Above this are Padilla and Elmer, who the boys call "Shrek" because of his unnaturally large belly. Below are Brayan and Cristofer. Brayan is the most adorable little boy in the world, and everyone kind of just lets him do what he wants since he's so cute. He and Cristofer actually just got here about a month and a half ago, but they've both adjusted real well. And more good news: Cristofer finally got his cast off woohoo!
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be part of Emmanuel's first ever quinceañera party.
A quinceañera is a fifteenth birthday party for a girl, and it's a big deal in the Spanish-speaking world. It was thrown for a girl named Mersy who's in one of the classes I teach, and her sponsor paid for everything (dress, food, decorations, etc). Her sponsor was actually here in the volunteer house with me during my first week or so. His name is RJ, and I could tell then that he really cared about the girls he sponsored. The party started off with fourteen couples made up of her closest friends walking in, and then she and her date as the fifteenth couple.
It sounds kind of cheesy, but the party really was heart-warming, and I don't say "heart-warming" very often. Mersy talked to everyone about how even though she didn't have her family here to celebrate with, everyone at Emmanuel had become her new family. Me and the other volunteers acted as waiters and passed out food and cake and refilled drinks and stuff, and we even got to eat some of it too. We had some fried rice and bread, and although I had my doubts about Chinese food from Honduras, it was actually really good. I was also able to get a picture of two of the most adorable girls ever during the party, Yeimy and Yasmin. They're the daughters of a couple of staff members here named Neri and Danny.
I've debated not talking about this for the sake of not having my mom start freaking out, but I've decided to share anyways and just pray that she doesn't go and email Katja, the volunteer coordinator or something hint hint Sharon Finlayson do not email Katja or anyone else. Time for you all to see some of the creepy crawling creatures of Honduras! First off you can meet our pets.
These are some tarantulas that Eric and Michael found in the ditch they were digging for the water pipes. I tried feeding them a moth, but they wouldn't eat it. Unfortunately, they're all dead now. Sad day. We've also had some experiences with scorpions!
This is a scorpion that I killed at 3am the other night when I got up to go to the bathroom. No need to congratulate me, I already know I'm awesome. Eric wasn't so lucky in his first encounter with a scorpion here though because it happened to be in his pants when he put them on, so he got stung two or three times. The last creepy crawly creature is one that I thankfully haven't had any experience with: the torsalo. It's a type of botfly, and it has the nasty habit of laying eggs in human skin. The eggs grow into larvae and it swells up a bunch and you have to pop it out of your skin. I've heard of a lot of kids getting them, and it's pretty nasty looking. I'm hoping I'll continue to be torsalo-free for the rest of my time here.
I've been out of the country for the fourth of July for the past few years and have never been able to celebrate, but this year was different. We all put in about seven or eight dollars and the girl volunteers prepared a scrumptious fourth of July meal for the volunteers and staff. Seriously, it was frickin delicious. The guys grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, there was potato salad, cornbread, banana bread, chips, BBQ baked beans, brownies, and a wonderful concoction called "dump cake."
Everyone wore red, white, and blue, and even Dean (a Danish volunteer) was showing support for America!
Dean took one of the extra shirts here at the volunteer house and gave it a nice patriotic touch by writing things on it like "I <3 U.S." in red sharpie. I must say, Eric also pulled off his DAD shirt preeeeetty nicely. The celebration was really fun, and we all had a 90's nostalgiafest at the end listening to such classic artists as Britney Spears, Aaron Carter, and many more.
All of the volunteers have actually been hanging out a lot more lately, which I'm happy about. We've been doing a lot of bonfires, playing games and stuff, and we've actually started doing a volunteer bible study. I was able to play guitar for some worship songs, and one of us shares what God's putting on his or her heart. I've really enjoyed it and hope we continue to do it. Sorry no pictures though!
This past Wednesday was the birthday of one of the small boys named Julio, so Carol (the volunteer that worked with me in the small boys house for the first month and a half of my stay) and I decided to do something a little special for him. Carol had the idea of taking Julio and his siblings up to the store at the front of Emmanuel to buy them chips and drinks and just let them hang out with each other. Julio also decided to invite Pimba, the boy I talked about in the last post, "because he has a small head." Why that's a reason to invite someone, I don't know, but I was fine with it because I love Pimba. Julio has three other siblings, Oscar (in the pictures in the first post), Carlitos (their older brother who's about 12), and Yensi (one of the girls that was in the clinic in the post I did on June 8th). Yensi is shy but sweet, Carlitos is excellently behaved but still cool enough to have dance parties with me in the laundry room, Oscar is really sweet but tends to misbehave, and Julio is just weird (but in a funny/good way). It was really fun to see them all interact, especially since they're not normally around their sister that often, and Pimba was overjoyed. On the way there, he told me about forty times how excited he was to go to the "menda," which translates from Pimba language to Spanish as tienda, which translates from Spanish to English as "store." They all got their chips and drinks, we shared some ice cream, and we hung out until we had to leave so the kids could go eat lunch at their houses.
One word that's been coming up over and over again in my life is the word "faith." I'm still trying to figure out exactly what God's trying to teach me in all this, so I apologize if this is a bit rough or hard to follow. When we met for the first volunteer bible study, Eric talked about how so often we pray all these things but we don't have faith that God will actually do what we're asking Him. I do that all the time. I ask Him to heal someone who's sick, I ask him to reveal Himself to someone who doesn't know Him, I ask Him to work in me and through me, but so often I just say it with my lips and don't actually believe in my heart that He'll do it. I ask God to do all these things, never fully expecting them to actually happen, and I hate that. Honestly, sometimes it's really easy to just go on autopilot and say a "good-sounding prayer" that I address to God but is really me just talking to myself. I think that's a result of my lack of faith. If I really believed that God would listen to my requests and answer my prayers, I would be praying with so much more focus and sincerity.
"Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, 'Why couldn't we drive [the demon] out?' He replied, 'Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.'" (Matthew 17:19-21)
"He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all---how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32)
"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen." (Ephesians 3:20-21)
I think God's continuing this thing He's been doing in my life for the past year where He takes something seemingly simple that I think I understand completely and know everything about and then completely flips it over on me and shows me that I never really understood it with my heart. He did the same thing to me in Peru about realizing the beauty of lost people turning to God for the first time, during fall semester in regard to the power and importance of prayer, during spring semester teaching me to truly love Him with my mind rather than trying to learn apologetics so I don't look stupid or so I can win an argument, and so many other times with other issues. He humbles me and teaches me to understand things with my heart, and he's doing the same thing with the issue of faith right now. I don't get why I have so much difficulty putting faith in God and believing that He listens to me and will answer my prayers if I pray in faith, especially since I've seen Him be so faithful to me in my life already. For example, there was a pretty long period of time early in 2010 where I was just feeling really separated from God. No matter what I did, no matter how much I prayed, I just could not stop feeling utterly lost and incapable of finding God. I remember one time just sitting in my room for a few hours straight in silence begging God to say anything to me. I went to meet with some friends from church at D-group and had to try to hold back tears while I told them I was really scared that I didn't really have a relationship with God. The strange thing is, I don't really remember any huge moment of God appearing to me or anything, but while I was in Peru, I felt close to God and really knew I had a relationship with Him. That's when He started doing this whole reteaching-me-things-I-thought-I-already-knew thing, and ever since last summer I've been steadily growing deeper in my relationship with God, which never happened for any significant amount of time all throughout high school. I now know that it was the Holy Spirit forcing me to feel that loneliness and that separation from God so that I couldn't deceive myself and settle for something that wasn't Him. I don't know if it was that I didn't have a relationship with God before that period of loneliness early last year or if I had just wandered away from God's path, but that's really not all that important to me. All I know is that while I tried in vain to find God, He found me. The song "Late Have I Loved You" by Gungor (based off of the writings of Augustine) pretty much completely describes what happened to me. God promises that "if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deuteronomy 4:29). Jesus says, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened" (Matthew 7:7-8). I am in a completely different spot right now than I was a little over a year ago, and it's because God is ridiculously faithful to His promises. All that to say this: I've seen God's faithfulness and therefore have no excuse to doubt that He'll be faithful to the promises in those earlier bible verses.
"Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the skies." (Psalm 35:5)
It's funny, this is nothing close to what I originally intended on writing about in this blog. I guess God had different plans! Well, some prayer requests that I have at the moment would be: that the Lord would continue to teach me about faith and help my faith to grow every day, true humility and a pure heart so that the things I do can actually please God and be for His glory and not my own, and prayer that I would still be effective for His purposes in these last couple weeks here and not be distracted by homesickness or anything like that, so that I can finish the work that God has for me here. Thank you so much, and I'll see you all soon!
