Home?

I'll say upfront that this is a longer post and it's a little more informational than some may enjoy, but it should be helpful to those of you that have been wondering exactly what has been happening on the development work front. 

As you may know, we've been hunting around for the past month for a place to call home, but we're not just looking for a pretty, friendly place. It's crucial to us that we're as intentional as possible in this process so that we stand a chance of getting the development process off the ground.Selection is certainly one of the most important elements of this process. This process has been difficult for a variety of reasons: getting to the area for the first time, getting straight answers out of people, trying not to reveal to much and raise expectations, encountering a community with drive and willingness to work together, etc. Since we've been here a little while, I just thought we'd share a couple examples of visits that didn't work out and then two with real potential.

Community PB was an interesting place because the pastor was right on. We had a lot of questions asking about the churches role in development and poverty alleviation is and he answered every single one just like we had dreamed. The only problem is that the area is in a good size town and is fairly developed; he recognized that the community's need was low in comparison to the rest of his country. Our goal is to identify a community where the development potential crosses with the greatest need. One side of the equation was missing.

Coummunity LDA was also intriguing because the trip there was both very difficult and beautiful, through streams and up the sides of muddy mountains to arrive at a quaint, poor community up very high in the mountains. The people were very friendly and kind, with a surprising amount of "cheles (whitish folk)," and they had power and water. However, as we talked with the pastor and leaders in the community, it became apparent that they were more interested in putting tile in the church than meeting the needs of the community. This obviously was not the place either.

We did have a great visit in Las Lomitas (Little Hills). This community is way up the side of a mountain, surrounded by coffee country. The community is pretty poor, but a few things are looking up for them. 1. They do own a good bit of land and are interested in increasing the production on it. 2. They do not have water, but they're working hard to bring it in. 3. Another group called "Salt and Light" has begun replacing the existing homes (in bad shape) with much improved concrete homes. 4. The people seem to respect their village council (patranato) and pastor. 5. It's small and would be easy to work with.

As a result of this good visit, we're returning there today to spend two more days to get to know the community better. We'll spend today, tonight, and tomorrow there before coming back down.

But by far, our most interesting visit has been to the community of Puerto Escondido (Hidden Port). It's not in the mountains, but the drive there was on the worst road we've seen thus far. Once we parked at the end of the road, we had to cross a fast river on slick stones, then walk for ten minutes through the valley before popping out in the community, and I will say that we were both surprised at the conditions there. It reminded me much more of Haiti than of anything we've seen here.

All of the homes barely qualify as shacks, they're constructed solely from bamboo, sticks, and tarps with maybe a couple of scraps of tin on the top and a side. Out of the ~30 homes in the community, none had water, electricity, or a non-dirt floor. They did have a school (Grades 1-6), but only one teacher for the 60 students. The school had bamboo walls halfway up, and a roof, and the floor was also dirt. However, the hearts and minds of the people were sharp. We had a meeting with most of the people in the community, and it was clear that they were chomping at the bit to improve their situation. We talked for about an hour with several action items on the part of the community. We plan to return next Friday with a couple more folks that will know a little more about the situation and potential. Our minds have been very occupied with this community. Regardless of whether this will be our home or not, we feel responsible to respond to these conditions. The church cannot sit silent when it encounters this type of need.

Damos gracias a Dios: por la opportunidad de conocer communidades y las personas que viven alla (the opportunity to get to know communities and the people that live there).

A. E. I. O. Oops

Just a heads-up on this one, learning a language is really, really hard, and as a result, you make a lot of mistakes, some of them inappropriate. So, against our better judgment, we're going to post some anecdotes of our (Kaleb's) learning mistakes. Some of them will be good for the grandparents and kiddies, others not so much. Hopefully as a result, there will be a little more joy in the world. We'll go in chronological order.


1. When it all began.
We were still in the States when the travesty began. I was out standing by our Forester, severely damaged by hail attempting to talk to one of the Honduran pastors about what happened to it. My Spanish, limited, but hopeful, was working hard to explain what had passed with this vehicle. Wracking my brain to explain such a concept. I spat out the name of the culprit...

"Smell from the sky."

Poor Fredy. We worked together to correct the statement to "Ice from the sky." In my efforts to quantify hail to him, I told him "Huele del cielo (Smell/Stink from the sky)" instead of "Hielo del cielo (Ice from the sky)." Unfortunately, this was only the beginning.



2. Worth it?
So, when we went back to Copan for the conference, we were having a good time one night after dinner and were walking from a restaurant in town to a coffee shop. At this point, my abysmal Spanish ears were only catching bits and pieces of the conversation, but at some point, I felt emboldened enough to interject...

"Yes, but it's worth the penis."

Which was met (appropriately) with interesting looks, laughs, and unceasing corrections. I was trying to say "Vale la pena (worth the pain)," but instead, I said "Vale la pene." Needless to say. That last vowel is very important.


3. It had it all.
This mistake was more recent. My Spanish has truly improved and I catch the majority of conversations now and work really hard to respond in some sort of intelligible manner, which makes my mistakes all the more obvious.

We were riding with our mechanic, Sergio, last week, out in the middle of nowhere in the everpresent rain. We'd just made a left (for the fun of it, none of the roads actually go anywhere) in our new vehicle purchase. I was telling him about previous vehicles, and how pleased I had been with my old Jeep Cherokee. In Spanish, it went a little like this.

"Yeah, I was really pleased with it. It was really reliable. The only thing it ever really needed was a firefighter of water in it."

Ah yes, exactly what I wanted to say. The desired phrase was "water pump (bomba del agua)" but instead, out came "firefighter of water (bombero del agua)." Yet again, close, but off the mark.


4. Not my fault for once.
Fortunately, I'm not the only one that makes mistakes. For their first lesson, we had the mechanic, Sergio, and another coworker, Sebastion (goes by Chango, slang for monkey) sitting down to take a basic English test to see where they were at. In the spirit of hearing the target language, we told them in English "Don't cheat."  Them, in the spirit of speaking the target language, responded in kind.

Sergio: "Don sh*t."
Chango: "Don sh*t."

Us: "NO. Don't cheat."

Sergio: "Don't sh*t."
Chango: "Don't sh*t."
Together: "Don't SH*T!"

As a result of this little exchange, they were officially banned from ever using "Don't cheat" again.


5. I said it earlier...
but learning a language is really hard. The last couple days, I had been feeling really good about hearing things people were saying and actually catching some of the intricacies of the language. Then, along came Buddy. We're not sure what Buddy's name is, but I'm fairly certain he does not speak Spanish, or if he does... woof.  Here's a sample interchange (this was in Spanish.)

Me: "How's it going?"

Buddy: "Thooft, thooft, thoot."

Me: "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

Buddy: "Thooft, thoot, thooty-thoot."

Me: "I'm sorry, you're going to have to slow down. I still don't understand."

Buddy (faster, and with more conviction): "Thoofity thoofity, thoot-thoot, Kaleb. Thooty-thoot."

Me (now in English and agitated). "I don't understand you. You need to slow down. Are you just messing with me."

Buddy (eyes full of questions): "Thooty-thoot Kaleb, thooty-thoot."

Me (thinking to myself): "Will he ever go away, or will the thooting never end."

Five silent minutes later...

Buddy (Still looking at me): "Kaleb, Thooty-thoot. Thoofity, thoofity, thoofity?"

Me (Back in Spanish): "I still don't understand, please slow down."

Buddy (Impossibly faster still): "Thoofity-THOOT! Thoofity thoofity, thoot-thoot! Kaleb!"



Anyways, you get the idea. Learning a language is hard. Hope it goes easier for you than it has for me. 

Update of the Standard Variety

Hello all. I know that you're not all hanging on the edge of your seats to see what's going on down here, especially if our update is without pictures. But for those of you following, we thought we'd just let you in on what's been going on down here.

Spanish is continuing to improve for both of us. Kaleb's finally starting to feel like every now and then a word makes sense, and occasionally has a conversation without struggling too much. We've been over to several local houses now for dinner. The folks receiving us here have been beyond kind to us and have made us feel very welcome. It's been great to be here long enough to actually start establishing relationships with the staff and local people.

This past week, we also went out to visit a few "widow's homes" in  the community of San Isidro. A group of engineering students wanted to do a survey to see how well the homes that HtH build actually meet the material and cultural needs of the recipients. As a result, we've had the chance thus far to make into 8 different homes in the community and check out how the homes are doing. For the most part, after a few years, the people that have received them still very much like and appreciate the homes. It's still strange (weeks later) to walk to a house, sit down and be surrounded by chickens, pantsless children, and piles of corn and/or coffee. Many times, the previous home is still standing and is used as a shed, and these homes are always shockingly bad. Many of these people have spent the majority of their lives living in wooden shacks with holes big enough for a cow to walk through (not exaggerated). The floors are nothing but dirt, and there is a fire going inside. The difference between the new home (which, without exception, has been kept up immaculately) and the old home is striking and seems to really give the recipients hope. 

We've also made it out to a few more communities to kind of get the lay of the land, but we'll talk more about the selection process in a future post. As we progress though, more and more doors seem to swing open and connections continue to be made. Thanks again for your prayers and support. We're thinking of you all as well and as always, please let us know how we can support you all as well.

Damos gracias a Dios por: hasta ahora, nuestro tiempo en los communidades y con familias (The time we've spent up til now in communities and with families.)

The Little Grape that Could

Well, after an interesting day on Tuesday, we have a vehicle. We can't say how happy we are to have freedom of movement.  We just used it this morning to jump in and chase down a pickup full of fresh veggies down the road (we's gots to has our veggies). The truck was hilarious, it had a grocery store scale hanging off the tailgate.

Anyways, we ended up with a little Toyota Tacoma, pretty much anything else was prohibitively expensive. I thought of 100 clever ways to write this next fact, but let's be honest here... it's purple. I don't know why on God's green earth, any car manufacturer would make a four-wheel drive truck that is a pretty light blue-purple, but Toyota certainly did. We're not only "the gringos" now, but we're the gringos rolling into town in a lavender truck. Awesome...

 This photo is pretty forgiving of the color.

But really, it's a great vehicle in phenomenal condition for here. For those of you that know the road to Canchias, we went out there yesterday, but now it takes more than half an hour to get there because all the roads have washed out from the unusually heavy rains this wet season, so we took it for it's maiden voyage. However, the little grape did a great job getting to and from. What these people do with two-wheel drive down here amazes me though, coming back, we passed a little minibus coming up the same mountain road, through the streams, ruts and all. Ridiculous. Apparently, as much as we Americans like our cars, we're sissies with  how we use them. Everyday, we see little tiny 1980s 4-cylinder trucks loaded down with well over a ton of bananas/coconuts/cinder blocks/wood going up slick mountain roads. The sounds that come out of them are just as amazing the vehicles.

Since then, we've ridden with our mechanic for about an hour on back roads, and it performed admirably with him pretending like he was in the final laps of a World Rally Championship race. At one point (at a particularly huge crater in the road, we were on 3 or 2 wheels), he told me to drive carefully, and take care of the truck. If "driving carefully" involves driving like that, I'm sure I'll manage.

This is the official end of semi-interesting material unless you care about what the process for purchasing a car looks like down here.

The process went fairly well. We decided it would be best for their only to be one chele (white person- from their word for milk) looking at cars at once, so Stacey stayed back, and Kaleb went with a couple of guys from Honduras to check some out. Luis, a guy here, ended up having a friend with the truck we bought. We went, drove it around a little, checked out every number in every document they had (approximately 13 times) and bartered a little bit. Then we went to the bank (where we had an account) to transfer the money. Apparently, unless you want to die, you don't carry a big check or lots of money in San Pedro Sula. So, we went to the bank, waited in the line outside, then the line inside, then at the counter, for almost 2 hours. From there, we got the signature and ID of the owner at a legal office to verify the transfer. Next week, we'll go to a lawyer, since we're not nationals, and complete the transfer into our name. A little different here, haha.

Life at the Office

So what have we been up to since the “Project Honduras Conference”?

Well, our goal right now is to begin to visit potential communities to move into (where we will work via the local church to start community development).  This whole thing is a long process but in short we have established:

• Criteria for the community where we’ll begin development
• Questions for the local pastor, community leaders, and individual families
• Potential communities based on conversation with Honduran staff

So far we have visited two communities and have enjoyed our time there.  Today we will visit two more and we have plans to spend extended time in one next week. In addition to our main goal we also have been car searching (so we don’t need to be escorted everywhere), studying Spanish, reading about development, beginning to teach English classes to the Honduran staff, helping out with translations/communication/etc. in the office, and getting to know the Honduran staff and their families. 

Oh, and our side job - going through about a 1/2 bottle of heavy duty bug spray a day while still acquiring 3-4 bites a day. We think the bugs here have started to acquire a taste for Deet.

Damos gracias a Dios por - la oportunidad de conocer familias hondureñas (opportunity to get to know Honduran families)

Love

"The love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is lovely and loving. The world smiles. 

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. 

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.  

And then there is the love for the enemy—the love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world."

Frederick Buechner—The Magnificant Defeat

A woman’s note – update!

I just wanted to update you all with some of my more recent blessings. 

We were able to purchase our first piece of furniture – a propane 2 burner stove!

Now we’re able to eat some things other than cereal and jelly sandwiches.  Just rice, beans, and eggs so far.  With still not having a car, we have only been to the town where the food is (Santa Cruz) once so we had to get food/ingredients that last a long time – we were running slim on choices.  You can pray we are able to purchase a good vehicle soon!

God provides.  Each time I think we’re going to go to bed hungry or not have enough to make something we end up being blessed with the opportunity to find food somewhere.  You really can live on one meal a day – try it sometime!  I thank God for my husband who doesn’t mind hunger and doesn’t mind repeating the same 3 foods for weeks. You should have seen our eyes when we were taken to San Pedro Sula yesterday for a meeting and on our way saw Pizza Hut, Applebee’s, Wendy’s, McDonalds, Duncan Donuts, Subway, and a few more.  There they all were - hidden from us 1 ½ hrs. away.  Our co-worker took us to “Power Chicken” for chicken, ribs (not quite what we’re used to – don’t get too excited), yucca fries, and Chinese rice.  

I’ve also had the blessing of washing clothing by hand at the pila.

It’s super hard to get them to smell good, but even harder to rinse out the soap.  Once they hang on the line to dry each piece is SUPER crispy – I feel like I’ve starched all of our clothing each time.  It’s tricky with rain every day how to get the clothing dry as well.

My conclusion – everything here takes more time.  

• If you want to eat you need to get food 20 min. away in Santa Cruz and bring it home knowing it will need to last you until you can get there again.  
• If you want beans for dinner you need to soak them for 6 hrs. or overnight before beginning to cook them which itself takes 1.5 hrs.  
• If you want US familiar food – drive 1.5 hrs. to San Pedro Sula.   
• If you want good smelling, clean clothing you have to soak them in a bucket with the detergent overnight, get up early to wash them, and then let them dry in the hot sun before the rain comes in the afternoon.  

I’m glad God made me a planner and that we're planning on having our own garden once we get into a community and get some land!

But why?

Okay, it's been great reading about how Stacey and Kaleb  have run away from the United States and seem to be just living it up in the tropics, but what's the point?

The reason we're here is far from learning language, attending conferences, encountering freakishly huge bugs, and exploring Mayan ruins. Although we've been having a great time doing all these things, we wanted to take a minute to talk about why we're really here.

As many of you know, we've been quite passionate about serving the poor, the suffering, the oppressed, the orphan, and the widow for some time, and we have honestly wrestled and wrestled with the question of "How do we respond?" After much prayer, reading, and discussion, we felt that God was pointing toward a ministry of community development with the world's forgotten people.
For us right now, these people are Honduran. God happened to open a door to Honduras, but this process could easily occur in any corner of the world. But, what is community development?

Although it will be defined many different ways by many different people, we had to establish our own definition. According to Eldridge Standard Dictionary...

community development -(n,v)- Living in and among an impoverished community with the goal of helping the community recognize their potential and value in Christ.

This will play out in a specific way for us. Right now, we are working with Hondurans to identify a community where the greatest need intersects the greatest opportunity for improvement. We'll identify the community primarily by looking at the level of its need combined with the community's desire to improve itself. We are concentrating our search in communities that have an active Brazos Abiertos church (Open Arms - non-denominational affiliation that is associated with HtH). Due to the establishment of the churches in these communities, we have an easy-in to help us establish ourselves.

Once we've moved into a community, we'll begin the process of ABCD or Asset-based Community Development. This method proposes that the most effective way to inspire people to work together to improve their situation is by focusing primarily on their assets, their skills, talents, and resources, instead of their problems. Through the local church, we'll work to help the community identify their resources and determine how they would like to partner with HtH to create solutions together. This method of development is highly-relationally based and will provide us and the church with  the opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ to the community in a very tangible way.

As projects begin and end, the goal is to ensure that the community and local church remain the driving force behind any development work. We want to work ourselves out of a job and see the individuals come to recognize their true potential and worth.

To us, this process is intrinsically related to our faith. If we were not Christians, we would not be here. We are seeking to reflect the love of Christ that we have experienced in our own lives to the people around us here in Honduras. It is of the utmost importance for us to live our faith in an active and dynamic way in the lives of those that need it most. The Christian life was never meant to be one of condemnation, guilt, pain and death, but of love by a Savior that was passionate for our world. We recognize that Christians worldwide have earned a bitter name because of the pain they have occasionally inflicted on the world. However, we stand strongly on what the Bible says, and use that as our primary guideline for the way we live our lives. Through living out these biblical principles, we hope to regain some positive connotation for the words Jesus/Christian.


We're not perfect, in fact far from it. Regardless, we will hold strongly to the love of Christ, and try to make a positive impact in this world. At times, we will trip, fall and dirty His name. But, we will get up, rinse off and repeat that process until we have done our part to show our world that Someone loves them and that they are worth any effort.

Project Honduras

We had the opportunity this past week to return to Copan Ruinas for a gathering of some of the many folks volunteering across the country of Honduras. The conference was called Project Honduras and was sponsored by people that run an English-language news website about current Honduran news. (For those of you interested in Honduran news, check out www.hondurasweekly.com). Approximately 200 people represented 7 countries with active NGOs in Honduras. We attended with some of the Honduran staff: German, Fredy, and Manolo. We thought that the bus trip was fast, but nothing compared to German's driving. In a Toyota minibus, we made the 4-5 hour trip in 3 hours. This was not accomplished without tires literally squauling in the mountain switchbacks sans guardrail: borderline stressful.

The conference featured a variety of speakers and panels/topics. The panels ranged from education, to child abuse, to AIDS, to community development, and many others. For you folks reading in the good ol' US of A, the conference also included appearances from USAID (the US government's humanitarian arm), as well as the new US Ambassador to Honduras; we have no desire for her job. We made several great connections and are looking forward to collaborating with several folks that we met in the Santa Cruz area.

Below are some interesting "Honduras" facts we gathered throughout the week.

• Honduras has 103 endemic plants. In addition, there are 600 orchid species, 117 different kinds of snakes and is the most mountainous country in Central America.
• There are 7 active languages groups in the country.
• 3/4 of Honduran homes lack a father figure, and only 20% of birth certificates name a father.
• ~40,000/8 million Hondurans are infected with HIV, and the north coast is experiencing a recent explosion of transmissions. 60,000 children are either orphaned from AIDS or are dealing with an immediate family members illness.
• 51% of Hondurans are under the age of 26.
• 1/3 of Honduran children have been sexually abused by the age of 12. 
• There are more gang members in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa (primary cities) than in the rest of Central America combined.

We're not huge numbers people, but some of these really drove home how bad the situation has become here. However, we thought that the most interesting element of the conference was the word choice of the Hondurans that spoke. Two words stood out.

1. Crisis - Hondurans recognize that their country has been in a state of decline for some time and is in desperate need of a turn around.
2. Development - It seemed that nearly every Honduran that spoke mentioned that their country's need was in "desarollo (development)." They mean that there is the need to create a long-lasting, relationship-based, self-sustaining lifestyle of the people in their country. (We'll talk more about this soon.)

Damos gracias a Dios para: La opportunidad llevar su amor a un pais con necesidades actuales. (The opportunity to carry His love to a country with real needs.)

A woman’s note:

So, after the 2 weeks of pampering: being served 3 meals a day and someone else washing our clothing by hand.  It’s time to get into real life.  We’ve got running water, separate drinking water, and electric so absolutely nothing to complain about!  Luis was kind enough to tell us that Santa Cruz has a new (2 week old – good timing!) “super market” and he stopped on the way to San Isidro to allow us to buy a few things since there is nowhere to buy anything more than a snack pack of “chips” or a soda in San Isidro and we don’t have a vehicle yet to drive the 15-20 min. into Santa Cruz.  The “super market” was awesome, more than I would have dreamed of.  It’s basically Aldi but only like 1/2 the size and selection.  Before this store came to town there were just several “pulperias” (mom and pop shops with a few of the basics) and then vendors selling their produce from time to time.

So as we walk into the store I pause…  What do we buy without knowing our future?  What do we have to work with?  Kaleb’s got pocket knives. We brought some utensils and a skillet.  The room has a mini frig (praise God and pray that the electric doesn’t go off too often).  Utensils= good, but the skillet will do me no good without a way to heat it.  Maybe they would allow us to build a little fire at the office? – but better ask about that first.  But, with a mini frig we can get some nourishment for sure!  So without knowing how long it will be until we’re back at the store we decided to go for a few things that will go a long way for 2 people.  A pineapple, some bananas, 3 bags of cereal, a gallon of milk, loaf of bread, a container of strawberry jelly, 2 bowls, and a small bag of laundry detergent.  Note: as many of you travelers know peanut butter is a hard thing to find in other countries.  

So our food is in order at home we’ll have fruit, cereal and milk, and jelly sandwiches until we can get back somewhere else.  

Our first morning on at our new place Kaleb was watching it rain and all of the sudden food fell from the sky.  He grabbed his rain jacket and ran for it before anyone else did.  He hollered to me that it was a guanabana (one of my favorite flavors) and I ran to join him.  We squatted like two starving children rinsing the dirt off and pulling the flesh out of the already split open fruit. We both tired it but fairly quickly spit it out – it’s super sour when you eat it fresh so instead we have it peeled, seeded, and freezing to keep.  We looked up ways to make juice (all require sugar). We discovered the office yard has a loaded guanabana tree and orange trees.  Needless to say we’ll enjoy the fruits.

With the “pila” (outdoor washing station with running water) at the office and my purchased laundry detergent I’ll be able to start washing our clothing by hand this week!

----------

If you wanted to get a glimpse of our time in Copan or interested in trying it out yourself:

Here’s the link to the family’s website where we stayed:

http://posadaernestos.com/

Here’s the link to the Spanish School:

http://www.guacamaya.com/

Living the Dream

Well, we made it (again) to San Isidro. We caught our bus yesterday morning from Copan to San Pedro Sula and arrived in typical Latin style, approximately 2 hours late. To be fair to the roads and the bus driver, there was some flooding along the way. For about ¼ mile, people had all of their earthly goods sitting on the side of the road as they stared at their inundated homes, so we drove past them through about a foot of water. It slowed it down a little bit. Other than that the trip was great, the driver did his very-loving best to make up for our late departure, which resulted in one of the very few times in our lives that we’ve actually been “carsick.” However, I noticed the Hondurans were wide awake for the leisurely first half of the trip, then fell asleep when the driver started driving like a mad man. Just an observation.

Luis met us at the bus station with his family once our bus touched down and drove us the rest of the way to San Isidro. It was great to see him again. He’s a strong man of God with a real passion for the people of his country. We are truly looking forward to working with him. He has already been thinking along the lines of where we might be able to settle into a community. 

Once we finally arrived in San Isidro, we were introduced to our next home for a month or two: fairly Spartan, but also very accommodating. The interior decorator looked to a lot of concrete for his design inspiration, but it will be easy to keep clean. We basically have a bed, mini-fridge, shelf, toilet, sink, and shower (sans shower curtain and hot water, but on the plus side, if you try to get the hot water to work, you get shocked for fun - free of charge).  We threw up some curtains over the window in an attempt to keep the Gringo Show G-rated for the folks in the community, not that they would really care. With two t-shirts stuffed with towels for pillows, and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our bellies our first night in our newest home went well. 

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the booming metropolis of San Isidro, it’s a small pueblo (town) in the mountains to the near NE of Lake Yojoa (for those of you that like maps, Yojoa is the only lake of size in Honduras, find it, and you’ve found us). There’s not really much here, but Santa Cruz de Yojoa is only a 15-20 minute drive away and it has the typical small town amenities. At the HtH office, where we’re staying, they keep their vehicles, have the staff office, keep a night watchman and have a barbed-wire fence all the way around. Needless to say, I think we’re secure.  It will be a great place to ease even more into the culture before we venture out to our final destination (wherever that may be) later this year. We’ll update more soon about exactly what this process should look like. 

Grace and peace everyone.    

                                                                              

Damos gracias a Dios por: Viajes seguros and un habitación seguro (safe trips and a safe place to stay).