The day before Easter, we were invited over our missionary friends’ home for dinner, a bonfire, and a sleepover. For dinner, we helped our friends make homemade pizza and it was delicious! The next day, Easter Sunday, we got up around 5:00am to hike up a mountain first thing in the morning to see the sun rise. There wasn’t much of a sunrise on Easter in Honduras, but we did watch the sky turn from dark to light on the mountain. Afterwards, we had a Bible study where we took turns reading all the passages in Scripture about Resurrection Sunday and a worship session lifting up our voices praising God for what He has done for all of us. Since Esther had the kids’ dance ministry songs on her phone, we also danced on the mountain-just having fun and praising Jesus. Then we hiked back down the mountain to make waffles for breakfast.
After breakfast, our friends’ dad asked us to join them outside on their porch for an Easter church service. This was the most unusual church service I’ve ever been to on Easter since there weren’t tons and tons of people packed into the church in their Easter Sunday best with flowers and spring decorations around the alter. There was just our friends, the Wolfe family, and my whole team minus Joni (our squadleader who was staying with us for the month) who decided to stay back from the Easter plans to have a relaxing day and a half by herself back at the house. We read some Bible passages about Easter, had a discussion about the meaning of Easter, sang some worship songs, and had communion with bread and grape juice. It was a nice, quiet service, without a mad dash to the parking lot afterwards before all the traffic hit to get to our next Easter plans of the day.
After that, they drove us back to our house for the month and we all took naps before lunch. For lunch, we were invited to a nice Easter pot-luck lunch with our host family, the Mejillas, and our host’s partner in the ministry, Missy. Our whole team walked over to Missy’s porch at 1:00pm where there were picnic tables set out with Easter decorations and a tarp above us to either keep away the sun or it was there in case it rained. For a while, it was just us, Missy, and the Mejilla’s 5-year-old daughter Ellie, with Missy’s food cooling inside and our sad contribution of Oreos (it was all we could find on short notice with most of the stores closed) sitting on the table. We talked about our typical Easter traditions back home while we waited for the rest of the Mejilla family to join us.
By 2:00pm, the rest of the Mejilla family had joined us with an apologetic Mrs. Mejilla telling us that the potatoes had taken longer to cook than she had anticipated. We smiled at them and at all the wonderful food that had gathered, including ham slices, deviled eggs, homemade bread, broccoli salad, cole slaw, juice, and amazing homemade fruit punch and told them not to worry about it, because in Africa, if someone told you they would pick you up at a certain time, it was usually 3 hours late on average, and occasionally an hour or two early if they felt like it. They laughed and we prayed to thank God for our food, our wonderful company, and that we were blessed with such a nice 24-hours of Easter celebration, even though it was very different from what most of us were used to.
Most holidays overseas have been rough, because they are times when you miss your family and friends back home the most. We skipped my favorite holiday, Halloween, entirely in Nepal, but made up for it a few days later with a squad-wide prom with our ministry hosts and friends that served with the ministry with us that month. Thanksgiving for my team One Pulse was spent in a village in India with nothing that resembled typical Thanksgiving food, but there was certainly plenty of it and we were surrounded by the love of our team and got to share things we were thankful for that night at team time.
My birthday and Christmas were spent with my team Ruach Chayil in Cambodia, and while my birthday was one of the few holidays where I stayed present the whole day and didn’t think of family except for a passing thought, the season leading up to Christmas was laden with a lot of homesickness and processing with the Lord. For Christmas, we went to church and our hosts treated us to “snow,” which was a snow-cone/ice-cream type dish and they bought me a special dairy-free one. We had a wonderful breakfast cooked by Amy and a wonderful dinner cooked by Irene with help from Mallorie and Katherine throughout the day. It was a great day, but it was also a very hard time to be separated from family and friends back home.
Valentine’s Day became Galentine’s Day for Ruach Chayil in Thailand and we decided to wear dresses and Irene bought us flower crowns for our heads. We made Valentine’s Day cards for our hosts, passed out flowers to women and children we passed on the streets, visited the hospital where we had made friends with a Christian doctor to pray for sick patients (and give away more flowers and some of our flower crowns). We spent every meal together that day as a team and several of my teammates processed through past hurts from relationships and our period of singleness on the Race, while celebrating the courage and bravery it took to share these things. That was honestly probably the best Valentine’s Day I have had yet, and it didn’t involve a man, a date, or the commercialism of the holiday back home.
St. Patrick’s day was spent as an off day to a volcano lake in El Salvador with Ruach Chayil, and almost passed us by without a thought until Amy and I looked at our watches at the end of the day and wished each other a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” We then pointed out to each other that we were both unintentionally wearing green that day and laughed.
But Easter was the first major holiday I’ve celebrated with my new team, The Gathering, and I have to say, it was probably the easiest holiday away from home yet. Instead of trying to preserve our holiday traditions back home, we planned the most interesting and eventful Easter we could while living in a village in Honduras. This Easter was nothing like any other Easter I’ve celebrated before. And while I can’t wait to have an Easter full of traditions and family next year, I really appreciate the simplicity of how we celebrated Easter Eve and Easter Day on the World Race for what the holiday is really about, which is Jesus’s Resurrection. We didn’t dye any eggs (even though we bought dye and had planned to), we didn’t search for any eggs, we didn’t get Easter baskets, we didn’t spend the day with family, and we didn’t even go to a real church on Easter, but we were surrounded by new friends who were like family for the day and we were also surrounded by Jesus’s presence and the reminder of what He did for us when he died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day. And I am so grateful for the fresh perspective that holidays away from home might not always look like what they usually do, but that doesn’t make them any less special. Jesus is Risen!
I apologize for this getting to you a few weeks late! Thank you for all the recent comments and for all the love you guys have shown me while I’m on the World Race!
We are currently in Guatemala, our second to last country on the World Race! We have about 3 more weeks here before heading to our final country, Belize. This month we are teaching English to students in 2 different schools. We are sleeping on our sleeping pads this month on the floor of a classroom in a small town called Pastores in Guatemala. We are also here with a Gap Year World Race team this month. They sleep in the classroom next door to us and have already been here for a month before we got here, since the Gap Year teams usually go to 3 countries in 9 months.
