Demos gracias a Dios

Sunday, June 20, 2010

The morning started with Morning Prayer led by Carolyn and Alyssa. After a simple breakfast we headed out, stopped by Casa LAMB to pick up Pat Cashman and have a quick tour and then on to SBV for church. I don’t think I will ever get used to the beauty of the Chapel. There is a special joy being in that sacred space filled with happy, squirmy children worshipping, singing, and praying. Courtney processed in with the altar party because she was asked to do the old testament reading. She read so beautifully, so poised. Suzy preached an inspiring sermon using a sailboat as a metaphor for our lives. We were encouraged to let the Holy Spirit be the wind in our sails. Bruce was the chalice bearer. There is a special type of joyful worship there in the Church of the Good Shepherd.

After church we took off for the park called Picacho aka the Jesus Statue park. We had a picnic lunch and enjoyed the fantastic view and the unbelievable statue of Jesus, arms outstretched over the city of Tegucigalpa. There is also a replica of a Mayan temple with a zillion steps. Jan and I climbed the steps to see what we could see and get a great shot of the statue. When we got down, Bonnie decided she wanted to go so up we all went again! Half way up are gargoyles. Bonnie, Jan and I posed with the gargoyle to the amazement of the Hondurans!

After the park we went to Chiminike – a huge and fabulous children’s museum. It was as cool as any children’s museum in the US and, really, bigger than any I have ever seen. It was full of really fun, hands on exhibits. One large room was dedicated to the human body. I think this room was my favorite. It had a “Vomit Center” that brought to life the process leading up to throwing up. There was also an exhibit of the various bacteria in our bodies, a huge intestinal system (I took a picture of Carolyn standing triumphantly in a colon) and a giant Operation game – just like the one we have all played as kids! Very cool. We took a group picture in the giant nose proving you can pick your friends, you can pick your nose… (you can fill in the rest…)

Home again to the most delicious dinner of enchiladas (we would call them tostadas) and brownies. The evening activity was sorting all the things we brought down, Alyssa’s getting to know you game, reflection and then Compline. Then bed!

It was a great day. Tomorrow, the real work begins. Can’t wait!

Amanda with Carla and her new son, Wilson Alexander,9 mo.

Leamarie and Elias reading the Bible

Mary and Julio horsing around (before the service started!)

Bruce and Jocelyn

Courtney reading Isaiah

Bonnie reading the Gospel

Bruce and Donna during Eucharist

Pat giving Bonnie and Geoff birthday blessings

Suzy and Jan in front of the great banner Jan made

Gargoyles...gargirls?

Picking friends

SBV Shenanigans

Saturday, June 19

Finally, back at SBV! It looks just beautiful and the kids continue to be fabulous! After storing our things in the school, we trooped down to “Sala Cuna” – the babies cottage. They have moved the children around so only the tiniest children are there. They have 3 babies – Linda 10mo, Marie Mercedes 9 mo, and Yolani 18 mo. Yolani is blind from birth and thriving at SBV! We launched into an art project that got as much paint on us (yes, my pants are covered as usual…) as on the paper but it was great fun and we have some really cute art to bring home! I discovered that getting hand and foot prints from babies is really hard since they have no idea what you are doing. The toddlers were easier except getting paint on the bottom of their little squirming feet as they giggled was a challenge!

Next was lunch and then a tour of SBV. We hiked up past the water tower to see the site for the boys dorm. This is what we will be working on this week. This cottage is being built using the large stones on the property. It promises to be quite beautiful.

The next item on the agenda was the minute to win it games with the older kids. The grand plan included 3 teams moving in orderly fashion from station to station. Yeah, right. Instead it was barely controlled chaos but truly memorable for all involved, observing or even in the general area. The kids moved on their own from station to station as they wanted. The Nose Dive game was very popular as was “Suck it Up” moving the skittles from one bowl to another. A few brave souls mastered the spaghetti game. Junk in the Trunk was amazing. The first two kids shook the pingpong balls out the box in a matter of seconds. Ha. We figured out the box was too low on their backs. The rest of the kids had a harder (and funnier) time as we strapped the box higher up on their backs. The SBV kids are better than we are in almost any physical activity but I have to say, Alex remains the Master of Junk in the Trunk! (I will upload the video to FaceBook when I get home. Or maybe YouTube for maximum exposure…

By far the biggest hit of the day was Cookieface. Alyssa demonstrated how to move the cookie from her forehead to her mouth to a rapt crowd of all the kids and many adults - team members and Honduran caretakers. The poise with which she contorted her face sitting on a tiny plastic chair in the middle of the courtyard was impressive. Then the kids ran to take their turns. I will let the pictures speak for themselves… Jimy was very zen about moving his cookie carefully down his face! Really and truly we could not have had more fun.

We left SBV to go have dinner at Suzy’s house. It is amazing to be there with ONLY 5 children! The vans had taken us all the way down the um, rustic(?) dirt road. It started to sprinkle and David suggested we move the vans to the top of the hill while we still could. The drivers clarified the suggestion by saying they needed ballast in the back rows to have sufficient traction to get thru the mud. After a couple of attempts, with some ballast moving farther back in the truck we got the vans up the hill. We had pizza (we inhaled pizza) and some roast chicken from Café Sur and then headed home. Some of us picked our way up the hill in the rain by foot while Suzy drove the rest along the flat road in front of her house. There was a rendez-vous to move the ballast, I mean team, from Suzy’s vehicle to the van and we all got back to Erika’s, happy and exhausted as usual.

Everyone took showers…the lucky ones getting warm(ish) ones, the intrepid leaping in first getting the icy showers. (Note to self… the C on the shower knob stands for Caliente not Cold. So even tho the C knob is on the right like the Cold at home, use that one for warm showers…)

We did a lovely, turbo Compline then sang some of our favorite songs accompanied by the playlist Alex put together on his IPod. (Phillip Spofford – we need you!) Then off to bed. Pamm, Courtney and Alyssa had a new roommate – Sallie spent the night!

Wish you all were here. This is such a Spirit filled place.

Happy Father’s Day to the dads out there!

Saturday June 19

Suck it up game

Cookieface game

Jimi master of cookieface!

Nose Dive game

The boys dorm and our project

Courtney and the beautiful view from the chapel

This is not what it looks like.  Geoff was NOT goosing me!

Jan helping Fani put her shoes on the right foot!

Hilarity in Honduras

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.)

Heavy hearts

Friday February 26, 2010


Our last day started out as all the other days had. Sleepy folks stumbling to get coffee and plopping down at a table in the courtyard waiting for the coffee to kick in. Fortunately, we don’t have any of those perky, whistley, “I just love the early morning” types. We are all pretty bleary-eyed when we get up. Morning prayer comes next and then breakfast. By then we are getting jazzed up for the day. Slowly reality began to sink in as Short Anne and Margot tearfully began to say their good byes. They had to leave a day early. Uh-oh. That would be us tomorrow. But, not yet!

Part of our group got on the van to Flor to finish painting the school and the rest of us loaded up to go to SBV. We stopped at Café Sur, LAMB’s new coffee shop on the way to SBV. It really is lovely. Then on to work. Marilyn and Leamarie headed up to the school to teach. Karen and I prepared to paint more pipes – red this time since they ran out of green. (I will pause while the mental image forms of my already green legs from yesterday and the potential impact of the red paint..) John, Al, and James when back to their sand and cement hauling.

Just about lunchtime, Suzy and Elsa showed up. They joined us as we shared our lunch with the Honduran construction workers. It was a beautiful day, sitting under the trees with a view of the mountains. Soon Gladys and Evelyn came by so John could take us, along with Suzy and Elsa, on a walk to see the prospects for wells, dams, and other possibilities for water. The solution to the water issue seems to be getting more concrete. Suzy told John that they were ready to do whatever he recommends. He is pondering the various options before declaring! Just about all of the options involve buying property to get us closer to either existing water or good well-digging spots. Pray that we are able to negotiate a fair price. Suzy and I were casually looking for a perfect site for the cabin I want to build on the property. I promised Leamarie that we would share the house. We may have to make room for Short Anne too!

The Flor team joined us after stopping for a delish lunch at Café Sur. We had some time with the kids before their program. As usual, the program was precious. First all the children sang us some songs and then each class sang a song. The first grade recited Psalm 23 in its entirety! Daniel gave his testimony and little Joselyn did too. I made a short speech entirely in Spanish! Woohoo!

We had a bit more time to relax with the children. I repeated over and over that I would be back in June. Evelyn graced me with some smiles. Jimy and Marilyn, our newest love story, were so sweet together – savoring every moment before it was time to go. All too soon, John was herding us on the vans. How I hate that moment. The only possible way I can leave is if I already know when I am returning – Junio. Regresso en Junio.

When we got home we cleaned up and began the packing party. We have so many beautiful things for the art auction. Pray they all get back to Atlanta in one piece! Pat Cashman, a priest who has been with us off and on all week, celebrated the Eucharist with us. What a wonderful way to finish the week.

So, tomorrow we rejoin our other world. We will be happy to see our friends and family but leave our beautiful Honduras and our friends and family here with heavy hearts.

Hasta Junio.

The 23rd Psalm

Evelyn smiles!