Each day is different here in Honduras, but to give you a taste of what ministry has been like for Team R.O.A.R., I carefully documented our day earlier this week. The following is an account of Wednesday, January 16, 2013:
4:15 AM – Wake up. Walk from my tent to the bathroom shared by 40+ people. Get dressed. Day four of no showering and I just don’t care anymore.
4:40 AM – Eat cereal for breakfast.
5:00 AM – Wait for public bus outside in the dark with our three Honduran boys, Ariel, Cristofer, and Fernando
5:20 AM – The bus finally comes. We sprint to catch it and it’s standing room only. What, you thought the bus wouldn’t have 50+ people at five in the morning?
5:54 AM – Get off the bus and wait for bus #2
5:59 AM – Get on bus #2, which is a smaller bus. We have seats!
6:35 AM – Bus finally leaves. My knees are in my chest because they’re so long and the chairs are so close together.
7:50 AM – Arrive in unknown village. We’re greeted by our awesome contact, Gracie. She and her husband run “Heart of Christ”, a ministry for women who’ve been impregnated by rape or incest.
7:53 AM – Ride with Gracie from the bus stop to her house. Eleven people in one small pick up truck. Mish.
8:17 AM – Orientation to “Heart of Christ”
8:40 AM – Begin work.
Our ministry for the day is to work with the teenage girls who live with Gracie and her husband Lee. The youngest mother among the girls is twelve years old. She gave birth to her stepfather’s baby a month ago. Altogether, there are about eight or nine mothers who live on the property, each of whom is a teenager that has a child less than a year old. There are other children who live there too, but they were abandoned. Two girls have cerebral palsy, two two-year-old boys lived at the property with their mothers until they ran away one night, and the other two-year-old boy was abandoned by his mother immediately after she gave birth. This baby, Mosis, was born with a tumor on the right side of his body that, at the time of its removal a year ago, weighed nearly fifteen pounds.
9:00 AM – I help give Erica a bath. Erica is a nine-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. She has little muscle movement and has the brain function of a five to eight-month-old baby. I bathed her in a bucket of cold water in the yard.
9:15 – 10:30 AM – Hold the babies, meet the teenage mothers, talk to the full-time nannies that live on the property.
10:30 AM – Help make popusas with Chaney, Emily, and the cook. The gringas were apparently terrible at rolling and frying the corn tortillas.
12:13 PM – Lunch time. Everyone is gathered on the porch to eat.
1:09 PM – Play time with the tiny humans. I run around with the two-year-old-boys, Diego, Mosis, and Alejandro. Between classes at the on-site school, the moms wander into the living room to breastfeed their babies. When the babies are finished eating, the moms return to their lessons and my team and I rock the tiny humans back to sleep.
2:30 PM – I sit out in the yard with Erica, the girl who has cerebral palsy. She can’t respond to anything I say in Spanish, but I keep talking to her. Eventually I realize that she enjoys it when I sing to her. So, I sat in the yard next to her chair, stroked her hair, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” over and over and over. Each time I began singing, she grinned wider and wider. I looked into her brown little eyes and saw an immeasurable, incomparable fount of joy – the kind of joy you don’t see in many places.
3:43 PM – Leave the “Heart of Christ” compound for the bus stop. Eleven people riding in the pickup truck again.
4:13 PM – Near the bus stop we buy some Cokes for nineteen Limpira (about 85 cents).
4:30 PM – Leave the village on the small bus. Emma and I talk about everything from midwifery to concentration camps as we watch the mountain scenery whiz by and the sun sink into the horizon.
6:15 PM – Get dropped off somewhere in Tegucigalpa after dark. We guard our backpacks and pockets carefully while waiting for bus #2.
6:27 PM – Cram onto the bus as it slows down (but doesn’t stop) to pick us up. It’s a traditional yellow school bus… with 100 people on it. It’s standing room only until a few people get off. I make plans to throw up into my jacket if I get any more nauseous.
7:11 PM – Finally arrive back at where we’re living this month, Zion’s Gate.
7:34 PM – Dinner. Some kind of chalupa thing with cabbage, cheese, and beef
7:55 PM – Finish dinner and hang out talking to squad mates until team time.
8:10 PM – Feedback. This is a time for my team to talk about the day and offer positive and constructive feedback to each other.
8:53 PM – Feedback is finished. I meet with Shannon. She and I were chosen to be the “Logistics Coordinators” for a year-long project called “Unsung Heroes Campaign” (more details about this later)
9:26 PM – Done with meeting. Walk to tent. Get clothes from the clothesline. Get ready for bed. Remember not to use the water while brushing teeth.
9:48 PM – Back in my tent. Dig tomorrow’s clothes out of my pack and lay them out.
9:53 PM – Crawl into sleeping bag. Debate about blowing up my sleeping pad a little more. Decide I’m too exhausted.
9:54 PM – Close my eyes and try to fall asleep. I have to be up again tomorrow at 4 AM.
10:01 PM – Hear a growling dog outside my tent and start to get concerned, then realize it’s just Josh snoring one tent over.
10:02 PM – Goodnight, Honduras.
