Honduras Mission - Day 4

The first day in the mountains was a work and play day. The church building we were staying in was a structure that previous mission groups constructed on their trips. The recent addition of a pastor's office needed to be roofed and also needed the concrete floor poured as well. Since I know more about construction, I volunteered for the roof project instead of the floor.
The walls of the room were constructed out of adobe brick and they were still pretty fresh, so we had to be careful not to collapse the walls. The materials we needed were already there, so all we had to do was put them on. Sounds easy, right? The first thing we realized is that none of us had any knowledge of building things the way they were supposed to be built in Honduras. We started laying out the rafters and then the locals told us it was too sturdy and that we had to minimize our efforts. We actually built the roof three times (and took it apart three times) before it was all said and done. Once the structure was built, we began screwing down the corrugated metal roofing panels. This process went a little quicker because we had done it before. The whole project took about two and a half hours. We were still done before lunch. It was an awesome learning experience about their roofing construction methods.


After lunch, we all headed down to the village soccer field where we met up with some of the locals for a game of futbol. I could not participate because of my ankle, but did enjoy sitting with the kids to watch. A little girl named Esperanza and her sister Buncha (I have no idea how they spell their names) seemed to latch on to me the whole time we were in the mountains. The game seemed to be evenly matched since most of us were larger than the Hondurans, even though they were exceptional soccer players. The girls and I enjoyed some laughs while watching a pretty physical game.


We finished the game and headed back for camp to get ready for dinner. Here is the part that I knew would be a challenge for me. After a long hot day, the only way to get cleaned up was to walk down to the creek and wash off in one of the springs. The water was about fifty five degrees and was surrounded by wildlife. I was told that there were a lot of leaches and snakes in the water, but I did not see any. I actually enjoyed putting my feet and ankles in the cold water. We all decided to go for it and dunked ourselves in a 4 foot deep pool of water. WHOAH, COLD is what we all came up saying. I declared that once baptized in this water, my new name is now Nicodemus.


We headed back for dinner and I was already looking forward to the next evenings plunge. Ryan cooked up some awesome grub for us, as usual. I drew some cartoon characters for the kids while I waited. Something so simple amazed them, and they had no knowledge of who SpongeBob was or any of the characters I drew for them. We ate dinner and then sat around a campfire singing worship to God lead by Jon Price. Singing worship under the stars...words can't even describe this.