Sunday, February 14, 2016

Heading Home: Honduras 2016

Although it never used to be, but January is quickly becoming my favorite month of the year. I spend time with my family and friends in my beloved hometown in the States, I spend entirely too much time on airplanes traveling to destinations that most people don't know exist/ confuse with a more popular country (no, Taiwan and Thailand aren't the same country and Honduras isn't in Africa), I eat weird foods, I set foot in my tierra amada where I get to hug my babies every day and have coffee with friends, and then just as life out of suitcase starts to be too much, I return back to Brazil as summer is coming to a close and spend my days at the beach.

It's a hard life, but someone has to do it. And I volunteer as tribute.

As I did last January, I flew to Honduras this year to spend ten precious days with some of my favorite people. I spent four days in Siguatepeque hanging out with my kiddos and visiting my old stomping grounds and then spent the next six days on the missions trip with Pilgrim.


The homecoming was phenomenal. There's really nothing like driving into your old hometown; seeing the restaurants where you used to eat every week, passing the same vendors selling the same goods at the same spot on the side of the road, smelling the scent of burning trash which is somehow simultaneously gross and comforting, walking into the four walls that you called home and opening your arms to the students who taught you how to be a teacher and the friends who walked beside you as your navigated life in a place so far outside of your comfort zone. 


We laughed. We laughed so much. We worked on Language homework (which is more fun when Miss Caitlin isn't your teacher anymore). We completed Reading Logs (which are still a drag). We played soccer. We went out for coffee/ lemonade. We dined together for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. We spoke English and we spoke Spanish. For four short days, we were doing life together again.


And then on Sunday, some of my favorite people from Pilgrim came down and I got to spend a week showing them my beautiful city. Our days were spent in the mountains singing "Un simple muchacito que se llamaba David" ("Only A Boy Named David"), painting nails, and having VBS with the local children. In the afternoons, we really lived the Honduran experience-- which included riding in the back of pick-up trucks, eating at Norberta's, driving up a mountain to buy fireworks and then shooting them off in the middle of the street, and eating ice cream at the Mennonite store. 


I think I was Honduran in a past life. Truly. There's no other way to explain the love I have for these people and this country; how at home I feel when stepping off the plane and how devastating it is to leave.

It's my dream in life that everyone can experience Honduras, and, hopefully, love it as much as I do. For those people who can't physically go to Honduras, for whatever reason, I used my top notch iMovie skills to put together a video montage of my favorite week of the year. This is Siguatepeque. This is our Honduras.

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