10 years

2007: Visiting a Fort in Honduras - learning the
history of this new country

87,600 hours OR 3,650 days OR 10 years. This last month was our one decade anniversary of being living in Honduras.

10 years ago, we were off for a one year adventure to a capital city we didn’t know how to pronounce, and we were so naively excited about what the adventure would bring. We didn’t speak more than a bit of Spanish vocab, we made friends immediately with some amazing Hondurans that so kindly flung the doors of their homes and hearts open for us - it was thanks to them that we fell in love with Honduran culture. 10 years ago we had a borrowed vehicle we shared with other teachers and went off exploring whenever possible.

A few random thoughts:

·      Our first meal in country was Applebees - we were super disappointed by that! (where’s the tacos!)

·      We’ve lived in 6 houses, 4 different towns

·      We can now speak Spanish enough to communicate with lawyers or business people

·      We have learned cultural norms of weddings, funerals, births, birthdays, honor.

·      There’s more paperworkt to living internationally than I realized: we track 2 residency cards, 8 passports, 4 Drivers licenses, and multiple banks and insurance options in each country!

·      One of the biggest struggles of being a missionary is seeing the need every. Single. Day.  

·      Next hardest point is living away from family and having them miss the daily life things.

·      We have multiple ‘communities’ that we interact with and we found we need them all: our neighbors, our church, the staff community, other missionaries (those we work directly with and the greater missionary community).

·      It’s all about contacts and who you know: we have our phone contacts with cheat hints of which ‘Jose’ is this one. Tristan has one called ‘fireworks lady’.

·      A friend of ours who arrived in Honduras on the same flight as we did, is still in Honduras as well and we are still friends!

·      Our kids prefer tortillas & beans over hamburgers.

2017: at the same Fort - only this time we were showing
our kids the fort and the history of Honduras

There are so many highlights that I could mention about this last decade, about all that we’ve learned and the heartaches and celebrations. For sure I know that being a foreigner in another country is not easy. It does not come natural and everything feels harder. But one thing I know for certain, when we are weak, God has a perfect platform to show off for us. We have learned so much about trusting in God to come through. His faithfulness and how we must be dependent on Him. We’ve learned that He loves His children and that He wants to use His children to love others.

For today, I’m thankful for the ups and downs and lessons learned through these last 3,650 days. I know that out of all it, I’ve been blessed.