One Week Anniversary

Lauren and I have officially been in Honduras for seven days now!

A couple of nights ago Lauren and I were laying on the couch in our “living room” and we were praying together when we heard the high pitched squeal of our little friend Stinky the lizard. He sounded a lot closer than I was comfortable with so I stopped praying and looked around to see where the noise was coming from. That little guy was on our ceiling staring at us while we lay on the couch. As you can see by our picture, he is a very tiny lizard. He is standing next to a screw that is coming through the roof so that should give you an idea of proportion. You wouldn’t believe how loud he is—his screams will wake you up in the middle of the night.

We have been cycling through the same six foods since we’ve been here: Egg burritos, cereal, pancakes, bean & cheese burritos, mac & cheese, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches…we try to stick to foods that have the word “and” in them. I’m still enjoying our fat filled burritos, but I think Lauren is ready for something new. We buy pre-packaged refried beans from the Super Mercado in town and they have a fairly high fat content, but they’re pretty cheap so we eat them. We buy a pack of 5 tortillas for 10 limparas (the equivalent of 50 cents U.S.) and the hot sauce we use cost about 80 limparas (about $4) but will last us for at least a month. We bought a flat of 3 dozen eggs for less than we bought the hot sauce so we’ll be buying more of those for our protein source.

I have been using hot sauce on just about everything we eat here at the orphanage. I’m not what one would consider a hot sauce person, but it has tasted pretty good on most food here. I use it in my morning egg burritos, bean & cheese burritos, chicken, and hard boiled eggs on a fork. It is even pretty good on spaghetti. We had it last night for dinner and I couldn’t help but think out loud when I asked, “Lauren, do you think hot sauce would be good on spaghetti?” She responded, “Probably to you.” Lauren has been making fun of my hot sauce cravings, but she can make fun of me all she wants and I’ll still use it for the duration of our trip. I’ll update whether or not I’ve come up with new foods to add my heaven-sauce to.

There are so many bugs crawling all over the place! The other day I killed two biologically engineered red ants in our bathroom, a moth in our bedroom, some other unknown bugs and then a black widow and its baby in our living room. Lauren and I were sitting in the living room and as we looked up at the ceiling, we saw a white patch and weren’t sure what it was so I stood on the armchair below it to investigate. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it was a spider and had to be dealt with quickly. I grabbed a paper towel, rolled it up, lit it on fire and stood back on the chair to do my manly duty. I held the flame up to our new friend and up he went into smoke. I wish I had a picture of that to show you, but there was no time to get a camera to capture the intensity of the moment.

Yesterday Lauren and I went to Katja’s office to be assigned jobs for the duration of our stay at the orphanage. She directed her attention to me first as she explained that I would be doing maintenance around the school before the children come back on the 15th of February. Upon their return I will be assisting a teacher in the classroom in the high school. I will probably be teaching English, but that has yet to be determined. Lauren was told that she will be working with the special needs children at the orphanage as well as the kindergartners. I was a little jealous because I taught kindergarten for about ½ a year beginning in January 2008 and those little guys were so precious. Lauren may also be working in the dental clinic for a few weeks when their annual dental team comes in February.

Lauren spent the rest of the morning working with the school’s computers to see which were working and which were not. When she determined which were good, she moved them to where they needed to be. I was given the job of checking all of the schools bathrooms and asked to make a list of what I would need to repair. I’m not exactly skilled in the area of plumbing or bathroom fixtures, but I went about my job anyways. Once I had my list compiled, I went to the warehouse to see what parts I could find and was fairly successful in getting what I needed. One of the jobs I had to do was to put a new valve on a urinal in the high school boy’s bathroom. They don’t have the normal flush lever (guys, you know what I’m talking about), instead I had to put in a lever valve between some PVC pipe that the child turns on, then off to flush their business. Most everything is very makeshift here, but it works.

The second half of the day Lauren and I were at the stables with Bryce learning the basics of horse riding. We groomed and saddled our horses and went into the smaller riding area to get our first lesson. After we finished we unsaddled our horses and put them back in their respective stables while Bryce put a makeshift “bareback” pad on Grumpy. We learned how to mount a bareback horse and then how had the opportunity to ride him around. Gentlemen, you can imagine how “uncomfortable” it is riding a horse while you straddle its spinal chord. Of course when I was riding him, he decided to walk a lot faster than he did for Lauren. We each had to wear a helmet in case we were bucked off so wearing that in combination with my bright yellow shirt, I looked like a special ed kid on a field trip.

Our last responsibility was to clean the stables, feed the horses and then put them out to pasture for the night. As you can see in the picture, the horses know when its feeding time because they are all looking our way as if to say, “Come on guys, we know you’ve got something for us!” The horses from right to left are: Grumpy, Pharaoh, Joshua, the new colt, and his mother Faith. Pharaoh is a good horse, but he can be a bit of a stubborn horse as well. He jumped out of the pasture a few nights ago and broke the top wire fencing him in—he’s a bit of a rebel.

While the horses were eating Lauren and I decided to go take a look at the pigs that wake us up in the middle of the night. They tend to be noisy because they are located on the edge of the orphanage property where wild dogs roam, and where trespassers often come to try and steal the animals to sell for money. On a side note the local police told the owner that if trespassers come onto the property after 6pm, they can be shot and the bodies would be disposed of by the police themselves. I, for one, would not want to be caught on this property as a trespasser after 6. Anyways, we imagined some cute little “babe” pigs, but instead we saw some overweight, ugly, lazy, fly covered porkers. They are a good distance away from our humble abode, but since they are housed inside a concrete pin, their screams echo and travel a pretty good distance to reach out weary ears. If they’re going to keep us awake, at least we could get some bacon out of them when they’re slaughtered.

Stayin' Alive

Today is Sunday (Domingo) and it is marked by a historical event in the life of LeLu—it’s our anniversary! Lauren and I have been married three weeks now and still get a long great. I know that may sound trivial to say, but when you are around someone 24/7 in a very literal way, it is possible to really get on someone’s nerves. In a “traditional” marriage, the husband and/or wife work and are away from the house 9-10 hours of the day. With our marriage being a somewhat un-traditional marriage thus far, Lauren and I are with each other every waking hour of the day as we go about our lives around the orphanage. You would think that spending that much time together would cause us to get annoyed by little habits, but we’re very un-annoyed with each other. We’ll continue to make our marital bliss last for as long as we can—hopefully forever.

The first few days here at Emmanuel were spent in a haze of uncertainty as we aimlessly walked around the orphanage looking for something to do. We talked to a lot of different children here as we stopped by some of the different yards. In some cases the children’s English was better than our Spanish! We went by the medium boy’s house a couple of days ago—before I go any further, let me explain something:

The children here at Emmanuel are not separated by age. They are instead separated by gender and size. In the past the children were put into separate houses based on gender an

d age, but due to problems with bullying among other things, the structure was changed. Many of the children here have been malnourished throughout their lives and as a result

are very underdeveloped. One of the “children” we talked to for a couple of hours looked to be about 10, but in fact was 18 years old! Due to this unfortunate fact of life, he is placed in the “medium” boy’s house.

As I was saying, we went by the medium boy’s house and spent about 2 hours there sitting and talking with a group of the boys. Two of the boys we talked with spoke very good English and were quite outgoing with us; their names were Watson (a black boy) and Josway. Boys would come and go while we sat there talking, but they all just wanted someone to give them a hug and play with them. Somehow they learned about the great sport of thumb-wrestling so, using both of my hands, I played two different boys simultaneously. Someone taught them how to cheat too—tag-team (using the index finger) has also made its way down to Honduran children.

The past two days Lauren and I have been working with the horses (caballos) that are stabled about 100 yards behind our house. Our neighbors are from Tennessee and train horses so they have been teaching us how to take care of the horses so we can continue without them when they leave next week. Our fellow Sandalite (a person that goes to Sandals Church in Riverside), John, will be in charge of the horses and we will be working under him. The horses here are used to teach the children about God in a different way. There are many uses of horses in the bible, so Tammy has written 20 lesson plans that incorporate that into her teaching about horses. I’m fairly certain that I won’t be working with the horses as my primary job once the children are back in school, but it’ll be a lot of fun for the next few weeks.

Lauren and I will be meeting with Katja tomorrow at 9am to discuss further what we will be doing for our short stay here. We talked with her yesterday for about 10 minutes and she gave us an idea of what we might be doing based on what skills we have. It sounds like I may be teaching English to the 4-6th grade class…that’ll be interesting since I’m pretty sure I don’t have a curriculum and I don’t speak much Spanish. I’m ready to do whatever it is that they want me to do though! Lauren may be working with the special needs children in a ½ day classroom setting since the orphanage currently has no program in place for them.

We still hear all sorts of crazy sounds in the middle of the night. We have discovered what one of the undistinguishable, eerie sounds of the night is—it’s a lizard! It sounds like a bat, but its not. We found a baby one in our bathroom light fixture and we (and by we I mean Lauren) think that the momma lizard was looking for its baby so they would call out to each other in the night in an attempt to reunite. We heard the screeching sounds during the night (as usual) last night, and after checking the bathroom light the next morning, the baby lizard was gone. Lauren believes that it is happily having an ice cream cone with its family while talking about the whole ordeal. We still hear other sounds such as pigs squealing, or horses neighing, or animals walking on our roof throughout the night. Lauren has resorted to wearing earplugs to help drown out the sounds. We had a new sound added to what is becoming a diverse listening palette last night and we can’t quite put our finger on what it may be. It sounded like raccoons battling outside our window, but we’re 95% certain that there are no raccoons anywhere around here. We’ll keep you posted on what we discover it to be.

We’ll spend the rest of or Sunday cleaning our house, doing laundry, and hanging out with other volunteers. We have a washing

machine for our laundry; however we have no dryer so we are hanging all of our clothes and towels over other furniture in the house (i.e. chairs, bunk beds, tables, etc.) It seems that we have had to use items around the house for jobs that they were not intended to do. Since we don’t’ really drink coffee, we are using our coffee pot as a water pitcher that resides in our refrigerator to provide us with fresh, cold water at any hour of the day or night. We also use our towels as a floor mat to place at our door and by the sink. We’re also using a piece of cardboard found under our bed as a dustpan! We’re lucky to have found it! It’s been a fun journey so far and I look forward to everything that we will learn as a newly married couple while we’re here.

Keep the prayers coming, because we can always use them! Especially pray that I will be able to handle loosing to Lauren in a card game called Nerts…she really kicks my butt at that game and it can be frustrating.

Update Soon!

Lauren and I would like to apologize for the delay in our bloggage. We have had no internet since we have been here. I believe that we now have a fairly stable connection so we will update more frequently and also include some pictures if the connection allows.

STAY TUNED!!!


Leo and Lauren

Travel to Honduras

We have arrived in Honduras! The trip itself was fairly interesting. Lauren’s family dropped us off, some hugs and tears were exchanged and from that point forward, Lauren and I were on our own—well Lauren, myself and God of course. We used the self check-in which was way shorter than waiting in those other lines to receive the assistance of an American Airlines employee. We then had to have 4 of our bags checked so we waited in a short line for that. When our bags were weighed, we were informed that 2 of them were over the 50lb. limit set forth by the FAA and were asked to fix it. We stepped aside with all of our luggage and began shifting luggage between bags in hopes of keeping all of them under the weight limit. After some strategic movement, two of our bags were a couple pounds under while one was 49.5lbs and the other was exactly 50lbs. We squeezed right by the weight limit and went through the security check-point upstairs.


Our plane left on time and Lauren’s head went right for my shoulder to try and catch some shut-eye during the flight. I tried also tried to get some sleep, but wasn’t as successful as Lauren. We arrived in Miami, Fl at 6:30am east coast time. I have had a cold recently and I believe that contributed to my left ear staying plugged during our assent and descent during our travels. It felt like someone was pushing a knife deeper into my ear. Lauren called her father (a doctor) to see what he recommended we do. He suggested purchasing a decongestant such as Sudafed to alleviate my ear pressure. Lauren and I started wandering around the airport looking for somewhere that had a decongestant such as this. It felt like we walked all over the airport before, at the last place we were going to look, we found a pack of Sudafed! We bought it and gladly paid the $8 it cost. On the flight from Miami to Tegucigalpa I didn’t notice the painful pressure building in my ear, so I’m guessing that it did its job.


Our flight from Miami to Tegucigalpa (commonly referred to as “Tegus”) was shared with the entire Honduran men’s soccer team returning from winning the national title against Chile in Miami. I sat next to one of the players, but since I know nothing about soccer, I didn’t bother him with questions or autographs. The flight was quick and little sleep took place between take off and landing. We waited in line to go through customs in Honduras and were both granted a 90 day visa to remain in the country. All of our luggage arrived safely (with the exception of some broken glass) so all we needed to do now was put our bags through the x-ray machine and find our driver Norman.


It was difficult to find our driver because the lobby was packed with people and media that had come to see the Honduran soccer team that shared our flight. We kindly asked people to move by saying “Con permiso” as we walked by. We found our driver, exchanged some cash for the super market, and left the airport.


The supermarket was only about a mile from the airport and our driver simply waited in the car while Lauren and I shopped. We kept tabs on what everything cost so that we could stay under the limit of what we had on hand. Since we need to get cleaning supplies as well as food, we were very limited on what we actually bought. Much of what we had on the list was not purchased (i.e. cereal, eggs, etc.) We spent L2,120.00 which converts to about $112.50 U.S. We wanted to be sure to still have the money we needed to pay our driver, plus money for food on the way back in April. We loaded up the car and began our 1 ½ hour drive to the orphanage.


Driving in Honduras is very different than driving in the United States…depending on what part of the country you live in I guess. There are no painted lines on the road and people commonly pass each other while driving on the wrong side of the road. The fastest driver is king and it would seem that people are earning points in an unseen videogame each and every time they honk their horn. There is probably one dog on the street to every car on the street so they become obstacles on the road. Many people in Honduras ride their bike as a form of transportation so that is another thing to watch out for while driving. We were stopped at only one police checkpoint during our drive to the orphanage and we were let go after about 3 minutes.


Norman got us to the orphanage in a timely fashion and we were met by Katja (one of the long-term volunteers) who gave us the keys to our home for the next 3 months. We’re staying in a two bedroom apartment duplex on “the farm”. We unloaded our luggage and gave Norman the $80 U.S. he required to drive us to the supermarket and orphanage. We met our neighbors—Tammy and Chris as well as their son and students that came with them. They gave us a few tips to Honduran living at the orphanage and told us to come by any time if we had questions. After unpacking most of our luggage and situating our room, we went over to the short-term volunteer house as we were invited over for dinner. I had never been so excited to eat in all my life! We had a chicken/vegetable soup, rice, roll and some canned mixed-fruit. I ate up knowing that we didn’t have much food in our house. The orphanage owner and his wife also provided us with a cake that was baked in the town (Guaimaca) outside the gates.


We went to a bible study put on by the visiting group at 7:30pm and felt at home because their group is about as big as our Sandals group was in August. They also had fun personalities like our group did. They made jokes and just enjoyed each other’s company. Their group is from Georgia and will be here until Sunday. I felt bad because I was nodding off from time to time despite my attempts to stay awake. I had been going on only a combined total of a few hours of sleep and was ready to hit the hay. When we got back to our house, Lauren and I got ready for bed. We put in an episode of “The Office” on my laptop and watched it on our California King (i.e. two twin bunk beds pushed together) under our romantic mosquito net. I pretended to be awake when Lauren would pick up her head off my chest and look at me to see if I was awake. I made sure to wake up when the episode music began to play at the end of the show so that I could turn off the computer.


That will be all for now, but stay tuned for the next blog which will include some interesting stories about animals…you won’t want to miss that! We appreciate your prayers as always.