2014: Escuela El Sembrador, Honduras
Having been to Africa the previous summer, I thought I knew what I was getting into as I signed up for the Honduras mission trip. Boy, was I wrong.
I’ll start with the team. Unlike the team that went with me and my Mom and my Grandma, this team was with my church. I hadn’t really realized this until I got to the airport, but I, for one, knew everyone’s name, and if I didn’t have a friendship with them at the beginning, I sure did at the end. And unlike Kenya, where I was the youngest by quite a few years, I was only the youngest to a girl a few months older than me. (This came to both of our disadvantages, though, because we were the ones that ended up getting the smallest seats and having to squeeze into the smallest places).
When we had gone to Kenya, everything we saw was spaced out, and there seemed to be a lack of street signs. Not so in Honduras. In fact, one of the first things I saw (other than the official-looking guards with big guns I later found out were everywhere) after squeezing into a cramped van outside the airport (what did I say?) was a stop sign. At least I thought it was a stop sign; having only taken one year of Spanish so far, I only knew alto to mean tall, not STOP! But the shape and color were generally the same.
Like I said, Kenya was all spaced out, but in Honduras, there seemed to be houses everywhere. If you looked all around, you could see them hanging off the sides of mountains in the distance. Don’t take me wrong; it was sad to see, but the houses were tiny. While we didn’t get to see the inside, they looked to only hold about one room.
After a long drive (made longer only by the fact that we were recovering from jet lag and THE shortest runway I have ever seen), we finally arrived at La Escuela El Sembrador, the boy’s school we were going to be working at. We were happy to arrive and rest.
I had honestly expected to do work while we were there. Good ol’ physical labor. Now don’t take me wrong; we did build a sidewalk (which takes a lot more work than you would expect), but that was about the extent of our work, considering that the week we were there was the 60th anniversary of the school. Trust me, that was fine by me, especially after I found out what the main source of entertainment was: soccer, or more accurately, el futbol. Futbolito to be exact, which translates to “little soccer”. The boys that lived there called it that because it was mostly played on a halfway in ground pavement court that had smaller dimensions than a regular soccer field. This is where we spent most of our time when we weren’t doing devo’s or working on that dreaded sidewalk (although, we did get to put our church’s name in it before it dried).
All in all, the trip turned out to be a success, from the celebration, to the sidewalk, to the work God did in all of us and in the kids we met there. And, to top it all off, it has kindled the already burning fire in the hearts of my mom and I to do work in the missions field, which is the whole reason you are reading this in the first place and have visited this sight at all.
Thanks for reading! - Noah