Breaking the Limits of Satan's Coffee Cup!

Today started extremely early. Our plan was to leave villa gracia by 6 am...well of course the busses weren't as anxious as we were to leave. we had to take the battery out of Elroy and start esperanza and then we were on our merry way to choluteca, or as I would like to call it, "the hottest place on earth!" so by 6:30 we fixed the bus and headed out with all 3 busses, both trucks, a lot of orange juice, and many many boxes of Dunkin Donuts; providing us with a sugary snack on our long, humid, wonderful journey to the middle of nowhere, Honduras. The scenery on the way there is breath-taking!...well at least for those who were looking at something other than the inside of their eyelids. The mountains here are like nothing I have ever seen before. It’s amazing that in a country that is so poverty-stricken, that God has blessed it with such beauty and amazement! Continuing on our journey, I think that the countryside lost a bit of its splendor when we started descending into the coffee cup of Satan. It was still beautiful, but having the windows down made it a bit uncomfortable with the intense heat. We were lucky though, today wasn’t as hot as it typically is here in choluteca, we only had a humidity of 70%, instead of the usual 90%, plus the temperature was down a little bit, which made it almost bearable.

Once in choluteca we met Chad at Wendy’s, and he took us to our hotel, Hotel Casa Real, this is a little bit nicer than the hotel we have stayed at previously here. We sat around until we got things straightened out for dinner and rooming assignments, then we unloaded the food from the bus into a storage room and split up into our teams for the day. We had three teams today: a food team, a playground/concrete team, and a painting team. The food team stayed here in the nice indoor/air conditioned/shaded/luxurious hotel, while the other teams suffered in the exhausting and dehydrating heat. All the teams exceeded the expectations of the day.

The food teams did an awesome job bagging food today; they made a lot of bags to hand out to the community tomorrow. They also organized different supplies to hand out: clothing, shoes, toys, and medicine. After bagging all of the food and organizing they put it in the storage, to be packed in the bus tomorrow morning.

The painting crew was astounding today! They were only expected to finish one walls of the warehouse that was taken from the Great Wall of China…ok well not quite but it was humongous. Instead of just finishing one humongous wall, the painters worked so hard that they finished the entire warehouse today, even through the distraction of a paint war. I don’t know how they managed to get the warehouse finished because to me it looked like they had more paint on themselves than the walls. What makes this even greater is that this one-time warehouse, now church, was a complete surprise for the church, so now on Sunday morning when all the members show up, instead of seeing their old, white/black/moldy church building they will now see a bright white building, livening up their worship.

The concrete/playground also exceeded their expectations for the day. When we arrived at Aguas Agria (I think that’s what it’s called), many men were already working on the concrete floor in the church. They had done 2/3 of it before we got there, so we didn’t have much to do. After they finished the floor, they did some little odds and ends to try and make the church a little nicer. This will be such a great thing for the members to have every time they come to worship. The playground crew got right to work when they arrived at their site. They playground will be right behind the school. Once again TORCH cannot just build a typical playground, we have to make the best playground possible with what we have, and I believe we will on this one. It will have 2 main towers and the one will be very high and have a look out tower on it. But for today we dug out holes and put our posts in, supporting them with concrete. Tomorrow we will begin the real construction of another amazing playground, designed by the one, the only, Terry Reeves. Ok well I don’t know if he’s the only one, but he did design another amazing playground.

After all of the groups completed or exceeded their tasks for the day, we all returned to the hotel. Some of us swam and cooled off for a while, some of us got to take advantage of the time by taking a nap and recuperating. We had dinner at 7, which by the way was paid for by the hotel. Unfortunately some of us had to wait a long time for food but we’re just thankful that God blessed us with a warm meal. After dinner we had devo on the 3^rd floor balcony. The lesson was given by Brian Henegar, it was an excellent lesson, and he made some good points that we can apply to our everyday lives about being content, not only with what we have, but the situations that come about in our lives. We then split up into the groups that we are from, and had discussions about the trip and compared it with previous trips and what we have gained from it. Then it was time for bed because it is going to be an extremely long and exhausting day tomorrow. Buenos Noches everyone!!