Semana Santa

Could NOT have asked for a better vacation week!  God allowed us lots of fun times and lots of rest and it's been absolutely beautiful.

We started Friday as soon as school was out by heading to the southern coast of Honduras to a little town called San Lorenzo and a little island called Amapala.  Apparently, to the locals it's weird for two girls our age to be travelling by ourselves, but we had fun, minus the jellyfish sting of course :-)

Crossing the bay with hott life jackets.

Welcome to Isla del Tigre and Amapala!

Oh yes, it was a volcano and oh yes, we climbed it!

Sunrise in San Lorenzo, who sleeps in on vacation?  We had things to do!

Whole fried fish on the beach, yum!

No comment.

Arriving home on Tuesday we rested a bit and then went swimming with the Buen Pastor girls at a local swimming hole.  It was lovely to see the young moms get to just be teenage girls for a day!

The only reason I got this photo was because Javi was terrified and going down the slide like a turtle :-)

The young ones took naps in the hammocks, but Javi took a little while to relax, lol.

And after all of this, we still had Easter weekend... Here they celebrate by making "afombras" (carpets) in the streets made of wood shavings in really elaborate designs.  Check it out!

Yes this is just out in the middle of the street!

This one was one of the best, hard to tell, but it's three dimensional!

Many of them had ladders on the ends you could stand on to take pictures.

These afombras were all made overnight and as is tradition, the processions the next morning left them all looking like this hours later:

Goodness there were so many moments I could write about, but I don't have the time to write it all down!

But the supreme point we celebrate this week is this:  that a completely just and holy God made a way to demonstrate his infinite love and infinite holiness all at the same time in the death of one man, who was also fully God and took away all our fears and worries, by conquering death itself to give us hope and strength for life and for eternity.

Now on to April

Now that I've finally finished putting up all the March posted (all 3 of them, haha), let's talk about April...  It began with the 3rd quarter's exam week at school and with it came a terrible round of sickness.  We were sitting in a teacher's meeting Wednesday morning of that week when I started feeling body aches, sure enough by the time I got home my fever was at 102.2 and stayed there for about 4 days.  After two trips to the doctor, a shot, and two different medicines, we finally landed on it being an intestinal infection and thank the Lord for strong antibiotics.  After that was a week of school and this week is Semana Santa (Holy Week, aka the week of no school and lots of fun times!).  Actually, I'll be posting pictures and filling in about those fun things later (get excited).

For now, what's really been on my mind is my return home.  I have been here for 8 and a half months with less than 2 before I come home.  Beginning to describe the number of mixed emotions and the intensity of them all would be a daunting task, but here's the crux of my thoughts: never in my life have I ever been so far away from home for so long.  Even though it's only about 5 or so hours worth of flying (about 1500 miles) it has felt like a whole world away.  It is after all a different world down here ;-)  But more importantly than never having been away so long, is the realization that I've never  before longed for home so intensely.  Part of me definitely doesn't want to leave all of the people and experiences I have enjoyed so much down here, but my heart is yearning to see my family and friends again.  It is a deep yearning that can distract me from doing any work at times.  A yearning that is always with me and more intensely the closer I get to June...

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.  Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling...

What a beautiful thing it would be to be yearning as much for my heavenly home as I am now for my casa in H'ville.  May God teach us what a sweet dwelling place he has prepared for us and may we long for it more with every day.

And so March ends...

One more post from the end of March that never got posted...

So… March is over.  What happened?! The 8 week partial with no vacation days that I was not looking forward to is over and I’m down to 2 ½ months left in my adventure here.  Let’s start with some of my favorite quotes from the past two weeks.  

First, from 8^th grade:

 Me: Alex, are you being punished for something?

 Alex: No I’m not getting punished…well, yes, but here’s what happened, Miss Janet saw me on the camera just standing while the others were making trouble so she punished me for secondary character flaw.  Does that seem fair to you?!

And from 6^th grade:

 Me: Raquel, I think that since Jimena came to this class your behavior has suffered some in class.

 Raquel: Well, Miss, Jimena is like a disease…

 Sayuri: MISS!  

 Me: What?!

 Sayuri: He’s calling me pronouns!!!

(Gotta love those crazy kids and their flawless English.)

Anyhow, my devotional thought for this month… The small things matter.  I got to thinking about this as I’ve been trying to work on some of the spiritual disciplines these past two months.  In our society, we pay so little attention to the small things.  Decisions, choices, responsibilities, disciplines… the small stuff I just don’t pay much mind to because my thought is that it isn’t going to make much difference.  What I am beginning to understand is that the Bible teaches us something very different.  The little stuff affects everything.  A few quick Scripture references…

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’  Matthew 25:21

"When they came to the threshing floor of Kidon, Uzzah reached out his hand to steady the ark, because the oxen stumbled. The LORD’s anger burned against Uzzah, and he struck him down because he had put his hand on the ark. So he died there before God." 1 Chronicles 13:9-10

I think that I have spent a lot of my spiritual life sitting and waiting for something big and exciting to come along.  Or at least something bigger than the everyday stuff.  But what have I been doing with the little stuff?  Cultivating a prayer life?  Memorizing scriptures?  Seeking God’s will in my daily schedule?  Turning off the TV to focus on someone else for a few minutes?  Have I ever lived as if any of the little things mattered?  Occasionally, but I think trying to explain those small choices to people sounds trite often times.  I see someone making those small decisions well and think they are just trying to be holier-than-thou.  What a judgmental heart I can have sometimes.  But the truth is I think all too often, “In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t matter, why should I bring Jesus into this and risk offending people or sounding like I’m trying too hard?”

Here’s the conclusion I am coming to: unless we give the little things over to this picture of eternity, this vision of the kingdom, then we are never going to find ourselves in a place of surrender in the big things.  I am never going to become a servant willing to go anywhere for Christ, if I cannot learn to set aside my agenda to help one of the girls from the hogar with their homework for an hour.  I am never going to have an intimate relationship with Christ unless I learn to not let my schedule, TV, my attitude, my whimsical desires, my worries about the future, my frustrations, steal it from me.

Learn to discipline yourself in the little things and be faithful with them, then you will be put in charge of more things.  And all not by your own strength, but my MINE.  Just surrender to what I am trying to do, make a few hard decisions to give up the strong holds on your heart and let me show you what real joy is.  This is what I made you for.

All the beautiful moments...

Another post from mid-March that never got posted:


So many beautiful moments that I just want to capture in my mind and never forget.  Isn't life always that way though?  Here's just a few that I want to remember from this week...

Funnest moment with the 5th graders:  They were being entirely too loud and rowdy on Wednesday, so I decided to let them yell if they wanted to, but they were gonna learn something while doing it.  So I started asking yes or no questions and told them to yell what they thought the answers were.  I've never had the 5B boys be so attentive to the questions I've asked :-)

Sweetest moment at school:  The father's day celebration was this past Friday and it was very cool to see so many fathers show up and participate.  Father's are absent from so many of the students lives, it was encouraging to see that there were some that truly cared and were trying to be good role models for their kids.  And of course, it was heart warming to see Papa Brewster and the other men from the hogar show up to be the little girls' "fathers" for the day.

Greatest blessing of the week:  Greg and Emily Bice along with younger brother, Andrew, were here for several days visiting.  Going out to eat, watching soccer games, and hanging out at the hogar with them and the girls was a great breath of fresh-air from the norm.  It is so easy to just fall into the same ol' routine week by week.  But their presence was truly a blessing from God to refresh our spirits a bit.

Finally, best teaching moment with the 8th graders:  We've started our short astronomy unit to finish out this partial and I decided I was going to begin with a discussion of Galileo and Copernicus.  At the end of the history portion, I wrote a few quotes from them and about them on the board and asked them to write in their notebooks what they thought one of them meant.  I don't often get to see the thoughtful side of their personalities and I think I want to do lessons like that more often with them as we finish out the year.

I wish I could write forever, but there's only so much time in a day.

The stories never end...

A blog from 3 weeks ago that never got posted (March 7-11):


Once you get used to life here, the different things that annoyed you the first few months turn into a long series of hilarious moments and stories.  For example, if you were a principle and decided that all the kids in 5th and 6th grade needed tetanus shots, you would definitely send the nurses into the classroom to give the shots at the teacher's desk without notifying the next teacher and of course it wouldn't matter at all if the rest of the kids were still in the classroom wandering around, yelling things at the kid whose turn it was, and eliciting a little bit of chaos.   As each student mustered enough courage to go forward (or endured sufficient ridicule from his/her fellow classmates that appearing a coward was the new issue), the nurses would just take a card from them, let the classmates engage in an endless barrage of unhelpful cliches, and stick them. A little cotton ball and they were sent outside for some fresh air.  Of course the nurses had the courtesy to ask which arm they write with so the soreness wouldn't effect their ability to do school work.  And I learned something very curious about my class: 90% are left-handed!  Go figure... Like I said, no longer annoying, just thoroughly entertaining.

Next exciting thing: teachers won the soccer tournament against the high school girls!  7th grade was the only grade to beat us and we played them again in the finals, winning 3-0.  It was a little anti-climactic really because we scored the first early on and they were never able to get past our outstanding portera (goalie), Dawnelle Clark of Jamaica! Hehe...

One last fun moment before I wrap this up... Thought I had gotten past most of the "you-are-like-a-celebrity-because-you-are-american" moments, but they still pop up.  At yesterday morning a mother was tying her girls shoes up in the entry and said something to me in Spanish I didn't catch.  I asked her to repeat herself and in Spanish she says, "My daughter wants to talk to you."  She was probably in kindergarten and I talked to her for just a minute as she asked me questions about where I'm from and if my eyes are really blue.  I've never felt more like Santa Clause in my life!

I wish life in the US were this hilarious...