December 3, 2007 - AIDS Parade, etc.

Well, I have been slacking off in my blogging so now I will do my best to remember the details of the last period of time...

Sabbath we had our church service for the people that had been coming to the meetings in our church here – lots of kids came, and quite a few adults came as well which was excellent. Also many people came from the Tegucigalpa church to join in with our service/run aspects of the service such as the childrens program, etc. The sermon was about baptism to which a call was made for people interested in baptism, and I believe 7 came forward, or perhaps it was 6, I cannot quite recall. Anyway, they did not have a baptism that day because I guess they decided it was a little too early on, which I thought was a good choice. Then that afternoon after lunch which was kind of like a potluck, a small group of us desired to go into the village and visit some people. The first house we stopped at was to visit a lady whose acquaintance Eli had made, and she is in need of a new house. Her house is small of course, and is not in the greatest of shape, so we visited her for a while and have the possibility of helping her with it. She took us to her bean plantation also to show us what it was like, and she had some amazing mango trees on it as well which were enormous. (Mango season is not here which I find to be most unfortunate..) Then we continued on into town a little farther and visited some other families. The first one we stopped at was a lady who also had house issues – this one was much worse than the other. They had a fairly decent house, tiny as well, but a little bigger probably. Unfortunately though, they had this lovely next-door neighbour who decided to expand his house, and in doing so he destroyed her wall, so he could put his own up. Sooo, her roof was half caving in since it no longer had a wall to support it, and this had happened four years ago – so since the roof is in such a precarious position, she only uses that part of the house for the daytime, and at night they go with their kids to her mothers place to sleep, where it is safe. During these four years they have been collecting material to build a new house, but the process is very slow, and the workers charge a great deal of money to build a house, so it is difficult for them. We had a prayer with all the people we visited, and when we prayed with this lady she had tears in her eyes at the end of it – it was a very touching situation, to see the hope these people had, and to see all the difficulties they had to go through to achieve something fairly simple for us...
This lady was very talkative and after she took us to see the area she wanted to build her new place, she took us to see her sister, or maybe it was her aunt, I forget which one, and on the way she told the story about her, which was that the woman had lost her daughter when she (the daughter) was only 22 years old, and it was some sort of a tragic death, and this woman was now so disturbed that she would not leave her house, because whenever she left she would be reminded of her and it would all just bother her deeply, so she has spent the last however many years of her life in her house, not venturing out.

We did not stay for too long at this woman's house because she didn't seem like she was really up to having so many visitors, so we kept it short there, but she did thank us for visiting and invited us back again which could either have been out of politeness, or she really did appreciate it.

Anyway, we talked to some other people, and then headed back home. Then that night, we had been invited to attend the graduation of the school where we had given talks some time ago, so we set off to that adventure. It was fairly uneventful – Marta and Werner had the delight of sitting at the table of 'honoured guests' or something like that, and were given some nice wine or champaigne for the purpose of a toast, (which I do not believe they partook of), and there were many speeches and things said, and yes, was not particularly thrilling.

Sunday...We had classes in the morning which involved some unpleasantries and I did not enjoy them in the least, but we will leave that to remain in a dormant state, then we had the rest of the day to do what we wished. I wanted to go to buy a flashlight (since mine unfortunately broke) so Rob and Philip accompanied me on that mission, and I also needed to pick up my computer which was charging in Marta and Werner's lovely abode, and after we came back I studied a little, and then there was lunch, and following that Philip and I accidentally came across a coral snake, which is apparantly quite highly poisonous (10 times more than a rattlesnake) so it's life was swiftly ended by Alexander (one of the locals) and then just for fun it was slashed at by a machete and divided into three pieces, just cause somebody wanted to feel cool and “kill” something...

Today, we had class and then work time and for work time I was on the team to go and get firewood from the yonder mountain. That was an interesting experience on skinny little trails that you slide down, but we succeeded in our bid and a good time was had by all. Then, the four of us girls (Hannah, Elissa, Marylin and I) had been invited by these two adorable girls name Maria and Mariella for cookies at their aunts house. So we went to that, which ended up being quite a little jaunt away – and were greeted warmly, and their English speaking son was summoned to talk to us and he told us about how he had lived in Texas and Vancouver and had a wife and child who is now 8 years old, over in Vancouver still, etc. And we were served cookies and Honduran coffee, and then were given the leftover cookies to take back to the rest of the group. Then we were supposed to go to the Health Centre to meet up with a bunch of other people because we were supposedly going to be in an AIDS parade. When I heard we were going to be in a parade I found it to be a little unfortunate because I already feel like I'm in enough of a parade when all the Gringos go walking through town, but no we now had to be in a true parade...incidentally enough it ended up being mostly us anyway – there were possibly 5 others present, plus part of our group...very small parade. Anyway that was interesting. Once we arrived at the plaza, we were informed that there were supposed to be activities for the children, and we were in charge of that. Go figure. I love how everything is last minute here...anyway, I ended up being gone for most of that experience because the girls Maria and Mariella (who were still tagging along) drug me here and drug me there speaking to en Espanol, repeating themselves over and over again thinking that the more times they said it the more sense it would make to me...if only that was the case! I felt so bad not being able to understand them, but alas there was not much I could do. Then we came back here to Beunavista (our mission station) and set about the task of removing the kernels of corn from the dried out cobs, so that it can later be made into tortillas, not because we had to, but because it is somehow an enjoyable task. And that is how the rest of the evening went – good conversation ensued, a very good worship was had, and we were graced with the company of a couple of visitors for a time.

All in all we were blessed this day with all that happened, and for that, we give thanks.