We’ll this weekend was quite the adventure, we were only gone for the weekend, but it felt like we were gone for a week.
We left on Friday from Tegucigalpa, and took about 7 hours to San Salvador. It was the biggest bus I had ever seen, a double decker. It was awesome, and I could lean my seat as far back as I wanted. When we got there it was about 9 at night, and we took a taxi to a hostel. Some dude named Rodrigo was there and he said that he would take us to a place to eat Pupusas. Pupusas are like a pancake, except made with rice flour, and cheese/pork in them. In El Savador they put beans in them too, they taste amazing.
So we hung out with Rodrigo there for a while and then we went back to the hostel with him. Apparently he just hangs out there a lot, he’s 28, single, and has a computer web site designer job. And he showed us the new I-phone which it was my first time seeing it, since I really haven’t been back in the states.
We woke up and changed hostels to another one down the street and met a bunch of Americans who were from the peace core. They were there in El Salvador for a 2 year commitment. Then we took a taxi to a bus stop (most taxi’s were about 4 to 5 dollars). And we took an hour bus ride down to the beach (66 cents). We went to La Libertad and saw the black sandy beaches, it was my first time seeing a black sanded beach. We saw a few eels washed up on the shore and then we started to see all these fish filets just sitting out drying on the beach, and then more fish filets sitting on tons of boats up on the land.
(The beach by the way had trash pretty much all over it, there was a lot of trash even in the water, so there were virtually no tourists there at all, not a place I would probably spend a week at, but it was definitely fun)
There was 6 of us and my friends Tristan and Sarah each rented a surf-board with me and we went out to catch some waves. I was the only one who had been taught how and I had only been once, so I was trying to teach everyone else, which was a bit scary. The waves were very big at times and they were all breaking at the same time all across the wave. I caught probably about 10 waves and rode one really nice one in about 4 hours of surfing. However the majority of the time………I got pummeled.
We at lunch and I got some more pupusas at around 2 o’clock, I got 4 pupusas for 30 cents each and a soda for 40 cents, and I was stuffed!!! We changed our long-boards in for shorter ones after that to try to cut a little bit better on the waves. Sarah handed her board off to another one of my friends, Vanessa. When she went out the waves started to get rougher, and they were already big. If you were in the wrong place, you could get pummeled by 5 sets of waves in a row every time you put your head back up above water.
She caught one of the really big waves and wiped and, as did I, as did Tristan. When I got up I heard one of the kids from El Salvador on the beach whistle at me. I looked at him and then he pointed to Vanessa. I turned around and I saw Tristan holding Vanessa and so I ran over there as fast as I could. When I got closer I saw some blood on the back of her leg…..very bad sign. Then I saw a lot of blood on her left cheek, on the side of her face.
It was one of the nastiest cut I had ever seen from the fin of the surf-board. It was really deep too. So I took her board and she went with Tristan and his wife Elizabeth to the closest medical practice that was open. Vanessa is getting married this summer so, she did not want a scar at all, she was very concerned about it, as she should be.
The doctor she saw at first knew that he himself, wasn’t an expert and since the cut was so long and wide, she might have a bad scar if he sewed it up. So they put a large patch on her cheek and we all took a taxi (truck with an extended cab) back to San Salvador as soon as possible. To get a plastic surgeon at a private hospital to work on it.
Tristan and I got to sit in the back of the truck and there was a van with a huge music speaker on top of it that was playing songs for us and we kept telling them to raise or lower the volume for us. They finally played a song in English (Linkin Park) and then they turned it off after the first 10 seconds. We wouldn’t let that happen though and signaled them to turn it back on, which they promptly did, it was sweet.
We went to one of the best private hospitals in San Salvador, where Vanessa has to get an IV, x-rays, and see a plastic surgeon to get her cut sewn back up. Meanwhile I was talking in Spanish to an insurance information dude who ended up being a Christian. We talked for a while about what we were doing in Honduras, it was pretty cool. We never did get that insurance info in time though, so we had to pay up front.
So we went out that night, ate some ice cream, and Wendy’s and went to bed.
The next day we were going to climb a volcano, but instead we decided to take a bus for a quarter to downtown. So we went to the market and it was like 20 times as crowded and as big as the market in Tegucigalpa. There was so so many people there and the stores went on forever!! The other interesting thing about El Salvador was that they use U.S. Currency, so I was using quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. I had pretty much used up all of my money by that point so I didn’t buy anything. (I used most of it on surfing).
We caught a bus to the bus station and took another 7 hour ride back to Tegucigalpa. It seemed like we had done so much in just a short weekend.
Yesterday I went to a viewing, one of my friends here, they behavior counselor, his father passed away. So I went with a bunch of other teachers there yesterday and we hung around for like 2 hours, I’m not sure if that’ normal or not, but nobody else seemed to be leaving either.
I had chapel today and I was soooooooo busy trying to prepare for it this week. I made a 10 minute video about cheating with my students and decided to focus my message on that since it has been such a huge problem at school here. And it was kind of funny, I caught one of my students cheating on a test, a period before I preached in chapel. It went really well though, much better than I expected, and ever better than the first time. And I felt like the kids really began to understand at least a little bit of what I said. Maybe not, but they seemed interested. Thanks for your prayer and continued support!!
