Honduras!!

Holy Smokes!:) What an adventure! We were in Honduras for ten days. While we were there, we lived through a military coup! The president was arrested and taken to Costa Rica for trying to have an illegal vote. Riots in the streets, protesters, churches cancelled, road curfews, country wide power outages, etc.etc!

We were to leave at 7am on Sunday,and arrive in Tegucigalpa at 11:30AM. When we arrived at the airport at 4AM we found our airline was cancelled by American and we weren't leaving until NOON. That made us miss our only connection into Teguc, which meant we overnighted in Miami. We left the next day on the same time originally connecting us to Teguc. So we arrived a total 24 hours later than we were supposed too. Which meant we arrived AFTER all seven of our church teams! We were supposed to get there 24 hours before, so we could do all our errands, set everything up, etc. Instead we were the last at camp! :) Worked out fine, and was sort of nice in the end! :)

The first day or so of camp was uneventful, besides getting 89 people used to living in a foreign country! :) Eventually we started hearing word of everything going on in the capital city. We were staying at a beautiful camp at the outskirts of the city, but had to drive through the town to get to our three mission site locations each day. We were certainly never in any danger (except for the possibility of not getting out of the country), but we were also skirting danger all the time.

One day Mike got a call, and the missionary that livest here full time (who we were working with), said riots were starting and we had five minutes to load 89 people, at three separate sites, into three buses and get them on the road! :) Miracles of all we did it! One bus was about five minutes slower than the other two, and ended up at camp a full hour behind the rest of us. They sat in traffic all that time. Thankfully it started DOWN POURING and apparently Hondurans don't like to protest and riot in the rain! :) Stuff quieted down the next day and we were able to go back to our sites and do the final day's celebration/party with the kids.

That Saturday we were supposed to go to this little outdoor market, and thought we were going to have to cancel the trip. We were able to go, by way of a different route..and had a great time. Again, on the way home, when the riots were supposed to start, it started to rain really hard and we made it home muddy, but safe!

Sunday we were planning to go back to the three local churches we had worked with all week, and have worship with them. But their services were mostly cancelled. We stayed at the camp all day and enjoyed the rest. There was an underlying nervousness of getting out of the country, but never were we in any danger!

We were in constant contact with the US Embassy there in Tegus. The last hurdle was we had 98+pieces of luggage and the three buses could only carry 45 TOTAL. We had a little moving truck planning to come to carry all the luggage, but there was a curfew put on the roads and we weren't sure he'd make it out to camp. Nor if he would even show up! So we had everybody repack their priority suitcases, most churches were cramming into less than three suitcases! Some were willing to leave it all behind! The power was supposed to be out that day, in fact in town the power was out for about ten hours. Out at camp, where 89 people were trying to repack their luggage, the lights stayed on all night. And thank God for that, because we would have been trying to do all that by flash light!

We planned to leave for the airport on Monday morning at 6am, get there by 7am, riots were to start at 8am. We got there fine, though it was a nervous trek there! We were on the road earlier than the curfew allowed, so we had special permission from the Embassy to be on the roads. Our groups left at noon, we left on the last flight at 2:00.

True to form, our flight was an hour late leaving, then we arrived in Miami and had to sit on the runway for 30 minutes waiting for a gate to park in! THEN going through customs and immigration was a joy, as usual! We gave our luggage back to the handlers at 8:30 PM, our flight was departing at 8:40PM. Thankfully, for us, the connecting flight was delayed until 9:30. BUT it never left until almost 11pm, which didn't put us in to Raleigh until 1:00am!

By the time we got home, it was 2am! I woke myself up on the hour, to put new loads of laundry in the machine. I didn't even fold them when they came out, just threw them on the couch! By the time we woke up at 7am, I had done almost six loads of laundry. The two college girls who were with us and I went to the laundry mat at 8:30 and did another four loads! Four people build up a lot of nasty dirty clothes over ten days! We took our suitcases into the laundry mat and just refolded everything into the suitcases! Ran to Walmart for some essentials, left the town by 11:00am, reloaded all our supplies at the office and then were on our way to the big town of Red Springs, NC. We'll work here for the next four days with about 90 people. Then we'll drive to PA for a week of work, we'll leave on Saturday.

Back to Red Springs for a full week, to Greensboro for a full week then we have FIVE DAYS OFF! Thank you God! :)

During the trip to Honduras, we saw God work in many, many ways! :) Despite constant calls and warnings of danger, we were always safe. We were able to start and complete a cement home for a lady and seven children. We did sports camps in the city. We went into schools and worked with kids there. And we did three Bible clubs in the three local churches we worked with. We had 200 each day (we did a morning and afternoon session) at each location minimum! We had 17 translators, whom we couldn't have lived without! That's for sure!

We have lots of awesome memories, I met two kids I would have loved to bring home with me! Whenever I get a minute (probably the end of July), I'll share some pictures!

Not done a single stitch, though I did teach one of our college girls and she has been stitching like crazy! :) Well, wait... I did stitch about 3o stitches on that Sunday we all sat around camp!

That's enough for now! I have lots of work to do here, plus Andrew is dying to use the computer! :)