A day in the life of team planning

Yesterday we left our house at 6:30am to go to Comayagua and plan for an upcoming team from the States and for Tristan to meet with the contractor regarding the medical clinic. We took with us Lydia - the secretary for El Ayudante - with us as she will be actually leading the team (we'll be having a baby the week the team is here) and she has lots of great contacts for teams. Sidenote: Lydia is a sweetheart - one of the most amazing people I know - she is sincere, kind, honest, giving, selfless, and a women of so much faith - they live on so little and yet her heart is so big! She also is super talkative and doesn't speak English so we got our spanish lesson in the for week by talking to her all day. Running on Honduran time, Lydia was 40 late on top of our 20 minutes late so we didn't leave Teguicalpa until an hour after we'd hoped to. We started at the hardware store, buying 30 bags of cement for the medical clinic and ordering more supplies for Tristan to pick up next week. The project is about 20 outside the city of Comayagua - out in the bush - and on the way Lydia all of a sudden said "stop - back up - did you see that - Maranones! -and we can reach them! So Tristan stops, backs up, and we all hop out of the truck to pick this fruit (pictured below) that Lydia says makes the best juice. Personally I can't stand the smell of it so the smell of them in the hot car every time we got in was not pleasant. We stopped twice for Maranones and Lydia was so happy! I'm going to try to make the juice today but I'm not too hopeful about liking it.

* I have realized that because I live here and everything is normal to me, I don't describe out surrounding enough for you. So I'm going to try. From Comayagua to El Ayudante is a very cultural 20 minutes. We drive on a dirt road - we have 4 routes and depending which road was recently fixed is the one we use. Sometimes Tristan has to put the truck into 4 Wheel drive just to get through the mud. Fields of fruit trees - mango, guava, maranons, lime, banana, plantains, and others that I can't identify, line both sides of the road. There are houses - some made of wood, some brick, and some mud - most without windows and most maybe 2 room houses. We pass old ox carts - pulled by 2 ox (it's amazing but I haven't gotten the guts to stop and ask for a picture - someday I'm going to get a ride!) with an old weathered man driving it and kids catching rides in the back. There is a canal along part of the road that is always full of women washing clothes on a rock or wash board and kids swimming naked or in their underwear. It's an average of 100 degrees everyday there so the pace of life is a lot slower. The main source of transportation out there is feet or biking. Mid afternoon the breeze comes which cools everything off (to 95 degrees) and then all the men and boys emerge to play soccer until dark. This is the culture of El Ayudante and I love seeing it.

ok - so back to our day - we went to the project, met with the guard, the contractor, bought 30 meters of sand and gravel (about 6 dump trucks full) for the cement to be mixed with, planned the layout of the windows for the clinic, met with the neighbor, unloaded the cement, and headed back into town for lunch at a new hotel in town. There have recently been 2 hotels built and opened in Comayagua and they invited us to come to lunch and see their hotels because they want our business when we have teams in town. During lunch we worked on planning for the team we have coming and negotiated with the hotel for the price for our team to stay with them. We then met with the pastor of a church asking them to partner with our teams so that there will be follow up to the people we work with while the team is here. He also knows the city very well and the needs of the people better than we do. After leaving him, we went to Casayada - it is a private school for deaf, mute, and handicapped children. We were given the grand tour, bought some bread that the children made, and scheduled for the team to do a presentation at their school. They are doing an awesome work there - because handicapped or deaf children are social outcasts, most parents aren't even interested in sending them to a school -much less paying for a private school - so the school only charges $10/month and also offers for the children to spend the week at the school - staying in housing at the school - if the family lives too far away to bring them everyday. It was really neat to hear about what they are doing.

By then it was 5pm - so we headed home - not getting home until 9pm due to traffic, dropping off Lydia, picking up Sigel, and eating dinner! Needless to say it was a long long day - but a great day. By the time we got home we were exhausted from talking, thinking, and listening in Spanish all day long - because even though Tristan and I can speak in English to each other, because Lydia only speaks Spanish we try to always speak in Spanish so she doesn't feel left out. so, we slept well last night :).