This Girl Is On FIIIIIIRRRRREEEEE!!!

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't written anything in NEARLY TWO WEEKS!  We have been pretty busy and I just haven't sat down to type in a while.  But I want to give a shout out first before I get to what we've been up to.  In Agua Agria down in Choluteca there is a man who has lived there all his life like most others in that village.  It is a poor village and he has never really had much to call his own.  Some of you might know Timeteo Estrada who is a huge part of what Torch is able to do.  Timeteo's dad has always lived in Agua Agria and will eventually die there, never really breaking free from the chains of poverty and now in his old age doesn't really want anymore than he's always had.  He raised his family the best way he could over the years.  He was able to provide Timeteo a way to go to school in Tegucigalpa 4 hours away even though they struggled just to get by.  Timeteo graduated and now drives from Teguc back home every other week to preach in the village he grew up in.  He lives in the city where he has raised two boys.  One which works with Torch Missions and the other that works with Honduras Hope.  So what's my point?  Well here is a shout out to parents who came from nearly nothing and have been able to give their kids everything.  Timeteo's dad could worked the fields and blown the little bit of money that he had but instead he saved his earning to send his son to school.  Now his grandkids have a life completely different.  They could be sitting in a small village working the fields for a few dollars a day but instead work with mission organizations and have a chance to do great things with their lives because of the actions of their dad and grandad.  Timeteo's dad didn't accept where he was and assume that for generations his offspring would live in the village and work just to eat that night.  He had a drive to make sure his kids and grandkids had a better life than he did.  My mom came from a poor family of 11 and my dad grew up in a divorced home.  Neither of them accepted their beginnings in life as the way things would always be.  Instead they strove for greater things.  Things for themselves but also for greater things for us, their kids.  Now with a few grandkids they have been able to provide a life that is completely different from the one they were born into.  Like Timeteo's dad, it's a product of wanting more for your kids, hard work and a faith in the one who set the world into motion.  Most of us are where we are because of our parents and i'm pretty stinking happy with where I am in life.  So here's a shout out to parents who gave been able to give their kids much more than they ever dreamed.

But as for me, I've been busy.  I don't think that things could have been much better than they were the last 2 weeks.  Thursday before last I got a big surprise at dinner when this crazy Florida girl came into the cafeteria looking for me.  I't's been a year since I've seen Jenna Hostetler and I wasn't expecting to see her here at all but she has been able to come for about a month, so that was awesome.  She's been working with us for nearly 2 weeks now and it's been a lot of fun.  I got a great surprise that Sunday when I sent this self proclaimed crazy Honduran girl a message to see if she could meet up with us at the Valley of Angels so I could see her.  Michelle Gross actually responded to a Facebook message in less than 3 weeks, that is crazy, quite possibly a record.  It only took her a couple of hours to say, of course I can meet you there.  But she did tell me that my blog was boring....yea for real, I was like saaayyy whaaaat?? Her idea of making this blog more interesting is to talk about her.  I thought about doing that but then what if that made people stop reading the blog and never read it again?  Who wants to read about someone they don't know right!?  The thing is, this isn't just someone.  She's pretty amazing.  So it's time to get to meet Michelle, the crazy Honduran girl who likes to use chainsaws just a little too much.  She is the director of a program called Shine Honduras!  They place kids in Bilingual schools, tutor them and find sponsors for them to be able to go to school here or in the States.  As the director and only employee in Honduras, she has 10 kids that she has to get to school, pick up from school, tutor for about 3 hours a day, take them all home plus some other things that she does with the kids.  All of that on top of the full-time school schedule that she has.  Not to mention she lives about 45 minutes outside the city so she's got to be up early and doesn't get home until really really late, plus she then has to do her homework.  And it gets better, she's a civil engineering student which isn't the easiest thing in the world.  Pretty impressive if you ask me.  She was the first Shine kid to go through the program.  She went to high school in Oklahoma and one year at Oklahoma State before she decided to come back home and go to school here in Tegucigalpa.  She likes to build but I think it's only because she gets to use a chainsaw.  It scares the crap out of me.....not really but (yes it does!).  She has done an incredible job.  I'm pretty sure when she hammers she imagines my face on the nail and just whacks the heck out of it haha.  She's pretty awesome though.  Hopefully that spices up the blog a little bit.  :)

I've built 4 more houses since we've been in Teguc.  Today we built a house in 2 1/2 hours which is impressive and we were able to meet up with the other group at the blind school.  So I was on the beast team today.  We've gone to the hospital, bagged up tons of food bags, gone to the Valley of Angels.  We've said goodbye to a great team of 70 and welcomed in another of 50.  The team that left last week was really great.  It was mostly people from Florida (the Keys and Bell Shoals).  I love getting to work with them because they are just great people to be able to work alongside.  They are ready and willing to do anything.  I've got a lot of friends on that team and made a few new ones this year including a few new poker friends and a fantasy football friend.  I was really sad to see them all go but all good things come to an end.  They left Monday the 2nd.  Oh I almost forgot about our spa day in between the groups.  The first group left the 2nd and the next came in on the 4th so we had a spa day.  Yea, manicures and pedicures all around.  Margaret Reeves even had her hair dyed and I'm pretty sure purple wasn't the color she was going for but it is unmistakably purple.  It was a lot of fun.  We spent a day out at the Didasko orphanage where we gave them the best gift an orphanage director could hope for, 9 sets of drums..... Payback from that guy is going to be intense.  We've moved some mud up at the daycare in Mololoa from all the flooding they've had which caused a sinkhole under the slab which had to be partly torn out.  We've carried wood forever and a day up a mountain to a house site and moved rocks the size of car engines at another, as well as chiseled out the rocks the size of cars in order to get an area for as big a house as possible.  It's been a great couple of weeks and hopefully I won't go this long again without letting you know what I've been up to.  It has been an absolute blast.

Tomorrow we are going out to Didasko for the entire day for a VBS program as well as to set up a computer room for the kids and to do some repair and additions to their playground.  It should be a fun day but in order for me to have energy for it, I need sleep.  We've built the last two days and my body hasn't liked the lack of sleep in days.  So I'm hitting the hay, Goodnight.