What a year it's been...God is doing great things! This past year there were some people who've expressed interest in coming along with me to Orphanage Emmanuel, so my experience down here will begin a little differently. We've joined with the Maryland team for an 11-day journey to Honduras, and I will get to experience the first week and a 1/2 of my time down here as a team member, and the final 19 days as a volunteer (completely different roles/responsibilities).
One of the girls who's coming along on this trip is a former student of mine, Kelsey. She spent last night at our house and decided to stay up all night with Alina. I wasn't able to get much sleep either, so I only slept for about 50 minutes and spent the rest of the night doing the final touches on packing and then weighing my suitcase over and over to ensure it was not over the 50 pound limit.
We left our house about 3:15am to catch our 5:45am flight out of Green Bay. Our connection was in Atlanta, where we caught the second flight into the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa.
All of our flights were on time which was nice. We experienced a little bit of turbulence upon landing in Tegucigalpa and the passengers cheered much more than normal when we landed...if you're not up-to-date on how dangerous it is to land in the capital of Honduras, you may want to google a video of the plane ride on YouTube.
Kelsey, Alina & I exchanged our money at the airport before meeting a Christian taxi driver named Jose Ramon. He was super nice and chatted with us all the way to our hotel. The girls were hungry, so after getting our luggage into the room, we walked to the MultiPlaza Mall and the girls were able to experience a fancy Honduran mall. It was a slow transition into the experience of being in Honduras in that not all Hondurans go to the mall, generally only the richest of the rich can afford to go (so they were not yet exposed to extreme amounts of poverty), but yet they had the experience of being in the minority with everybody around them speaking a language that was not English. In the cafe court, we decided to eat Honduran fast food, so we ordered pupusas which are hand-made tortillas filled with cheese. After that, the girls were able to explore the mall for a bit and noticed that there were both American stores as well as Honduran stores. When we began to feel tired from lack of sleep, we stopped at an ice cream shop to give us that last bit of sugar to get us through the walk back to the hotel. Before leaving, I purchased an internet stick at the mall so that I could write these daily blogs. Internet here is sketchy, so I'm not sure how often I'll be able to upload this blog...but hope to keep you up-to-date as much as possible.
We had a safe walk back to the hotel and pretty much turned in for the night by 7pm!
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