Ranas Que Echan Leche y Algunas Otras Cosas

I am a murderer.

The other day I saw a frog in the area where the small boys normally play, and I was ready to start playing around with it when Suly (one of the girls that works in the kitchen at the small boys house) told me that that kind of frog can echar leche. Turns out a lot of the frogs in Honduras release a milky substance that can burn you. Fun stuff, right? We decided that we needed to get it away from the area the boys play in, so I used a shoe to try to move it away. After five minutes of trying to get it to go away without getting burning frog poison on myself, Suly decided that we needed to kill it. I didn’t want to kill it because I like animals too much, so Suly started throwing rocks at the frog unsuccessfully. It even got pinned against the wall with a rock once and we thought it was dead, but it somehow emerged unscathed. After a lot of persuasion, I got convinced to kill it myself. I took a big rock in my hands, lifted it above my head, choked back some bitter tears, and threw it down on top of the frog. BOOM! The deed was done. Some frog guts looked like they were spilling out and some of its skin was peeled off. Two guilt-ridden minutes later, the unthinkable happened-- the frog came back to life and started trying to escape! We freaked out and I threw the rock on it a couple more times until I was sufficiently convinced of its deadness. The memory of that day still haunts me, but at least I can release all of my pent-up emotions here. I would post a picture of the incident, but it was a bit too gruesome for some of you to handle (and I didn’t have my camera with me at the time).

In other news, I’ve finally settled into a bit of a schedule! I stay at the little boys’ house during meal times to help give out food and clean up afterwards, and I’ve been teaching English classes for a little less than two weeks now. I love the boys at the house I work at, and I’ve actually learned most of their names! There’s Oscar (the boy in one of the photos in my last post) who runs up to me for a hug every time I see him and makes sure to always say hello and goodbye to me, Carlitos, who likes to press a button on a toy truck that plays music and have dance parties with me in the laundry room, Rudi, who thanks me in French whenever I give him food, Vaca, whose real name is Jefferson but gets called “cow” by everyone (including staff) even though he’s one of the smaller kids (I’ve still yet to hear the full story of how he got that name), and many more. I really love getting to know the unique personalities of the different kids. I want to take pictures of them, but it’s hard to do that without causing chaos. Once you take one kid’s picture, they all want their picture taken. So far, I’ve just been able to sneak a photo of all of them watching the movie Spirit (which they were all singing along to) in the area where they eat their meals.

English classes have been going pretty well so far. It’s kind of strange because there are actually a lot of students who are my age or older, but they’ve been pretty respectful for the most part. Right now I’m helping a lady named Candice teach the class, but I’ll be teaching it all by myself once she leaves in the end of June. I definitely have a lot more respect for teachers now, because being a good teacher is tough. Especially when you’re trying to make class semi-bearable but have to teach using a workbook that is about 95% exercises, and especially when said workbook is littered with ridiculous grammar and spelling mistakes. For example, a sentence on page five says “She will stay ¡f your’re not here.” Yup, that’s definitely an upside down exclamation point instead of the letter “i”. And yes, that definitely says “your’re” instead of “you’re”. Example number two! The text on page eleven says “Mrs. Mary Scott lives with her husband Andrew and her two young”. The rest of the paragraph is missing. It continues to say that “In the morning she usualy wakes up very early to look after her children and prepare brekfast for them. While Susy and Tom are in schoo; Mrs. Scott must do a lot of things at home.” The especially fun part is that my book is different from the one the students have for some reason, so I’ll start explaining one of the many errors and then proceed to get a lot of confused looks because it’s written correctly in their books. Oh, Honduran education system, why must you frustrate me so?


Overall though, things have been going really well. Teaching English to the 7th-11th graders gives me a good opportunity to get to know some of the older kids. I’m also gonna be playing soccer on a team with some of them in a tournament tomorrow against some teams from outside the orphanage. It’s not quite the big, grassy field that I’m used to though, so we’ll see how that goes. Here’s where we’ll be playing:

A couple of other things real quick:

On Friday mornings they have what’s called “big circle time,” which is where everyone in the orphanage meets in a big circle (hence the name) in the yard and sings and listens to some kids recite Scripture they’ve memorized and a person preaches a short message. The circle’s pretty dang huge though, so I wasn’t able to get the entire thing in the picture.

Here’s a picture of the guys’ volunteer house and one of the room that I’m staying in. It’s a pretty nice place, and right now there are only five guys in the house. The only bad thing about the house is that it’s at the top of a pretty big hill, but it’s ok, I need the exercise.

As far as prayer requests go, I would really appreciate if you guys could pray for God to teach me genuine humility as I serve here, for good memory with all the names, for me to be the best teacher I can be for the kids in the English classes, for God to give me opportunities to positively impact the kids here for His glory (especially some of the older ones since they don’t get near as much attention as most of the younger kids), and whatever else may be on your heart. Thank you so much for your prayers, I really appreciate(/need) them! 

And so it begins!

I flew out of Atlanta to Tegucigalpa at 10am then met up with a team that’s going down there for a week so that I could ride a bus with them to the orphanage.

The bus ride took a couple hours, but it was pretty interesting. It’s always really cool to see in person what another country looks like. There were a lot of houses really close together on big hills, and it kind of reminded me of the scenery in parts of the movie Fast Five. In case you haven’t seen that movie (and even if you have), here’s a picture:

There were places with a lot more houses than that, but it was hard to get a good picture while the bus was moving.

When I got to the orphanage I realized that it was a bit bigger than I thought it would be. The entire place is like 9,000 acres or something, and it kind of feels like a small town or city. They’ve got about 6-8 houses for the children, a girls’ volunteer house, a boys’ volunteer house where I’m staying with a few other guys, a team house for people that are here for a short time with their church, a school, a church, a farm, staff housing, La Tienda (a small store that you can buy food from), a main office, and probably a lot more that I don’t even know about yet. But now the moment you’ve all been waiting for...

The kids! There are almost 500 kids here, and they all want you to know their names. So far I have about 20 down, only 400-and-something more to go! I really can’t wait until I know a good bit of them. Most of the kids are really friendly. Some of the kids are a little too friendly (aka 16 and 17 year old girls that try to hold my hand and make me feel really sketchy). I’ve had a ton of fun playing soccer and getting to know the kids so far though. I’m supposed to be meeting with the staff at some point to figure out where they’ll have me working most of the time, but no one has said anything to me or Carol (another volunteer that got here the same day as me) about it, so for now I’ve just been following Allan and his dad (two of the volunteers I’m living with) around and playing with kids**. Any of you who know me well at all will know that I’ve pretty much been in heaven since I get to use Spanish so much here. It’s preeeetty much the best thing ever. I especially like hearing things in Spanish that aren’t meant to be understood by me and the other volunteers (like when Allan got called a pig the other day for sucking the juice out of a lime). I still can’t understand everything, and there are about a billion words I don’t know, but I’m able to have conversations with people, and that’s ok for right now. 

I’m really glad that God has pushed me out of my comfort zone in coming here. It’s an amazing place, and I’ll hopefully be growing a lot in my faith over the next two and a half months. It’s a beautiful truth to know that regardless of where I am on the planet or how far away I am from friends and family, God is always with me. “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:9-10). One thing that I need some prayer for is that God would help me to see these kids as he sees them and truly have compassion for them. The kids always seem so happy that it’s really easy to forget that their parents are dead, in jail, can’t provide for them, or just plain don’t want them. They’ve grown up with some really rough circumstances. I’ve already heard of one girl who saw her mother murdered right in front of her, and apparently stories as gruesome as that aren’t that uncommon of a thing here. I think a decent number of kids have been involved in gangs as well. That’s why I don’t want this to just be a summer spent playing with some kids in a foreign country; I want this to be a summer where God pours out His love through me, because these kids truly, desperately need that.

**Update (I don’t feel like rewriting the other stuff): I met with a lady named Katja today with two other volunteers and she gave us the rundown on what we’d be doing here. I’ll be working a lot with the small boys house (the boys have given me the name Chimichanga), and I’ll be helping teach English classes for 7th-11th graders (and eventually teaching them by myself!). It’s nice to actually start getting a schedule instead of wandering aimlessly all the time/shadowing Allan and his dad. Well, that’s all for now! I’ll try to post on here a good bit, but I’m using someone else’s internet right now so I don’t want to get on too much. ¡Hasta luego!