4 Hour Bus Rides....

I am a few days behind on typing up what we have been doing but here goes my best shot at remembering it all.

July 3rd-Day 25
    Last Sunday we were up at 5:45 for breakfast at 6.  The hotel provided breakfast for us and it involved eggs with some sort of salsa on them...In a really hot place, eggs with salsa is not a good idea for future reference.  The 23 of us had a worship service there at the hotel.  It was pretty neat to have a worship service of just a small group of Christians in a conference room of the place we happened to be that day.  It seemed to me to be something that a first century group of Christians would have done, meet wherever they were on Sunday to worship God.  We then headed out to the work sites to hopefully implement our plan of building a house on stilts.  We started the first house by framing the house on the ground and then lifting the frame up onto the concrete pillars.  Then we put in the floor and started framing up the sides and put on the roof.  If I had written this on Sunday evening I would have said that it seemed like a great way to build this house, but on Monday we found a little better way.  The group that we came down with had to go back to Teguc bc they had to fly out Monday morning.  So around 11 they headed out on the 3-4 hour ride back to Teguc and met up with the group at the Valley of Angeles.  Nathan Reeves had a team of about 10 that came in around 1 that afternoon to replace the people we had lost.  So for a couple of hours there were 7 of us putting up siding and some flooring until Nate's group arrived.  The house went up pretty smoothly but it took all day to get just one house up.  But we were a part of the very first Torch house on stilts.  It was a huge accomplishment and the ones to come will be a much needed improvement for the families in the village.  We then went back to the hotel, had dinner and went to bed.
July 4th-Day 26
    Monday we started the day with breakfast at 7.  We had a new plan to build the house today and by 8:30 we were at the site ready to go.  Nate's team thought it best to frame the floor up on the pillars and then build the walls on the floor and stand them up.  This worked a bit better than the way we did it on Sunday.  We framed up 2 sides and stood them up and only had to get ladder's to put up the other 2 sides.  So this method made the building process go a little smoother.  About 1 that afternoon, the lady who we are building the houses for had the school kids come to the house that we had finished on Sunday.  They had a presentation telling us how happy they were that we were there building houses.  They had an Independence Day cake for us and some Pepsi.  Then they wanted us to sing our national anthem which was pretty cool.  I've always wondered how awesome it must be for the U.S soccer team to stand on the pitch in a foreign country with our national anthem playing in front of ppl of another country.  This gave me a little taste of what that might be like.  It was a really awesome 30 minutes.  So we then went back to work on the house.  The 4 interns that were still there had to leave at 3, that's when our van got there, to go back to Teguc to meet up with the rest of our team so we could head to Santa Rosa the next morning.  So we loaded up at 3, took showers at the hotel till 4 and headed back to Teguc.  We left the build team with a roof to put on the house but we had started framing the floor for the next house.  So this build went quite a bit quicker than the one on Sunday went.  We made it back to the mission house about 6:45 and ate and had devo.  Then got to bed early to since everyone was worn out.  The team of 122 was now back down to just 20. 
July 5th-Day 27
    Tuesday morning we got to sleep in a little bit.  Brunch was at 9:30 and we had to be on the bus ready to leave between 12 and 1.  It was a fairly slow morning with nothing to do but pack and chill for a little bit.  We were told that the drive from Teguc to Santa Rosa de Copan would take about 4 hours so we were planning on being there by 6 at the latest.  So we loaded up and left the mission house about 12:30.  About 30 minutes outside of Teguc is where the road construction started.  We sat, then went a few miles, then sat, then went a few miles, and yea sat in traffic some more.  The weather here has been beautiful, low 80's, the rain has held off till the evenings...Not on Tuesday.  It started raining 5 minutes after we left the mission house and rained nearly the entire trip to Santa Rosa, so that slowed us down some as well.  Some of the storms were incredibly intense.  So at 9:30 we came rolling into the hotel here in Santa Rosa.  It was a long day and we were all pretty wiped out.  For those of you that think a 9 hour ride wasn't extremely bad, let me describe the roads here in Honduras.  The bus constantly has to swerve to miss the canyons and pot holes on steroids.  The driver does a great job to miss the big ones but you can't miss the little ones if you're trying to avoid the big ones.  It's like riding on the back of a four-wheeler through the woods for 9 straight hours.  It can be rough.  Just when you get to sleep you hit another hole and just when you think the road has smoothed out you quickly find out that it hasn't.  Now don't think I'm complaining bc I'm not.  The scenery is incredible and there is fun to be had on a bus ride like that.  But after 9 hours of it you are pretty beat.  Thankfully we made it safely to the hotel, through the storms and darkness and more storms and construction.  This is the last place the interns will be working before the trip comes to an end.  We are going to be working with Mission UpReach this week doing a few projects but mainly doing a VBS in a school that they are heavily involved with here.  It is everyone's first trip to Santa Rosa and our first time working with Mission UpReach so it should be a grand adventure.
July 6th-Day 28 
    Wednesday was a good day but not a great day.  We were up to eat breakfast at 7:30 and left at 8:30 to go to the school to hold our first VBS of the week.  We have the kids from 9 to 11 so we have 2 hours with them each morning.  The skit went ok but everyone was tired and it kinda showed, we were dragging.  Everything else went ok for the most part.  Since it was our first time to this school, we didn't know what kind of facilities we would have so we had to improvise a little bit when we got there and things went ok.  The kids seemed to have had a great time.  The school is located in arguably the poorest part of Santa Rosa.  Since Mission UpReach has been here this school has gone from one of the worst schools according to grades, to winning an award this past year for having the best test scores in the Santa Rosa area.  The school is just outside the city in Los Angeles so I can now say that I've been to Los Angeles and people will be like dude that's awesome.  After the VBS we had pretty much the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted.  Most of us went out into the city to walk around and visit the shops and the cathedral and just see the city.  It is a very colonial style city with cobblestone streets and narrow streets.  It looks similar to pictures I've seen of towns in Spain.  It seems pretty peaceful and it is a gorgeous place.  After that a few of us went to the pool on the roof of the hotel for a few hours and then went to the local soccer field/track and jogged and walked some and just hung out there.  Then there was dinner, devo and we headed to bed. 
July 7th-Day 29
    Today we were up for breakfast at 7:30 again and left for the school at 8:30.  The kids were already out front waiting for us when we pulled up.  We had a meeting last night about how to do a better job with the VBS today and it went so much better today.  The skit was much more energetic and the kids loved it.  We kept each group of kids in one room and just moved the people with different activities to the kids instead of trying to move the kids which went much smoother than yesterday.  We had a much better time and the kids seemed to have enjoyed it more today.  I had to get my Silas on one more time but we are now done with the skits I am in since we won't be doing our 4th skit this week.  After that we came back to the hotel for lunch and then I have no idea what people were doing this afternoon.  I came up here to my room and laid down on the bed thinking I would take an hour nap and 4 hours later woke up when they told me dinner was in 10 minutes.  So that was GREAT.  Doing a VBS, then eating lunch, then going to sleep only to be woken bc of more food...It was a great day.  After dinner we had devo up by the pool and now I'm sitting here on my bed about to be out for the night. 
    So tomorrow will be our last day of planned work.  We have our VBS tomorrow morning and will leave for the ruins in Copan on Saturday morning.  I'm absolutely pumped about going to the ruins.  It'll be my first time to see them and I'm excited.  It is the largest set of ruins in the america's and only a fraction of it has been uncovered.  In my missions class last semester we did a project to develop an evangelistic campaign for a Mayan Indian culture in Guatemala so we had to do a lot of research on the Maya people.  To get to go to their ancient capital will be incredible.  So I'm just a little excited about that.  But until next time, peace out.