BUILDING A SCHOOL IN HONDURAS, CENTRAL AMERICA

Another first for me this past year is that I am now a PUBLISHED writer. If you have visited this site before you might already know about my trip to Honduras with other members of my church. We went to build a school in a remote mountain village. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of another culture and live and work as they did. Additionally, it was very rewarding to feel like I was making a difference. On the trip home, I got the idea for an apprenticeship program which I am proud to say my church has put into place. We are supporting 6 young boys from the village of Las Mercedes, Honduras, and they are working with the foreman who led us in the building of the school. These young men have nearly completed the building of 21 adobe homes to replace the stick huts they lived in, where the wind blew through. I wrote about my experience for the church newspaper, and recieved an offer to publish it in an online magazine. Had I known they would pay 25 cents per word I would have made it much longer! To read my article in Offering Christ Today click here.

I had mixed feelings about going to Honduras before I left. I had read "Hawaii", and I had an image in my mind of missionaries as people who shove their religious views down someone else's throat. As a result, although I was excited about going to Central America, I was wondering how badly we were needed down there. As it turned out we were badly needed, and greatly appreciated.

We were met at the airport in Honduras by Tim Wheeler of the Heifer Project, and our first night in Tegucigalpa we spent at headquarters, Monte Carmelo. Carmelo is a beautiful dormitory style camp on several acres. It is a self-sustaining farm with cows, chickens, goats, beans, corn, bananas, cabbage, tomatoes, coffee, cucumber, and more. It not only provides the food we eat, it is also a learning center. Leaders from the various villages come to Monte Carmello to learn about organic gardening, crop rotation, and basically that if you eat the goat you don't get to have the milk for as long. The teaching is certainly far from being heavy handed however. They have a great understanding of the importance of self-determination for the locals, and also of the tenuous hold on self-esteem that impoverished peoples have. The old saying "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime" was never more true than it is here.

Our second day was spent driving up the mountain. Our first stop was at the regional headquarters in La Esperanza. (Appropriately named with the Spanish word for hope.) Here we met Marta, who oversees and coordinates the activities for the area. At this regional office, they also offer horticultural classes, AA meetings, domestic violence education groups, and wholistic medicine. Marta explained to us the way their program works, and also told us about the "circle of friends and neighbors" group. The circle focuses on women, because of their status as secondary citizens. It maintains that every woman deserves one opportunity. That one opportunity may be two goats, two chickens, or two cows, and the training to raise them. When those two animals reproduce, two offspring are given back to the project to be given to another woman, and the circle widens. Later that afternoon we headed further up the mountain to the village where we would be working, Las Mercedes. There is a saying in Honduras that goes "a beautiful view cannot fill an empty belly". If it could, the Hondurans would not need our help. The drive up includes spectacular beauty.

When we pulled into the village, it was like driving into a National Geographic magazine. In their very best native dress, the villagers were anxiously awaiting our arrival.

The Lenka Indians are a very open people, with an almost a child-like vulnerability. They are very articulate however (they love to make speeches), and for all of our sophistication we have nothing on them spiritually. They are devout Catholics, and have services every Sunday even though they only have a priest come through once a year. In Las Mercedes there were no hot showers, and there was no indoor plumbing. We were 16 adults all sleeping on the floor in the same room. But unlike a trip to Disneyland, the experience was unforgettable. When we met the Lenka Indians, they were strangers. We spent a week working, eating, playing and praying with them. When we left they were friends. I will never forget the feeling I had when we 16 gringos stood holding hands in a circle with as many indians, praying the Lord's prayer in two languages at the same time.

I will never forget the faces of the children when after five days of saying "buenos dias" to them they finally responded with "buenos dias" themselves instead of just giggles. I will never forget the way even the old men crowded around me to put on the headphones and hear the mini disk recording I made of them singing.

I will never forget the sight of the tropical rain forest clouds hanging over the banana trees in the early morning. I won't forget the sight of 20 chickens under foot as Maria Soto made her morning tortillas for us in her little hut made of tree branches tied together. Mostly, I will never forget the tears that fell when we left to go home. We Americans are blessed way beyond other peoples of the world. Honduras has had eight constitutions since separation from Spain in 1821. The United States military has supported dictators who have exploited this fragile country, and we have enabled the United Fruit Company to strip Honduras of its Mahogany trees in order to plant bananas. When Hurricane Mitch hit two years ago, United Fruit just moved, leaving 20,000 people unemployed. It is good that we are giving back.

Mostly I will never forget working alongside the "maestro" (foreman), learning how to build the adobe school. I didn't realize it then, but now that I reflect back on it, I can see that I desperately wanted the Maestro to give me the approval for my construction skills that my own father couldn't. He did. He called me 'maestro segundo" (assistant maestro) & he bragged to the men of the village that I "could do the work of a man".

Later I felt guilty that perhaps his mentoring me had kept him from mentoring some young boy from the village. It was out of that guilt that I got the idea for our church to set up a mentoring program for a young boy from the village. I joined the Global Outreach Committee at my church, West End Methodist. The committee decided to take it a step further, and chose to support six young boys from the village in the mentorship program. Under the guidance of the Maestro, there are now 21 new adobe homes in the village of Las Mercedes that have replaced the stick homes that the wind blew through. I'm really proud to be a part of West End Methodist Church, and humbled to be proof that God can work miracles even when he has very little to work with (me).