Shoes and Meds

It's hard to believe we've been here in Honduras for five days. Everyone seems to be growing accustomed to the schedule and demanding physical labor and are enjoying the stay. Yesterday was a big day in Armenia Bonito. We continued work on our two housing projects. We started laying cinder blocks for the foundation of one home and spent hours mixing concrete and mortar. Cement trucks and even portable mixers are non-existent here; instead, we pile sand and concrete mix on the ground, mix it with shovels, then form a big crater in the middle. The crater is then filled with water, and we fold the mixture from the outside of the crater into the water and repeat it all the way around until everything is mixed together on the ground. It's a pretty neat trick.

After our four hour work morning, we had an authentic Honduran lunch cooked by the home next to our work site. We ate tacos on homemade tortillas with refried beans and chili-infused onions. It was a very domestic experience! Afterward, we held a shoe drive at the town hall. We brought three bags of shoes from the states that John, Ben Kinnebrew, and I picked up from a guy in Florida who donated them to us. It was a chaotic scene! We had about 260 pairs of mostly women's and girl's sandals in piles inside of the town hall, and when we arrived from the work sites to start the drive, there were nearly 300 people standing outside. What made it even more chaotic was that the culture of Honduras doesn't embrace the tried and true method of forming a line, so people were pushing and shoving at times to get inside. In true American fashion, however, we were able to form them into a tidy line and distribute most of the shoes. Some people weren't able to receive any because of the magnitude of the crowd, but a lot of people from the community received a pair of brand new shoes. It was definitely a highlight of the trip.

Moving on to today, we did more of the same this morning at the work sites. One of the houses that Karsten, Stephen Kelly, Jeff, and Cary were working on was finished today as they erected the remainder of the roof. The rest of us were able to relive a childhood dream and dig a ten foot deep and eight foot wide hole in the ground. It will eventually be filled with stone and concrete and will become a ceptic tank for the house we're building. The first foot or so was good topsoil, but the rest was pure sand, so it was a very laborious process to dig it out. It was especially hot today, so we took a lot of breaks and drank a lot of gatorade and water. Sometimes it seems like no matter how many liquids you put in your body, you just can't keep up with the sweat that drips off your body...literal drops.

After the morning work session, Karsten, Stephen Bankson, Ben K., Samantha, Katie, Julianne, and John helped set up a medical clinic in the town hall. Erin Pettengill, a registered nurse, hosts the clinic every Thursday, and they are able to provide basic healthcare for those in the community. I walked in for a few minutes and saw Karsten and Stephen holding an infant down on a table as Erin operated on an absess on his forehead. She had to use a scalpel and syringe to remove all the liquid from the wound. The poor little boy was screaming and writhing the entire time, but he turned out just fine in the end. The scene was very eye-opening for serveral kids on the team. The rest of us took a flock of kids to the soccer field to play with them and get them away from the business of the clinic. The field itself was littered with trash, and we spent an hour or so cleaning it up. About fifteen kids helped us complete the task and were very excited to receive praise from all the "gringos." After we finished cleaning up, we loaded up a pick-up truck (with about 20 kids and four adults!) and drove ten minutes up the road to a beautiful swimming hole in the river called "tres piedres" (three rocks). Aptly named, it is a pool of clear water with three giant boulders to jump off of. It was another one of those picturesque scenes as the mountains rose in the backgorund and the beginnings of the coastal jungle formed near the mountains. Ben Noble, Jeff, Cary, and I had fun throwing the kids around in the water while Katie and Julianne kept the little "ninas" occupied in the sand and shallow water. We'll be heading back to Tres Piedres tomorrow for some well-deserved fun and refreshment. After we left Armenia Bonito for the day, we headed back into La Ceiba and ate another authentic dinner at a local buffet. Randy and I each got a plate of different foods and tooks turns picking off each other's plates for a well-rounded dining experience. We'll see what adventures tomorrow holds for us!!