Antigua, Guatemala, Holy Week

Wow, sorry it's taken me so long to write this, it's a week late,

Anyway, during March 11th-to the 15th, I went to Antigua, Guatemala with the married couple Tristan and Beth, and another Honduran teacher named Dania. Antigua is the 2nd most popular "Holy Week" place besides a city in Spain that draws alot of people. So it was very crowded.

Anyways, we left on friday right after school, drove 5 or 6 hours to Copan, Honduras, which has many Mayan Ruins there. To bad we didn't have time to stop there. We spent the night in a hotel and then continued on to Guatemala the next day. Tristan and Beth had friends there who run a Youth With a Mission Base down there (YWAM). So when we finally got there at like 2 in the afternoon, they led us to there house where we stayed for the 4 or 5 days we were there. That night there was a spanish movie night for a bunch of little kids and their parents that all lived in the same village as the YWAM base. There was already a team of high school and college age kids there, but they barely knew any Spanish, so I got to interact with a few of them alot, since my spanish has gotten better. After the Christian movie was over the leader got up there and shared the gospel in Spanish. Then gave popcorn and juice to everyone.

The next day we went into downtown Antigua, there were so many gringos down there I wasn't used to seeing so many white people, it felt kinda weird. We went to church and it was a bilingual church, which also felt weird, preached in English and translated in Spanish. After that we ate lunch at the "Mono Loco" (the crazy monkey) the food there was definitely more expensive than in Honduras. We ate American food pretty much the whole time too, since the family we stayed with didn't like Guatemalan food that much. Although we did have some really good tacos the first night. The town is so cool because all the buildings are very colonial looking, and you feel like your in a city 2 or 3 hundred years ago. All the streets are made out of cobblestone, so it's pretty old fashioned looking. The city is also surrounded by 4 or 5 volcanos, 2 of them being active, we saw one of them erupt right before church, a huge plume cloud of smoke came out, it was unbelievable.

Monday, we did a little reading and then went into town. We went often catch public bus headed into town, it was usually like 10 to 20 cents, and sometimes they were so packed that I was literally hanging outside of the door, hanging on for dear life! That's the kind of bus ride I like! We went into the market, which was huge!! And right away I noticed the immediate differences between the markets in Honduras and Guatemala. In Honduras people don't barter as much, you can't talk people down to much here. But in Guatemala, it's like they almost automatically expect to lower there price at least 3 or 4 dollars, depending on what you buy. Also Honduras has alot of wooden carvings and boxes, things like that. Guatemalan's sew alot more and had much more fabrics and clothes at their markets.

I almost forgot, on Sunday night we witnesses what so many Latin American cultures are famous for during holy week. "Alfombras," basically what they do is they start making these huge designes or patterns in the street. Excepts to make these designs, they use colored sawdust. We saw some of the most amazing designs, they were unbelievable!!! Anyways, they have this huge procession or parade, and they have like a thousand people dressed up in these purple robes with white pieces of clothe tied around their heads. And there are a few people that are carrying big metal containers of burning incense and swinging them back and forth. All of these people take turns carrying this enormous wooden box, with Jesus on top of it carrying the cross up Calvary. It was basically like a big float for a parade, except made of wood and finished very nicely, and carried by maybe 30 men on each side. These took turns carrying it all day, it was carried to all sorts of different villages and then ended up in the city at the end of the night. When all they people and floats march through the streets they walk over the alfombras and ruin them. There were also many Roman Soldiers dressed up in real armor and spears. They had a leader who was accusing Jesus, and there was also a few smaller wooden boxes being carried by other people with the same purple robes. Mary was on the 2nd biggest box, and there were 2 more smaller one's than that, I'm not sure what people were on those boxes. I was told that all the people who volunteer to carry one of the boxes believe that they can help earn their salvation by doing that, it was really sad to hear that.

The procession probably lasted 25-30 minutes, it seemed like the people with the purple robes never ended. There was also like a mini-high school marching band type of deal walking behind the wooden box parade things. And then a bunch of balloons as well behind them.

Tuesday morning we woke up at 5:00 AM because we had to catch a shuttle in town at 6 that was going to take us to the bottom of a volcano. So we got picked up at around 6:30 and drove about an hour and a half to the bottom of Pacaya, one of the active volcano’s in the area!!! We got there and everyone was selling hiking sticks because they were saying that the rocks and the lava were really sharp and that you needed them in order to keep your balance up there. And just in case you fell, you could put your stick down and keep from falling on the really sharp rocks or into lava. However, I’ve been Latin Americanized by now, and I know he people try to sell you things you don’t really need. And I was very confident in my hiking ability, maybe a little nervous though, seeing as I have never been anywhere close to lava before though.

We started our descent up, the unusual thing about this trail was that it was a very steep trail up, the terrain wasn’t too difficult though. But they kept horses behind our group (there was about 12 of us) so that when someone got tired, they would pay 8 dollars to ride a “taxi” aka, horse, all the way up the horse. The guide was a native Guatemalan and we had Dania who was our Spanish expert, she’s from Tegucigalpa but she’s very light-skinned, so everyone mistook her for being a gringa. Anyways, she caught the guide saying that the “Honduran” is slowing the group down, which was pretty funny, be she did a good job making it up to the top.

It was about 2 hours to the top, and we were hiking on black sand for the last half of the hike, while avoiding huge horse turds the whole time. We finally got to the top, and what a view!!!! We got to see all the hardened black lava, that had obviously trickled down the volcano already. We were on top of a lookout point looking down of the hardened lava, and we could see a couple spots in the center where there was red-hot lava showing through. And there was people like 5 feet away.

So Tristan, Beth, Dania and I went down there, got some good pictures, and then Tristan and I went out to try and discover where the river of lava was coming from. It seemed like there was a steady stream coming down the center of the volcano, so we walked up the side trying to find the river of lava coming down to where we were. By the way the hiking stick salesman were right, the volcanic rocks were very sharp and if I would have fallen it would have hurt a lot. Since they were sharp, I never slipped on any on the rocks at all, it was perfect. However, a lot of the rocks instantly crumbled when I walked on them, so I had to make sure I walked on the big rocks. So Tristan and I were beginning to walk on rocks that were getting warmer and warmer, we knew we were getting close, then all of the sudden we saw our guide standing on a lookout point on top of some rocks. He told us we couldn’t go any farther, but he let some other kids go where we were who weren’t part of our group. We asked him why and he just said that the group was far away from us. Which was true, but a terrible reason. So we walked up to where he was and I asked him where the best spot to see the river of lava was. Instantly he knew where it was and pointed to the direction it was in. Tristan and I took off, but then he said we couldn’t go again, once again we asked why? He gave the same reason, the group was too far away from us. Then he said, I’ll lead you there if you do one thing for me. We asked what it was, and he said that we had to collect tips for him, from the whole group at the end of the hike, so we agreed and he took us right to the mouth of the river where the lava came up and formed into a river. The rocks were so hot, that my feet were really really hot, after being on them for 2 or 3 minutes. Tristan and I both got to put his hiking stick into the lava, as soon as it touched the lava, it burst into flames!!! And we each picked up a little piece of lava with the stick. We took a few pictures and videos and then I had to run off those rocks as fast as I could because my feet were so hot.

Unfortunately we only had about an hour to hike around the lava and stuff, we hiked back down and went back home to Antigua. We bought some groceries for the next days trip, because that was our last day in Antigua. So the next day we woke up at 5 AM again, and left, we stopped in Santa Barbara, Honduras, about 2 hours outside of Tegucigalpa and visited some of the in-laws of a teacher we know, Ms. Sabillon. It was in a little village, and her family was really big there. Everyone worked so hard in the village to make food and drinks everyday. They made us home-made “chilates” which are like a really hot healthy drink, combining cinnamon, ground cocoa, and 2 other things. It was pretty good, then they gave us homemade canteloupe juice, which was really really good. We left pretty soon after that though, because we were so tired.

When we were about 30 minutes from home, we got pulled over by a police officer, they have random police checkpoints everywhere during holy week. The police officer thought that we were all gringos, so he asked if we had a triangle reflector in our van, I guess it helps if you have a accident, you can put it in front of your car. Anyways he said it was illegal not to have one, and said his supervisor would write a huge fine and take away the driver’s license (Tristan). However Dania was in the car, and knew that the police officer was just trying to get a bribe. She was pretty ticked and kept asking to talk to the Police officer’s supervisor, since he kept saying that his supervisor would write the ticket. They argued for a while, then Tristan said he would buy one tomorrow and after about 10 minutes of intense dialogue, he just let us go, because he knew we didn’t believe him and we weren’t going to give him a bribe.

We were so thankful to have Dania with us, because the police definitely were trying to take advantage of us.

More to come later....

My brother comes to town!

Us eating watermelon with the Youth Pastor (Pastor Olman)




I will have to finish telling about my Roatan trip later, make sure you check back to look at that one, I’ll post some really sweet pics too.

This past week may have been the best week of the year so far, my brother and 8 other people came down here from the United States. 5 of my brothers friends from James Madison University as well as 2 others from Mary-Washington College, and 1 who just graduated from Randolph Macon. I knew all of those 3 from Summer’s Best Two Weeks.

They arrived last Saturday around 1 in the afternoon, and I went with Pastor Olman, the youth pastor here to get them. They brought so many books for the library here it was great!! The principal was so happy because they only had 1 set of encyclopedias and a few dictionaries in a school that has 800 kids. So we drove back to the church to drop all the books off. Then we talked a little bit about what we were going to do for the week and we needed to count all the money that everyone was able to raise for the church in Villa San Francisco. We raised about 1500 dollars initially which was pretty good. Pastor Olman seemed pretty excited and told us that the church was being built from the ground up and that all there was right now was land, a bunch of cinder blocks and 2 bags of cement.

The girls in the groups stayed at the girl teacher’s house and the guys stayed at my apartment with my 2 other roommates. We dropped all our stuff off and then went to the mall where everyone was able to get the currency here (lempiras) out of an ATM with their credit cards back in the States. We went to the food court after that and got a few snacks, and walked around the mall a little while. We decided to head back after that and went over to my apartment and they were all blown away by the view from 3 stories up. Then we all went on the roof for a while and had a meeting up there for the 2 chapels that we would have to do for Monday. We were definitely behind at that point and I was getting a little nervous, I’ll explain more about that later. But we had a bunch of good drama ideas for the chapels. The first chapel was to be for 7th-11th grade and the 2nd was to be for the elementary school kids. After that we went to Pupusas Miraflores which is a great Pupusa place, and really traditional Honduran food. Most people enjoyed it, and we went back and crashed that night.

Sunday we woke up and walked to church (about 6 blocks) and then went into the service. Everyone really liked the service and the worship songs were some of the best I’ve heard at church in a long time. Not only that, but there was a visiting pastor from the U.S. who was preaching. So everyone could understand perfectly because his message was translated. All the people I play soccer with every Friday with and help build churches with, were all at that service. So I got to introduce everyone, it was really cool. Then, one of my 8th grade kids was outside with his parents. They always make pupusas and typical Honduran plates of food for lunch. So all of us went into the cafeteria, and that’s when everyone experienced first hand the famous “water in a bag.” We each drank a ½ liter of water out of a bag, it was really fun for them. After that we went to Valle de Angeles which is a really big tourist town, and everyone bought souveneirs and other things like that, we came back that night and worked on our chapels.
No one had very much prepared and no one had rehearsed anything. So I was pretty nervous, considering that all anyone knew about the group was that they were connected to me, and I was hosting them. We worked on 5 or 6 dramas for about 5 hours that night, only got to rehearse them 1 or 2 times, and got a few worship songs in English that we knew. We went to bed exhausted and I was really the only one who knew what they were in for in the morning (or so I thought) as I have done a few chapels.

Monday we woke up and did 3 really powerful chapels for the 7th graders to 11th grade, after each drama 2 people came up and spoke about it, using some Scripture and we played a song or two also. It went really really really well, I think that the team was expecting them to listen and take it seriously a little more, but the 10th and 11th graders really did, and it hit home for a lot of them. Tim finished up the chapel with a presentation of the gospel, I think a few people ended up accepting Christ, and we sang another worship song. God really worked powerfully in that service, and it was the best chapel by far that any of the kids had all year. Then I had to leave because I had to teach class, but they did the elementary kids chapel afterwards. Apparently the kids really loved it and they taught them all these new songs and had a boxing match between Satan and Jesus, which they loved. When I walked out of class and went to get my lunch, I saw the whole team signing autographs, they probably signed over 100 autographs, it was ridiculous. That was the one thing I was not expecting. I also forgot the mention that all the high school girls and girls were swooning over the gringos and gringas, blues eyes and lighter skin are very attractive here, and people are obsessed with relationships, so they got a big taste of that.

They stayed and talked about there faith, a lot of them shared their testimonies in the classes, it was really really cool. My loudest class was as quiet as a mouse while many of the group members shared their testimonies. The day ended and the group went down in the courtyard to hang out with the kids and sign more autographs, and give their e-mails out to the older kids, plus get in a lot of pics with them. I got some Spanish worship songs, and my brother and I also met with the Pastor of the village we were going to in order to work out the details of our coming. We were able to raise about 1400-1500 initially which helped them a lot. We went back and everyone dosed off for naptime, while Lisa, Foo, myself and Kelsey all went to get glass bottle sodas at the mercadito across the street from my house. That night we had the best pupusa lady come over to our house and taught us how to make pupusas. They were soooooooo good. The best.

Tuesday, we woke up and got to church by 7:00 AM, two of my 10th grade students, Pamela, and Alejandra had volunteered to help build with us and since our guide and translator Pastor Olman had to go back into the city, we took them along to help and to translate just incase we ran into a jam. It’s about an hour and a half car ride out there, so we got there and I went with Pastor Rene to buy the supplies for the church. Kelsey had gotten 75 more dollars just in time and I gave it to him. With that money, he had just enough to buy everything he needed to at least start the building project. Basically the only thing that had been done so far was digging the foundation around the building. So we started digging and using a pick ax to level the foundation trenches. We also cut 300 pieces of re-bar with a hand saw and cut a lot of little pieces of little metal wire. We made about 12 really big framed of rebar for the building as well. And we certainly had a fair amount of blisters to go with our work too. That village had so many little watermelons in it, and the family that currently lived on the church property would feed us them usually twice a day. When we finished for the day at around 3:30 they gave us coffee and semita which is really good sweet bread to eat with coffee. We went home and showered, and then went to a little hole in the ground restaurant with typical Honduran food, called Carnitas Kennedy. Just to give you an idea about the food, the Chilaquiles I had have two hard taco shells on the outside, taco sauce, and cheese and the outside, more cheese and chicken on the inside, and surprise jalepeno peppers mysteriously in the chilaquile somewhere. Everytime I eat them my napkin basically turns into a big ball of greese. (yummy).

The next day we did pretty much the same thing minus my 2 students who were really helpful, because the youth pastor as the big church back in the city, Pastor Olman was there. He is one of the funnest guys you will ever meet and he just had a 2 month old baby with his wife, so it was a real privilege to spend time with him. He had such a great time with the group, we took a stroll through town and got a few sodas, it was pretty cool. We left around the same time again that day and went to a Baleadas place, which is like a big wrap with eggs, beans, sour cream, salsa and some other stuff, they are really good. The rest of the night we practiced a drama in the Bible of the sinful woman in Luke 7 who washes Jesus’ feet with her hair. We practiced 3 songs as well, and found out that we needed 800 more dollars that we didn’t have, to get thicker re-bar to put down before the cement. So we got 300 more from my brother and Kelsey and decided to call it a night.

Thursday we went to the Jesus statue, the best place to go in the city for a overlook of it. It is amazing, and also a very very popular place to take kids on field trips, which I forgot about until we got there. There were so many kids from public schools there, it was absolutely crazy. They were following us everywhere, so I took the group over to some rocks. I was sitting on one of the rocks and 4 little girls came up to me and were telling me about all their relatives in the U.S. And I got to tell them in my very limited vocabulary that I was a teacher at a Christian Bilingual School and the group had come to share the good news of Jesus Christ, the one who has come to save us from our sin. It was really sweet, I could have talked to those girls for hours, they were about 9 or 10 years old I think. We went back and ate at Bojangles the famous restaurant in the south that somehow made its way to Honduras. And then met Pastor Olman at the church. He was happy to see us and we got a chance to see his little 2 month old baby and his wife Gloria. We drove there and the pastor had an enormous sound system that we tested out. We rehearsed our drama, and a song. Then we split up into 2 different teams and went out into the village and tried to invite everyone that we could. I’m not sure how many times these people had every seen a gringo, for the kids it may have been there first time. We told them that we were having a special meeting or service with a drama, songs, and preaching, and a lot of people came. More than expected, maybe 70 or 80 in all. There were many many kids that came.

So we sang in Spanish and I introduced the group with my brother, Cally, one of the team members preached an amazing sermon/testimony all in Spanish, it was really well done and impressed a lot of the people. We acted out the drama and then quizzed the kids on the drama. If they got the question about the drama right, they reached their hand in the candy box and pulled out as much candy as they could with both hands. They loved it. We taught the kids a Summer’s Best Two Weeks song, and then closed out with Hope and Kelsey talking a little bit.

Afterwards we hung out with the little kids for a while, playing with them, and the family who had a house on the church property made us all dinner. It was really nice of them, we started back home and we took a 5 minute break to look at the stars in the village. They were so amazing!!! We got a few Cokes, by the way Coca-Cola is so much better in this country, reflected on the week for about an hour. God had done so many things and it was so cool to be able to talk about it. There is so much more to do at the church, but when I gave him the 300 more dollars that my brother and Kesley had gotten, Pastor Rene started to cry and gave us all the biggest hugs. And he said that the service that we had, laid the first spiritual stone in the church, which was a huge complement. God did so much, and He has so much more to do if He wills it. I had to teach on Friday, so my time was up with being out of school, 3 days was definitely a lot to take off, but it was worth it. The guys and girls packed up, went to the mall one last time to get some last minute souvenirs and coffee. Then they came by the school to say good bye, and 3 of them talked with the principal about possibly coming and teaching here in the future. And then they left and headed back for the U.S. And I went home and immediately took a nap, which I needed desperately.

This week has been pretty crazy so far as well. The seniors have been fundraising and yesterday they all sold themselves as slaves to the other students for the whole day. Which meant so many more distractions in class. And Tuesday, 6 teachers were absent and there are only 4 to cover classes, so they had the seniors put on a big soccer tournament the entire day. I was the referee for the championship game, and I was quickly reminded of how much everyone hates the referee. He never seems to be the good guy, always the bad guy. To my students who take the game of soccer very very very seriously here, it was even more so. But after this week is another week off of school.