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.