Monday, April 12, 2004
Dear Friends,
I write today from the computer lab at Instituto El Rey, where our
colleagues are showing “The Ten Commandments” starring Charlton Heston, to
several classes. It is the first day of school after a Holy Week of eating
various carmelized fruits (papayas, pumpkins, banana), soaking our skins in
the river and drying (burning) them in the intensifying tropical sun,
celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus, and receiving family and
friends from far away.
Holy Week….
For us, Holy Week was a welcome change in rhythm. It is one of the two
grandest holidays in Honduras, and the whole country escapes to various
bodies of water to celebrate – the ocean, the lakes, and the brooks and
rivers, including our own Rio Cangrejal. Thursday, Friday and Saturday saw
hundreds of families from La Ceiba and elsewhere sprinkled throughout the
river valley. Las Mangas is also home to a retreat center for the Church of
God, and so the village played host to 400 youth from all over the North
Coast. Friday and Saturday night we bedded down to the sound of a
well-amplified “praise karaoke” that went late into the night.
In the River…
On the campus we hosted the families of Joe and Rachel, teachers from the
colegio, and friends of Chris and Sharon – thus increasing our numbers from
7 to 18 and giving us bountiful opportunity to offer hospitality and enjoy
the company of others. Kelly baked bread and made another batch of homemade paper. I studied Honduran history and helped Larry slay our three rabbits for Easter dinner. And we swam almost daily, discovering through our
younger neighbors that the river is not just full of rocks and water but of
waterslides, ramps, free falls, and kiddie pools.
Several days after playing, we sat in the shallows with the Lobo sisters
Karla, Maria, and Ilsa, and other friends. There they taught us a song:
En el arca de Noé, todos cantan, todos cantan
Quieren escouchar como canta hermana Karla.
La hermana, canta si!
In Noah’s Ark, everyone sings.
They want to hear how sister Karla sings.
Sister, sing!
The selected sister or brother then sang a Canto from memory, and everyone
else joined in with smiles and laughter. This growing friendship with the
sisters from the Lobo family is a great blessing, especially for Kelly.
Maria is grown and living some distance away, but has a job that allows her
to attend colegio and provide for her daughter who lives here in Las Mangas.
Ilsa is in her last year of elementary school and is as enthusiastic about
learning as she is about playing soccer, sewing, and hurling her body off
high rocks into the river. Karla is 19, an eager tenth grader at Instituto
El Rey as well as participant in the Bible study we host at the campus, and
hopes to wait to marry until after she has studied all she wants. We are
looking forward to seeing how the Lord continues to intertwine our lives
with those of this family.
Holy Week also gave us an opportunity to get ahead with our planning for
English classes at the colegio. We have been teaching five classes of
seventh, eighth, and ninth graders since February, about 85 students,
including four of our fellow teachers. As first time teachers and barely
conversational Spanish speakers, it is certainly a challenge. But it has
been a great joy to work together at filling this role in the River Valley,
and to get acquainted with our students and their families. Many of them
are the same young people that we see everyday in Las Mangas or El Naranjo,
which provides a blessed coherence in our lives. And we hope that the
English the students learn will expand their minds and give them education
and employment opportunities they might not otherwise have.
With Ramirez…
On Thursday, we filled our backpacks with foodstuffs – corn and wheat flour,
fat, milk, sugar, and various root crops – and hiked up the mountain to La
Moralla, the home of our friends Santos and Rubenia Ramirez and their four
children, Cristian, Noe, Orly, and Osman. This is the family who hosted
Kelly for several days during her first visit to Honduras in 2000, and we
have been visiting them at least once every one or two weeks in order to
continue our relationship with them. Holy Week provided a chance to spend
the night and enjoy a holiday with them. We arrived at dusk on Thursday,
and soon sat down to a dinner of beans, eggs, and pacaya (a slightly bitter
stalk harvested from a palm tree). As the darkness gathered we sang Spanish
praise songs by kerosene lamp – Rubenia in particular loves to sing. We
slept very close on a single bed in pitch darkness, a little fitfully but
content. In the morning, through the cracks in the wall, I watched the
growing light paint the mountains blue.
Ramirez took me to see his fields, where he is growing corn, lichas,
bananas, tomatoes, peppers, melon, rice, tobacco, radishes, mustard, and
more. He is a hard worker, but you may remember that he has had mysterious
pains throughout the right side of his body, which make it very difficult
for him to work. We at the campus try to see that he gets what treatment he
can. An EKG that an American friend helped procure turned out normal, so we
are pursuing other possibilities.
After looking around and doing a little maintenance, Ramirez and I returned
to breakfast (rice and beans and fresh radishes) and a trip down to the
stream to bathe and swim. Meanwhile, Kelly was attempting to help Noe with
his letters. Their school teacher has only come twenty days in the last
eight weeks, and the children are not learning much. Noe, at age 6, still
cannot recognize by name more than two or three letters of the alphabet, and
the older children are not much better off. It seems that one reason God has
placed us in their lives is to help the children with their education – at
least the alphabet (we would be rather poor Spanish teachers at this
point!). Long term, though, we are praying for a faithful Honduran teacher
in La Moralla.
We are glad for the way the Ramirez family has welcomed us into their lives.
They are very devout Catholics (we had a confusing, funny discussion about
how Catholics don’t use animal sacrifices, only fasting and other personal
disciplines, when I told them I was going to help Larry sacrificar the
rabbits) and very affectionate with the children – somewhat unusual here,
we’ve found. They also seem to be very committed to each other. On Friday,
they dragged a very dusty suitcase from their “attic” and pulled out her
wedding dress, all the cards they received, and even told us a little about
their honeymoon.
Today..,
A typical day for us now begins at 5:20, when we wake to be ready to catch
the bus at 6:30, to be at school at 7:15 or so. We have 5 classes back to
back, and then a couple of planning periods where we try to prepare for the
next day. We’ve also been teaching educación fisica to about 40 students,
which has mostly involved running up and down the dusty caraterra, except
for one day when we braved the soccer field – yikes! So we got a whistle.
School is over at 2:15, and we pile back onto the old school bus (which
still bears the name of some county high school) to arrive home at three.
Afternoons are usually filled with cooking, cleaning, feeding the rabbits,
watering seedlings, visiting, and occasionally reading, jogging, or
swimming. Evenings are generally devoted to spending time with Larry,
Chris, Sharon, Joe, Rachel, and Peter: delicious dinner, fierce matches of
Settlers of Catan, and “jawing.” On weekends, we visit neighbors, do
chores, plan for classes, run errands in La Ceiba, and meet together for
prayer, Bible study, and singing.
Please continue to pray for growing friendships with the Lobo and Ramirez
family, and especially for the health of Santos Ramirez and well-being
(basic needs, education) of his family. Pray for a teacher for the children
of La Moralla. Pray for our health here at the campus – several of us have
had persistent sickness recently. The student Bible study is beginning
Sunday April 18, with about nine young people from Las Mangas and El
Naranjo. Pray with us that the students would be open to following Christ
and that the leaders Ester, Larry, and Peter would be full of Christ’s love
and truth. One other thing: we have been considering together how to start
some sort of children’s library here in Las Mangas – books are rare and many
kids are eager to read. Please pray with us about this and feel free to
offer your own ideas and input. At this point it is only an idea and
something we hope for the future…
We are thankful too for your faithful friendship to us, aware as we are that
we are only here because of the strong Gospel community where we have been
raised and loved.
Leave a comment