Travel Day

Today, we travel.  We are moving home. It has been a busy and emotional week of packing and goodbyes.

On Wednesday we had a staff dinner. It was so much fun. These people we do life with here are a pretty amazing bunch. And it’s a big bunch. We have seen this place grow from a staff of 2 (our fearless leaders Beth and Tristan) to a staff of over 30. It has been a blessing and an honor to be involved in this season, but now, we are moving on.

Our decision to move home was not quickly made.  We prayed, we sought council, we talked, we prayed some more.  In the end, we both came to the same conclusion; our role here is done.  It is time to move on.

It is a blessing to know we are leaving well, on a good note, but it is still sad. Our short time here has been rich. (Of course sometimes it felt long. A power outage on a muggy and still night seems to last forever!) We have grown so much.  We are so grateful for this season and for our community here. Living and working in such close proximity to one another, in another culture, bonds you in fast and deep ways. We are forever changed, and deeply grateful and humbled to know these people. We love you Team Dante.  It is hard to say goodbye.

And yet, we are excited. We are going home. We will be spending a few weeks at my parents house first to decompress, process, and rest before we enter into life back home.You see, our home is not where we were born, not where our family lives, but where God has planted us. It is where I have learned to root and love and serve.  The community we have there is rich and deep. We are thrilled to do life there together again.  Even though the winter might just do me in, (I’m weak I tell ya, don’t laugh at me Michigan friends!) we are looking forward to the future.

What’s next you might ask? Mark will be continuing as the Honduras Missions Pastor at our church, focusing the momentum gained from teams coming to El Ayudante into more involvement and support in Honduras. As for me? My main goal right now is getting us transitioned, explaining things like fire hydrants and water fountains and vacuums, and then…..we’ll see.

Thank you so much for your support and prayers over the years. Howards in Honduras is not done. We might not be living here anymore, but we feel we still have a place here. God knows what it will look like, we will just continue to take things one step at a time.

Howards from Honduras, over and out.

This crew has done a lot of growing up together.  They’ve gone from 5 baby and toddler (mostly nicely) sharers of space, to best friends who can play together BY THEMSELVES. Miracles do happen people. 

 

Neighbors

We’ve had a very neighborly couple of weeks.

We’ve been to two birthday parties.  When we received the invitations, it was very affirming. “Yes! We actually do life here! We are not the far off gringos behind the wall!” And then going to the parties, and actually chatting with people and laughing and having a good time, IN (mostly) SPANISH….  It still amazes me to see how far we’ve come.

Jordan showing off his mad jumping skills for Ali at one of the parties.  She said, “Jump Jordan!” He jumped, and was rewarded with a “Oooo, that was good.” These two….

The boys playing Monkey in the Middle at the other party.  Life tip; don’t go anywhere in Honduras without a ball.

The other day it was unseasonably cool so we took advantage of the mid-morning hours (which is usually when we escape the heat indoors) and walked to a friends house.  We hung out, chatted, and then in true beautiful Honduran fashion, they offered us a snack. (We had after all popped over unannounced, but it is never met with annoyance at having interrupted their day as I would naturally respond, but instead great hospitality.  Latin culture for the win!)

Making us fresh tortillas for a snack. Yum!

As we walked back home, my friend ran out to see if we had eaten lunch.  With empty stomachs, we turned toward the mission house (where teams stay when they come to El Ayudante) and invited all the staff on campus to help clean out the fridge of leftovers.  We wouldn’t have a team for two weeks, so what normally would be used by the next team was used to provide us with a fun and spontaneous community time.

Yesterday we had our friends over to make alfombras (traditional holy week sawdust carpets) out of sawdust we had been collecting from the tool shed.  Last night the community held an event at El Ayudante, so we got to walk out of our house to a campus full of community and yummy food.

Jordan hanging out with his pal Jose, part of the team staff here at EA.

Alfombra making on our back deck.

And then today was a very neighborly day with our fellow missionaries on the El Ayudante campus. One neighbor delivered cinnamon rolls just because.  Another neighbor invited my boys to hang out at their house. As I was walking back from dropping the boys off, I ran into one neighbor who was exercising and chatted with her, than two others who were working, chatted with them, then my other neighbor ran to her fence to check on the departure time for the pool. (It’s Semana Santa/Holy Week right before Easter, the whole country takes vacation, and the thing to do is go to the pool. Who am I to buck tradition?) Then I continued the walk home along the wall.

And that is when it hit.  I cried.  I love these people. I love this place. We live in such close proximity to each other, we are family, friends, co-workers, support systems, kingdom builders.  It is beautiful.  It is not always easy, but it is beautiful.  I walked, I cried, and when I arrived home, I announced, “Well, I just cried.” We are trying to tackle this transition thing head on.  Oh, I haven’t mentioned the transition thing yet? Yes, yes I know.  I’ll get to that.  Right now, I am enjoying the highlights of some fun memories made. Feliz Semana Santa/Happy Holy Week everyone!

What better way to finish a day at the pool than a special trip to the ice cream store.  

Conclusions

“Mommy, I have something in my mouth.”

It was 5:15 in the morning. I stumbled out of bed, wiping the three year olds mouth, leading him back to his room. He kept saying he had something in his mouth, so I turned to go get a flashlight to investigate, still only partially awake. As I turned to leave, he reached out his hand to me, and put something in my hand.

It was cold, and slimy. I whispered out loud, “Dear Lord, don’t let this be alive.” I tucked him back in, cradling the slimy thing in my hand. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light. There it was, greenish brown, kind of flat, kind of round, curled up in a ball, about the size of a quarter. “My child has just coughed up this thing,” I thought, “so let’s figure out what this thing is.” He said he had something in his mouth, and then he hands me this. Conclusion drawn. To the google I went. My first search, ‘child coughed up slug looking thing’ yielded absolutely no results. This made me laugh. Of course. I kept searching, all the while thinking the following:

-“I wonder when we can get an appointment in the clinic.”

-“There goes the whole day. We probably will have to go into town to see the pediatrician.”

-“I better text Beth. [Texting…Jordan just coughed up a slug looking thing, so I don’t think I can run this morning.]

-“I guess this is another thing I can’t tell my mom about.” (Mom, it’s true, I have a list of things I do not tell you because I don’t want you to worry. In due time….)

The interwebs weren’t yielding any results. The thoughts continued, doubts began to rise. “This thing looks nothing like what our neighbor coughed up,” I thought. “It’s not even slimy. It looks too big and symmetrical to have lived in a stomach. Hmmm….” And so I revisited the three year old, who was at this point happily singing in his bed.

“Mommy, I still have something in my mouth.”

“Oh goodness,” I thought, “is another one about to come out?”

“Jordan, did the thing come out of your mouth?”

“Umm….yes.”

Suspicious. I left him again, and continued my searching, to no avail. At this point, finally, my brain fully woke up. Back to the three year old I went.

“Jordan, did you cough this thing up?”

“No, it was in my bed.”

“Oh.” Long pause. This still did not negate the coughing up thing. He could have coughed it up, and it hung around in the bed for a while, drying out and getting less slimy. But then he said this: “I thought it was a banana gummy, and I wanted to eat it.”

“Oh, ok….. What did it taste like?”

“Yucky garbage.”

I walked back out to the couch, sat down and looked at the specimen in question. Just then, as if on cue to confirm my suspicions, two little antennae popped out, and the little guy uncurled. As if to say, “is that giant who tried to eat me gone? I have been falsely accused! Let me out of here!” And so I did. I took the regular old garden slug and let him go outside.

The deadly stomach parasite, er, garden slug.

I thought my child coughed up a garden slug people. This tells me a few things.

1. I need to get more sleep.
2. Our life circumstances are such that thinking my child coughed up a giant slug does not cause me too much alarm. That kind of stuff happens around here.
3. I really have some explaining to do to my mom.

After all was well and figured out, I texted my friend back, revealing my amazingly false conclusion, and like any good friend, she laughed. Who wouldn’t? It is good to be able to laugh at ourselves, and have good enough friends that we can laugh at ourselves together. I was quick to judge that innocent slug, but the whole ordeal reminded me to be grateful for our health, and I got to add another thing to the list of ridiculous things I have to say to my kids:

“Jordan, tonight when you are sleeping, if you find anything slimy in your bed, don’t eat it, ok?”

“Um…..ok Mommy.”

Hmmm….not too convincing.

Flashback: Food

I confess. I overreacted. It was ridiculous. But it was a ridiculous season.

We had just moved to Honduras. My boys were all growing and eating everything and asking for more. I was trying to re-learn what to feed a baby. (How do you forget that after 2 short years!?)

“Mom, I want more FOOOOOD!! I can’t even find any crumbs under the table!”

Going to the grocery store was an event. I prayed I didn’t get lost or pulled over or hit someone with our massive truck. I had to translate my list and then most times figure out what to eat on the fly when they didn’t have the thing I was looking for. Then I hoped I got a nice check out person who would speak slowly and not get annoyed at all of my clarifying (in broken Spanish) questions.

It all came to a boiling point one day. All he did was eat the leftovers. That is what one does with leftovers after all, one eats them. Well, he did. And I cried.

“You ate the chicken!” I sobbed.

“You mean the leftover chicken? That had been in there for two days?”

“Yes! Everybody liked that, I was going to use that for something!”

My dear wise husband, with his infinite levels of patience, quickly realized this was not about the leftover chicken. He calmly asked, “What’s going on?”

I not calmly responded, “You people EAT ALL THE FOOD.”

He knew this was not about the food, so he kept listening. And the truth was revealed.

In that season of re-learning how to cook for my family, I felt like I couldn’t keep enough food in the house. I felt like a failure in an area that I had normally felt fairly confident in. And then I felt ridiculous for stressing about HOW to eat when some are scared about WHAT they are even going to eat. It was apparently traumatizing. (In my defense, I was still breastfeeding. Clearly, hormones had a hand in my craziness. Right!?)

Eventually I figured it all out.

I am happy to report that the house is well fed, and the head chef is (a little) less crazy. Yet another moment in the Honduras journal of ways I’ve had to depend on God, in ways I never even thought about depending on Him.  God has a funny way of answering that prayer for being fully dependent on Him.  It wasn’t my finest moment, but I can look back on it and learn, and laugh. And now you can as well. But just wait, my crazy gets even better.  Stay tuned…

 

 

Understanding Luxury

I am doing research for a class the doctor at Clinica El Ayudante is doing for parents of malnourished kids in our area.  I am sitting here reading about what it is like to try and eat healthy when you don’t have many resources.  I pause, and realize I am hungry.  I had a good workout with a friend this morning, and apparently I didn’t eat enough breakfast.  Something to do with three little guys wanting to play soccer, and trying to take a shower within the small window where they are happily playing together.  I go to my kitchen and open the cupboard, which is full of healthy and yummy choices.  Maybe I’m not hungry, I’m thirsty. So I go to my water cooler and fill my clean bottle with crystal clear, filtered, cold water.  All this time, my mind is processing what I have been reading.

I have been processing the concept of luxury for a while.  When you go to the pulperia to buy an entire carton of eggs, and are waiting in line behind an 8 year old girl who is buying just 2 eggs, it makes you think.  It could be those eggs are for her, for lunch. It could be those are for her entire family, for the rest of the day.  Who knows, but it made me think.

I know the disparity of wealth in the world is a great chasm.  I know, because of nothing I have done, I am on the side of the wealthy.  Let’s look at all the luxury in the above paragraph.

I was researching, which means I have received a sufficient enough education to teach me to read and think critically.  I was healthy enough and had the time to exercise this morning.  My three kids are so well fed that they want and are able to play soccer at 7am.  I took a shower, a hot one in fact.  I not only have enough to eat healthy and sufficiently, I can make it taste yummy as well. Sure we have to filter our water, but it’s there in a machine that makes it cold if I want.  We are living in the lap of luxury.

I have no answers or life altering how-tos or conclusions, but I sure am pondering.  I know luxury is not, in and of itself, evil.  But perhaps having a better perspective of the luxury in which I live, and my own heart concerning the matter, will help me live in a way that is more honoring to the God I love and live for.  Honduras sure is changing us, and I pray it is for a lifetime.

And because I have no other pictures, here is a throwback of Jordan, spotting a digger.  That cuteness I get to enjoy everyday? Talk about luxurious. 🙂

This was Jordan’s ‘would you look at that!’ face.