

So school is going pretty well, the high school kids are going to put on a 2 hour Christmas program, so they are all using class time to rehearse, so that's pretty frustrating, and this quarter is shortened anyway, so it's pretty hard to get alot of grades in and cover alot of material. Last week they had a class period every single day, for every class in which a few police women talked and warned about the gangs in the city. Apparently there are alot of gangs here, about 125,000 in the country, and most in Tegucigalpa I think. The biggest gang, "dieziocho" was named after a street in L.A. So that was more class missed, but the Lord is definitely in control, and he continues to work despite what I want to do, or have the opportunity to do.

This weekend I met to go camping at the church at around 5:30, but being on Honduran time, we eventually left at around 7:30, so Tristan and I played to volleyball/basketball for a while with some of our students who were there. We started driving up the mountain at around 8 and got to this spot up on top of a mountain to our camping spot. We had to park at someone's house and then walk up a ways to our camping spot, because the road was too steep. It was of course dark out by then, and one of leaders who was with us "Joel" warned us that there were some guys up ahead who were smoking marijuana and could have weapons and guns. So I was a little on edge, and only a few people had flashlights out of everyone. I was one of the first people in front and then all of the sudden I heard about 5-10 people run into our crowd, everyone was shouting and Joel went into the crowd, he was yelling it's spanish at them. And there didn't seem to be any lights shining on the people at that time. Then someone shined their light and the intruders and they ended up being people from another car who were camping with us, and the whole thing was a practical joke to scare the gringos. And I have to admit, they definitely got me.

Then we set up camp and had some fried rice and talked for a while to other people. Then some of the leaders got up and shared for a while, little sermons, words of encouragement or their testimonies. It was a pretty charismatic night, a bunch of people got slain in the spirit. While I had alot of time to pray for people there as well as other people who I normally pray for outside of Honduras. Finally after all the talks and charismatic experiences for others, we ended at around 3 AM, and I had a long day at school, and all of it was in Spanish, so I was having a really hard time understanding and concentrating. After that we hadn't even roasted marshmallows yet. So we did that and went to bed.

We woke up at around 7:30-8:00 and I woke up to everybody laughing. Hondurans really know how to have a good time. They were just sitting their telling jokes for about an hours. Everyone was constantly cracking up. Then we had a pinata for one of the leader's birthday's (Raul). And then we hiked up about 10 minutes up the mountain to play on a really ghetto field. It was really fun though, because the field was so bad that everyone was on a more equal skill level, because no one had control of the ball. After about 15 minutes on of our guys was talking to some people nearby, (there was houses along the field) and apparently someone had died in one of the houses or was dead inside, something like that and we were making too much noise. So we left and hiked with half of our group for about a half hour down the mountain, actually it was partially through a creek and partially through some woods.

One part of the trail involved ducking under this huge bee nest. I was just walking and then the guy in front of me yelled, "abajo" and I knew I had to duck, but I didn't know why? Then I saw it about a foot in front of my face, bees all over the nest, swarming. So I quickly backed up and warned the guy behind me. Then I waited to time my run when the bees weren't flying around and I ran under and made it safely. Unfortunately, when I ran all the bees started flying around and stung the guy behind me, but he was ok, he just had a really swollen finger. We finally got to the water hole with a two level little waterfall, and we went in, most kids didn't even have their swimming trunks so they just swam in their underwear. The water was soooooooooooo cold. Reminded me of a polar bear swim I once had in Lake Michigan.

We hiked back another way, and walked through a huge farm with banana trees all up and down the mountain, it was absolutely beautiful. We had lunch and cooked a bunch of meat. And then headed back down the mountain and back to church.

Today I woke up sick, so I'm hoping to get over it quickly, we will see. And this week we have 2 half days, thurs. and fri. next week we have 2 half days tues. and weds. And I'm gonna be leading a devotional on wednesday for all of the teachers, so that should be fun.

Busy Weekend!!

Some of the guys I worked with building the church


I’m really busy this week so this might be a little shorter blog, but last week was the first of 3 consecutive full weeks and then a half week before Christmas break and I get to go home!!!

So last week was a long week to say the least, I think I handed out 10 detetentions. Today I already wrote 6 or 7 afterschool detentions. So the discipline continues to be an issue, I’m just getting much better at handing out punishments.

Friday my buddy Tristan and I played soccer for the last time in the month of December with a bunch of the guys from church. It was a good time, and I ended up scoring 2 goals, which was pretty cool, (my career high in the Honduran professional church outreach league). Then Saturday we went to work and build more of a church in a village about 40 minutes away, the same one we worked on 2 weeks ago. This time we put some rebar in the cinder blocks and carried a lot of dirt up a pretty big hill. I’m learning how to carry really heavy things on my back, which is good, these bags were probably 60 to 70 lbs. depending on how nice the guy who was filling them was. We were fed 4 times though by the people in the village in only about 5 hours of working. So as you can imagine, I was definitely ok with that.

Then my friend Joel, one of the Honduran teachers, invited me and my North American friends Tristan, and Beth to his son’s 2 year old birth-day party. It was so fun!!! Joel and his wife were the most amazing hosts, there was probably 25 little kids and 25 adults all packed in this little room and outside. There was soooo much food, and there was a Pinata, which somehow I ended up busting a huge chunk of it open, and not the younger kids. Then there was pin the bow-tie on the hippo, and finally their was an amazing informal dance contest between 3 of the kids that was probably the highlight of the night. I have never seen a 4th grader shake like that in my life, it was absolutely hilarious.

On Sunday I woke up and all the North Americans went to Valle de Angeles, which is the biggest tourist town in Tegucigalpa. I bought a few things there and then headed back home so I could get ready for the big soccer game!!! It’s playoff time in Honduran Soccer and Olimpia the 4 seed was playing Marathon the 1 seed, Joel and I went and Olimpia won the game 1-0!! It was so fun and it was awesome to see them finally win one, since the other 2 games they tied and lost, that I went to.

So my kids have a lot of tests and quizzes this week, so I’m gonna be really busy, but this weekend, I’m going on a retreat to the mountains with a bunch of the guys I play soccer with. It should be really fun. I’m really looking forward to it. I continue to ask and covet your prayers as I need them so much. Thanks so much for all of the support of those who read this.