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To those whom it may concern;

You may not know I went on a mission trip with some people from my church to Honduras, but i would like to share with you what happened and some of the stuff that we did. Here is a list for the people who were a part of our team there.

Sam was the leader and he is very tall. There isn’t much to say about him but he is very sweet and he loves God a lot.

The co leader was Duane, and he is also very tall he is sort of middle aged whereas Sam is in his 20’s. Duane is also a very caring man and they both have a very healthy sense of humor.

Sam and Duane are both married, Sam’s wife is Megan who I am already friends with because she is a youth leader at our church and she is a very fun person to be around, I also borrowed my homecoming dress from here since we are like the same size.

Duane’s wife is a very small Chinese woman named Julie; she has 2 daughters and is a lot like any other mom.

The pastor of our church named John also came and he is really fun, he’s a hard worker and is nothing like most pastors, he’s also got a good sense of humor.

The pastor’s wife Anne also came and she is a preschool teacher and very sweet, and she loves children so much. Even though she doesn’t speak Spanish she speaks child so all the kids understand her.

Also a man named Nate came and I didn’t like him at first, but I ended up really getting to know him and I like him a lot better now. He is just a very fun all around loving guy and he speaks Spanish very well.

Michael came too and he is pretty quiet and I didn’t get to know him very well but he was a pretty cool person from what I saw.

Mark is the director of the midweek program at our church and he is a very funny person and always making jokes and fun to be with.

Toni is a woman who wasn’t from our church but she still came. She is a mom of 1 girl named Taylor.

Kyla has been a friend of mine since 2nd grade and it was really cool to not be the only teenager there. She is also fun to be with and she sort of gets emberaced a lot but it was still fun.

Kyla’s older sister Bekah also came and it was really cool to get to know here because they get along like best friends its easy to hang out with both of them and we all had a lot of fun together.

Kyla and Bekah’s dad John came too and he is a physicist and a professor at a college in Seattle.

Other than that the only people from Washington were me and my dad who is a 10 year old in a 40 year olds body.

Mario was our translator who lives in Mexico and usually does missions for merge there as a translator but he was with us last year in Playa del Carmen and liked our church so much he requested to come with us to Honduras. He is not very apathetic but usually shows no emotions unless he is at soccer games, or very, very happy or sad.

Efrain (Eff-rye-een) is the pastor of the church there in Honduras but they don’t really have a church, just a spot of land that is flattened and then a little hill about 10 yards and another flattened spot with a tin roof and like 8 beams and that’s where church is for them. Efrain is a very ambitious guy and he just loves God so much. He is very childish in his humor and he is very fun. His father is also Efrain and he drove us around in a van everywhere and his mother cooked us dinner every night and we ate at her house which was in the city.

If you drive about 15 minutes from the hotel we stayed you can pass Efrain’s house and go the Los Pinos, which is where we worked. If you climb up like 8 stone stairs and walk like 10 yards that’s the school that they had built, unfortunately only about half of the kids there can afford to go to school. But then if you climb up this ridiculously long hill that was crazy hard for even me to climb and it’s a mile long and about 500 feet high that’s the church. And these little kids do it bare foot every day multiple times. Carrying food or even their younger siblings.

Anyways one more guy was David (Dah-veed) who is also in his mid 20s and amazingly funny. His English along with Efrain’s is very, very good. David is such a clown its just always fun to be with him.

Day 1- We didn’t do any work, we just took 2 trips from the air port to the hotel, checked in and went to dinner at Efrain’s house.

Day 2- Work: as far as what they had done it was like nothing. There was half the trench for the wall dug, so we dug that, and moved this pile of sand to the side away from the dirt wall and trench of the church, and I bent rebar, and helped cut the ties.

Lunch: for lunch there was food provided by merge (the group that runs the missions business we chose) and Alleyda helped prepare it. She also works there at the church.

Outreach program: after we work and lunch there was a small break and then we did a children’s service outreach thing, the first day was a health and hygiene theme. First we did coloring and then there were stations, sort of like a VBS (vacation bible school) and Nate did a memory verse, there was a little healthy food puppet thing, and an active game, (red light green light) and Kyla and I put cinder blocks in a wall and we sat in the trench in the shade and did a puppet show and of course the kids loved it. And you can’t understand them because they talk so fast, just like the little kids here! So they would b like *in Spanish* ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’ ‘*gasp* Si??’ ‘*Excited* blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,’ ‘ohhh! Es bueno??’ ‘No…’ ‘No, no es bueno…’ ‘Oh si, si, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,’ and so on. And it like totally works. (Yes I just said ‘like totally’.)

Day 3- Work: On the third day we tightened the ties on the rebar for the columns for the wall, and also cleared the floor and made it level. We also tied a long column to go along the length of the wall to go in the trench. Since we didn’t have a cement mixer, we mixed cement on the ground of the lower level of the property, and then carried it in buckets up the hill to put it in the trench. Also to save cement we moved rocks to put in the trench. By the time we were done with that, since the floor level was a like a step higher on the left side, the cement was level but not yet ready to build the wall.

Lunch: Lunch this day was not fun at all. It was very evident that there were the Hondurans eating and then us eating, and not together. Also after lunch today, I took a nap on the floor of the church.

Ministry: The theme of this day’s ministry was respect so we made bracelets to represent respect for different things (God, community, others and self) so I tied bracelets for people, and colored pictures with the kids.

Day 4- Work: This day we finished the foundation of the wall and put up rebar for the cinder blocks to be stacked. We also tied rebar in a grid on the floor. Also the large pile of sand was moved to the lower level of the property to level the floor for another trench for the wall on that side of the building. Unfortunately we didn’t get that trench dug.

Lunch: Lunch this day was much better in that we all ate together with the Hondurans and us.

Ministry: Today was the last day of children’s ministry, so we had a carnival day that was health and respect themed so we still had stations except they were like balloon animals (Kyla and Bekah knew how to make balloon animals and Mario used to be a clown). The station I was at was face painting. So Julie and me sat under a tree in the shade and painted faces. The awesome thing about that was that I got to see almost every kid, and we took pictures of all of them and we are going to show them in our church so people can choose a kid to pray for.

Day 5- Today was Easter Sunday and the end of lent!! Which meant coffee for me!! This day, we didn’t do any work, because it was Easter Sunday, but we had church at the site, and it was amazing! First we prayed together and there were like 4 older women in the back who prayed for us so it was prayers in English and Spanish and these other women praying for us themselves out loud and you could just feel God’s presence, and then we Sang songs together, and we sang ‘open the eyes of my heart’ and ‘the air I breath’ and it was being sang in English and Spanish and it like all blended together, and we sang for the church ‘I love you, Lord’ in Spanish for them. And then we all sang together.

After we sang our pastor gave a sermon and Mario translated it. And he did my favorite story thing. He pulled out a new 100 Lempira (about 5 dollars) and he asked if the congregation would like him to give it to Efrain for the church. And they said yes, and he crumpled it up and asked again and they said yes, and then he threw it on the ground and stomped on it, and asked again and they said yes; and he explained that even though sometimes we may feel crumpled or dirty or stomped on, but God still sees our true value. Then he gave it to Efrain.

After church we did house visits where we broke into 4 groups and went to people’s houses, and they served us lunch, and it was really cool and humbling to like see how these people live. Still people would think that since these people are poor they are sad or don’t have anything, but they do have a lot in the way of family and talents. The house I went to was Juan and he had a prosthetic leg, but he was a carpenter and one of the foremen who were working with us. We got to see some pictures of things he had made and he made a guitar and a violin all by hand, and a bookcase, and a dresser and all this amazing stuff with no training at all.

After House visits we had sort of an excursion day, and some of us went to a soccer game that was a qualifying round for the world cup for 17 and under. It was Honduras versus Mexico and of course Mario was for Mexico, and he as one of 5 people in a 25000 audience who was cheering for Mexico. Including us gringos! Anyways, Efrain and his younger brother was there and his brother was 15 (my age) and very cute and his name was Wakein *sigh* too bad he only spoke Spanish and I don’t… Oh well. Back to the game, it was a tie, 0 to 0 and Honduras was able to advance.

Day 6-Work: Today tied more rebar for the floor and finished that part. Also a truck came like half way through the day and we set up an assembly line and moved and stacked in a pile-ish stack 400 cinder blocks, and 14 100-pound bags of cement. Then we mixed all of the cement.

Lunch: I ate lunch with everyone this day and it was fun. Most like lunch every other day.

Ministry: Today was Youth ministry, which was much different than children’s, in that it was more like teaching, rather than interactive stuff. But I helped anyways and it was fun. We did the bracelet thing again and I made one and helped tie them.

Day 7-Work: The day before this we had poured along zig zag lines to make paths for us to walk along, also to fill in and level the rest of the floor. By the end of this day almost the entire floor was poured, and half of the wall up.

Ministry: I wasn’t there for this ministry day (it was being held at the school they are renting at the bottom of the hill) but Megan (the leader of youth ministry) was teaching it. Mario wasn’t there when they were leaving so she asked Efrain to translate and he said sure, but then she said it was about God’s plan for sex within marriage, and his eyes went all wide and he said very slowly ‘Oh… Mario would be good for that…’ Because in Honduras, Youth is considered about 13 to married and Efrain is probably still considered youth since he isn’t married yet! (Lol funny story… I think at least…) but it ended up that only 3 people were there so they played Frisbee instead.

And after that we had a barbeque for the people of the church and the bano family. (Bano is actually spelled with a ~ over the n but I don’t know how to type that, and it means bathroom in Spanish. This family let us impose and use their bathroom every day when we needed to.) It was very fun and good that we didn’t scare them off with our horrible American mystery meat food…

Day 8- Today we didn’t do any work, because we went to Valley of the Angels, which was more of a touristy place but I got some cool stuff. And then we went to the hotel and then to the airport. But I have a really weird story about the trip home! At the gate when we were waiting to get on I saw this guy who was at the hotel we were staying at and he was sitting kind of close to us and I thought he was like following us because I say him check in and sit close to us at breakfast twice and sit right behind me like he was watching me in the computer room. And so we get on the plane and they were going to leave but then they said ‘we have to go back to the gate there has been a disturbance on the plane’ so we go back to the gate and they start pulling a bunch of people off the plane and they pull of dude and he gets back on after a while and reaches up to the over head bin but he’s like pawing at the part under the latch like he doesn’t know where it is and then he reaches his arm back and punches this dude in the face and he just starts wailing on this other guy and then they pull him off and then we leave.

So I talked to Julie cause she was like 2 rows in front of him and she said that he and they guy in front of him were arguing about the other guys kid being fussy, and he was like cursing and stuff at this guy to get his kid to shut up. And the guy behind him hit in in the head to make him shut up cause he was being really mean and a lot of people were like they have to get this guy off the plane so when he got back on he was punching just some random guy and it was like really weird… so after that we had a 10 hour layover in Miami, and I slept on the cold hard airport floor, but it was still ok. But then our flight the next day got canceled, so the airport services got everyone a free hotel room in this really fancy hotel that was really cool. And it was so awesome it was like over 300$ a night hotel for free. And then we went home and it’s very good to be home. I recommend a mission trip to all Christians who are serious about their faith.

if you want to see pictures, you can go to my journal, it has a link to a website of our blog. mrgreen

well it makes sort of a difference, cause i went with my dad and 2 mother figures that my mom is friends with (i say figures cause one doesnt have kids) so she felt a little better about me going.

I've always wanted to go one a missions trip but 1. They
re too expensive for me right now and 2. my mum doesnt like the idea of me going off to another country where in her words "I might get hurt". smile Maybe someday though.