You know you've settled into life in Honduras when...

1. You talk about the cockroaches & centipedes in your house and nobody thinks you live in a dump.

2. You get stuck in a line behind a police check point for 40 minutes, not able to do anything about it but wait, and don't get upset - you just realize it's part of life.

3. There are police check points all over the place! You're not afraid of police check points anymore.

4. It takes you four hours to go grocery shopping & pay your electricity bill.

5. You spend $8 on dinner for two and think it's expensive

6. The power going out is normal.

7. Everyone has a gate & fence with barb wire around their house.

8. There are security guards at every restaurant and store with ancient guns strapped around them.


I'm still working on my list but that's the start of it.

Last week we went out to El Ayudante with high ambitions and plans to pull the well pump that stopped working. John went with us as well. The well is 265 feet deep down a 1ft whole with the pump at the bottom of it. We worked and pulled and pulled some more. We used a 1 ton winch (Thanks BIll!) attached to the lumber rack on the truck...pulled...pulled, stretched rope, broke pipe...broke some more rope...bottomed out the springs on the truck (no damage) and only managed to stretch the pipe about 16 inches. This is after 4 hours of working in the sun (boy did I have a nice burn on my shoulders. So we think the pump must be stuck in the mud at the bottom because it was ridiculously heavy. The problem is if we snap the main rope or break the main pipe attached to the pump at the bottom, then we loose the pump and then what? The only thing we managed to do was run over our camera with the truck. Yep that's right. So needless to say, the day was quite frustrating. So we're looking for suggestions and we'll continue when we have some more ideas on what to do.

Last weekend we had Santos and Scarlet at our house for the weekend. Santos (16) and Scarlet (18) used to live in an orphanage and now they are part of Seeds of Change and we're part of the team that is transitioning them back into real life. It's great. So we spent time playing with them and loving on them. Scarlet loves to cook so we cooked, we dyed her hair, rented a movie (which was the first time she'd ever gone to a movie rental store & got to pick out what she wanted). They were great for our spanish as they are Spanish speakers and only understand a bit of English, but don't speak English. So they were our teachers all weekend. We had a really great time pouring into them for 4 days. It was weird to feel like a mother to two teenagers. But we were both sad when they went back to their home on Tuesday. So Thursday we had them over for dinner and a wild game of Monopoly. Please pray that we will be able to love and help them - they are a big part of our ministry & have found their way inside our hearts! The things they've gone through as kids...unbelievable. They have a lot to heal from from.


We are trying the chicken thing again. The first two chicks that I wrote about escaped (and were probably eaten) within the first two days. We felt really bad. So we got two more from our friends -but the chicks are 3 months old so they're bigger and can't escape...so we thought. But they can fly! So we had to catch them the first night and put them in the coop (because the fenced area does not have a roof) and then the next morning we clipped their wings - but they could still fly! so we tied them by their foot onto a tree so they could still be outside -and one of them got wrapped around a tree and totally stuck (not the smartest animals!) and the other got the rope off and hid in a tree. So we've had really bad luck! We put them in a cage and so far haven't let them out because we're afraid to loose them. The internet said to feed them enough that they get too heavy to fly :) So we're stuffing their faces with corn! We're supposed to get 4 more on Wednesday. Hopefully our chicken farming will become more successful because so far we're striking out :). These two are named Lucy & Wilma (Tristan named them).