Home in Honduras!

After a delayed flight from Ft Lauderdale to San Pedro Sula, we finally arrived in San Pedro, and enjoyed our first night in a comfortable hotel downtown. We didn’t get to our hotel until 4am, but were able to still get about 7 hours of sleep before getting picked up by my cousin Chris and his friend & driver, Elmer. We had lunch and picked up some necessary items for our home & food items at a grocery store before making the hour long drive to our new home.
None of us really knew exactly what to expect, but Chris had found us a home that is very nice for the area, and we have grown to really like it. Our home has a kitchen, dining room, living room, and 5 bedrooms –they are literally only BED rooms, with barely enough space to walk around after a bed is in place, and one of them is up a spiral staircase that is only accessed by going outside. We have a cooking stove inside the house, which will be handy when the power is out, and we also have a “pila” – a Honduran washing machine, which consists of a cement slab with a drain and a big basin for water. It’s kind of like a washboard, and of course, still works when the power is out. Our housekeeper, Karleni, does an amazing job of getting the clothes clean with it!

It rains here just about every day, and we have a tin roof, so when it rains, it is extremely loud. It kind of helps us sleep better and masks the sound of the numerous chickens that are very noisy. I think all of our neighbors raise chickens! The benefit to this is that we can buy fresh chicken and eggs whenever we want to, but they do make a lot of noise. At first Conan would bark at the chickens, but he is already comfortable with them, and they don’t seem to mind each other. We also have cows living in the field directly behind us… about 3 steps away from our back door. They have a bunch of calves right now and are really cute. I think Conan likes hanging out with the cows, and they don’t seem to mind him most of the time. We also have geckos sharing our home with us and helping keep the bugs under control. The other night we were treated to a “National Geographic” moment when a gecko (we call him Marty) quickly ran down the wall to catch a large bug about half of his size. We watched him kill, eat, & digest the unsuspecting bug… somewhat disturbing but interesting nonetheless.

We have a housekeeper to help keep our home safe and to help us adjust to the many changes around us, and she is a really hard working and sweet girl named Karleni. We are getting better at communicating, but still need a lot of work with our Spanish. We have met a lot of really wonderful people already in the week that we’ve been here, and that has helped make the adjustment go a lot smoother also. The people here are very friendly and helpful for the most part, and we have received a warm welcome.

We have enjoyed 2 Sundays at our new (bilingual) church, and it has been really nice. We are hoping to learn the Spanish praise songs so that we can worship a little better, but the music is beautiful, and the services have been very helpful and uplifting. The girls have attended the young adult group, and are enjoying making some friends there. Every time we have gone into town we have run into people we know, which is really cool.

There is a lot of need in the area, so please pray that we will be able to discern who to help and what we should do to help them. We have an abundance of children living near us, and they absolutely love the girls! The girls have played with them, and they will come to our door yelling, “Natalie, Venga! Chantal, Venga!” (Come here Natalie! Come here Chantalle!) Most of them come from very poor families, but they are very sweet and adorable kids. We had to hang a curtain (it’s a shower curtain, but it looks really pretty, and we noticed that our neighbors also have a shower curtain for their front curtain!) in our front window so that we can have a little bit of privacy.

We are still working on getting the kitchen equipped to start the food program there. There haven’t been enough funds to get the kitchen completely equipped with a stove and refrigerator and all of the necessary utensils, so we are praying that the funding for that will be available soon, and we can get that underway. In the meantime, we are forming relationships with local people and fellow missionaries, helping out at Sister Maria’s, where she feeds children lunch every day, and helping with things in the church as needed. We are really excited to see how God is going to use us here!

Galatians 6:9 Let us not lose heart in doing what is right, for in due time you will reap a harvest if you do not grow weary.