Friday, June 18, 2010
Bienvenido a Honduras! It is so good to be back in Honduras! Our team includes 3 new people (Yay!), 8 adults and 6 teens. Teenager #7 arrives Monday IF she can find her passport. (Pray with me to St. Anthony, Patron Saint of Lost Items that she does…)
We had a blessedly uneventful travel day with parents of the unaccompanied teens cheerfully handing them over to our care. (Hmm…why were they so happy??) The flight was pleasant as usual, customs and immigration a breeze and NO lost luggage! Woohoo! David, Suzy, Sally, and Lucy met us along with our van drivers, Hugo and Jose. We arrived in short order at Erika’s and took over the bottom half of the house. It was great be back in our old digs. We had a short planning meeting and then a well needed rest period. Our first dinner was delish with Andrea’s signature chicken and my favorite vegetable, pepian. Finally a wonderfully sweet cake that sent me into a sugar high that would make any toddler proud.
After dinner we reconvened to organize activities for tomorrow. After a tour of SBV and briefing by the chief mason on the work we will be doing, we will start our field day activities. First is an art project with the “bite size” and “fun size” kids (babies and toddlers) then more involved activities with the “snack size” and regular size kids. We are going to do an SBV version of the show “Minute to Win It.” If you don’t know what it is, google it and you’ll quickly get an idea of what we will be doing. We have a set of simple and silly tasks that the kids will have to do as part of a competition. Here is where the hilarity comes in. Amy Hill (here in spirit) put the supplies together for us but we figured we’d better know how each game works. Each game was tested by a team member. I really thought Bonnie was going to suffocate – she was laughing so hard for so long I worried about her oxygen sat levels!
Leamarie bravely volunteered to test the first game, Nose Dive. She had to stick a cotton ball to her nose (with Vaseline) and put it in a bowl of water. Naturally, she couldn’t use her hands! The first thru fourth cotton balls went pretty well, if you disregard the sight of Leamarie with a cotton ball stuck to her nose. The fifth one seemed to want to stay put so Leamarie had to wrangle that thing off by shaking her head with authority, the kind only teachers have. It complied and she was successful!
Alyssa was true to form testing “Face the Cookie” in which she had to get an oreo from her forehead into her mouth using only her facial muscles. “I don’t know where my nose is!” she cried… (Breathe, Bonnie, breathe!) One of our newbies, Donna from Holy Spirit, pioneered the candy elevator by pulling a pencil “elevator” loaded with skittles slowly up with strings held by her ears. Pamm conquered the game finally with her gecko like tongue action as it lashed out and snatched those skittles right out of mid-air.
Courtney, a newbie teen, had no trouble fitting right in with the crowd. Her task was to move skittles from one bowl to another using only a straw! She was so good at it I kept moving the bowl farther and farther away. No problem! I think she could have relocated the entire bag! We did agree that trying to balance a skittle on top of another straw exceeded our (no, I mean the kids’) capabilities and simplifying the game was in order. She had amazing concentration as she precisely placed a skittle on a standing straw – alas, unsuccessfully. So we abandoned that part of the game!
Carolyn invented a game in which she tied a balloon to her ankle on a long string. She had to break the balloon by stomping on it. Easy right? Carolyn looked like she was possessed futilely chasing and stomping air! She finally scared half of the sleepy group when she managed to burst the balloon!
Anne and Geoff worked on what seemed to be a very easy task – keep 2 feathers in the air by blowing on them. Anne went first and failed miserably. The feathers immediately plunged to the floor. Anne claimed shortness so Bruce (I think he is literally twice as tall as Anne) volunteered to give the feathers (or Anne) a head start by launching them way over her head. Nope. Then Geoff got up to try his luck. He used the limbo technique and bent himself over backwards so he could glare at the feathers and intimidate them into staying up. He had better success but there is no way one could keep 2 going! We plan on trying one feather tomorrow. I had to thread 5 penne pasta pieces onto a long piece of spaghetti only using my mouth. I found the best approach was to sneak up on the pennes and grab them before they knew what hit them.
Mary thought she was off the hook because she was taking pictures. Not so fast. She had to demonstrate the game in which 5 brown lunch bags of varying sizes (the last being just a couple inches tall) were placed on the floor. She had to move each one from the floor to the table using only her mouth and only her feet could touch the floor. I think she broke several laws of physics as she contorted her body to bite a 2” bag off the floor without her hands or knees touching!
Alex and Jan had the most…um…interesting tasks. Alex had an empty Kleenex box strapped to his back with 8 pingpong balls in it. He had to move and gyrate to get them out without using his hands. (Breathe, Bonnie, breathe!) Jan had a yoyo attached to her back like a tail. She had to do the Wonder Woman twirl to get the yoyo swinging and knock empty water bottles off the table. The variations she tried before she found the winning move were priceless. And I literally mean priceless since I have all of this on tape… How much do you think I can get for these videos? (100% of the proceeds go directly to LAMB of course!)
At 8:30 Honduran time (10:30 ET) we said the Lord’s Prayer and everyone scurried off to bed exhausted. Great first day!
(Dear St. Anthony, please lead Maddie to her passport before Monday morning.)
