moving, & Friends :)

The past 4 weeks have been a whirlwind - probably even more so than normal. The first week of January went into Tegucigalpa for a few days and visited some friends of ours which was a lot of fun - they have a 3 year old girl so Maddy enjoyed it a lot also. We also had our passport appointments for Sigel and Alessandra! Sigel now has his Honduran passport that says MOHAGEN as the last name! yahoooooo! This was the next step that we had to do for his paperwork to come to the States (next is an appt at the embassy). And now that Ali has her passport we are finished with all of her paperwork as well.

Unfortunately I came back from Teguc sick and had a high fever & migraine for 5 days until I finally went to the clinic and they gave me some strong medicine. At the same time as being sick, we were supposed to be moving out of our house - so while I laid on the couch and watched the girls, Sigel and Tristan emptied our house and took it all to El Ayudante. It was a pretty awful week for me because moving doesn't really allow you to lay around sick. But we survived it and are now living in one side of the mission house in a big open dorm room (along with my mother in law who is visiting and the cook). We have our beds and dressers set up and the rest is in a few rooms of the clinic waiting for our house to be finished! On the other side of the mission house is a team of men from Maryland who are here to finish our house and build the cabinets in the medical clinic. They are all 'construction guys' and I'm amazed at how much they have gotten done and so quickly! Looks like, thanks to them, we'll be moving into our new house in the first 2 weeks of February - which is super exciting! And the clinic is having a huge transformation because of the cabinets - basically this is making the clinic ready to be used (minus the false ceiling that we still need). As of today, they have all of the base cabinets and the hanging cabinet's boxes done - and they now need to do the drawers and doors and tile the top and do the sinks.

Why, you ask, would we move out of our house and into a dorm room for a month when we knew that our house wouldn't be ready? well that's a good question - and the answer is that WE HAVE FRIENDS. For the first time in a long time, we have friends! :) lol - no offense to those of you who are our dear friends here in Honduras and in the States - the difference is that we now have co-workers who are living near us and that we see on a daily basis! Up until now, all of our friends we only see for a weekend at a time every few months - just not often enough!  So let me introduce you to our new friends: Mark & Tracy and their 3 kids  Kai, Riley, and Jordan are from Maryland and they have moved here to Honduras (and are living in our old house) to work as full time volunteers at El Ayudante! They'll be helping lead teams, do community outreach, media and promotion stuff, and finances.  And also my sister - Melissa and Jeremie and their 2 kids Hannah and Isaac are here until 6 months and they'll be coming back and forth between the States and here every 6 months. We're so incredibly blessed to have these 2 families in our lives who have caught the vision and are here to jump right in - it'll be good! It's so fun for our kids to have all these other kids (the 'Dante gringitos) here to play with all day long. we also have Jeff from TN who is a long term volunteer. So instead of it just being our family, we all of a sudden have tripled our forces! 2013 is going to be a HUGE year!