Spiritual Lifting

Having never lived in another country, except Puerto Rico where I was born, I have been amazed and inspired by the faith and the religious customs of the people of Honduras.

Amid all the violence there seems to be  an oasis when you go to a Mass. True, that almost all the homilies do mention how we need to use our spiritual beliefs to help control the violence and to give a good example to the youth so that this vicious cycle stops.

There is one practice that gives me goosebumps every time  it is celebrated.  I have wished that I would have taken the camera to capture it. This morning as an afterthought I told Hernan I was going to take the camera just in case there was a presentation in church. I am so glad I did... a little baby  girl was presented today.

 In Honduras when babies are 40 days old they are brought to church to be presented to God. 

Much like Jesus was presented at the Temple.  

Mom, dad and sometimes siblings approach the altar, the priest blesses them and then  the priest  takes the baby and lifts  him/her up  to God and then presents  the baby to the congregation.  It is such an emotional moment and such a beautiful custom!

May God bless this faithful country and grant it peace ! May He bless all the babies and all the youth so they can make a  positive change in Honduras.

He never promised us a rose garden.....

As a mother of 7, many a time when going through all the joys and tears of motherhood,  I would repeat and sing to myself “He never promised me a rose garden”…

 But I think He did. You have to go through the thorns and get pricked by them before you can enjoy the roses!!

Now , being away from home for  seven  months and looking back at all we have lived in these months the same phrase came to my mind. “He never promised us a rose garden”.

Life has been bearable because Hernan and I are here together, many a time I have thought I would have asked for a reassignment or gone home a long time ago if it wasn’t because we have each other.

The violence in Honduras is so patent and I simply refuse to get used to it.

How can this situation be changed? 

 I hear that question at least once a week from someone.

 I don’t have answers, I only know that we meet beautiful people who live in fear, grateful people who shower you with hugs because they appreciate so much what you are doing and who almost constantly wonder why we are here.

 Beautiful children who act like every other child in the world but who will have to acquire a resiliency to be able to survive in a country ruled by “maras”(gangs) and “cicarios”(drug lords). I see them and I see our children and grandchildren in them, children playing, smiling and hoping.

I just pray that somehow something will happen so that God will shed His light on this country and these children can grow up in love and peace.

A week ago a photo appeared on the newspaper , children in a school sitting on the floor of their “classroom” because there were no desks  for that school! (And this is not an isolated  case!) There was a ray of hope when the next day there was an article about a financial institution and a private enterprise  that had donated some desks to two schools.

Maybe there is hope, maybe there is a rainbow in the horizon. Maybe….

Messages from above

It hasn’t been once or twice that we have been down in the dumps.

 Simply because things were not going the way we thought they would….and invariably we go to church and something in the Homily or in one of the songs speaks directly at us and we know we are OK.

About one and a half months ago someone hacked into Hernan’s email account. They sent an email telling all his contacts that he had been mugged and that though he was OK he needed money.

 Of course, Thanks to God Hernan is fine and, though the danger is out there, he was not mugged.

This happened at a time that we really needed prayers because we were not finding meaning in all that we were doing and had encounter some difficulties.

 I think the hacking of his email account was Heaven sent because Father Cook,our Pastor, mentioned at church what we were doing and also asked the people to pray for us.

 The GOOD LORD works in mysterious ways. Thanks for all your prayers. Keep them coming, we need them!!

 There are good days, great days and not so good days and we need the strength of your prayers to get through these.

Back to Teguz

Just returned from a short break.

We went to Guadalajara , Mexico and met with my brother and sister and Heidi ,our niece- god-daughter, to celebrate her graduation from the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara's School of Medicine..

It was great to see family and to take a break.....

But at the same time I felt very sad seeing Mexico and realizing that Honduras is so much, much, much poorer. In Honduras, you don't have to travel very far to see very poor barrios ("colonias"), In fact just minutes away from the center of Tegucigalpa you will find places where there is no pavement and the houses are very very poor. Where you can see and feel it is not safe to be there.

In Honduras you are greeted by armed security guards, with big guns, at almost every store entrance. You are asked to turned your cell phone off and you are searched with the wand before entering the banks.

It was with a little trepidation that I returned to Tegucigalpa. In January, we came and we had heard of the country's situation..... but now we were returning after having experienced the situation for over 4 months.

In some ways we want to help the poorest of the poor but we have realized that the poorest of the poor sometimes live in areas that we don't want to go to, and where we are not allowed to go to for our own safety. So for the moment we are ready to dive into our assigned tasks and try to fill our days as much as we can so that we can feel we are making a tiny difference. We are reaching very poor people in the National Center for Diabetics, Hospital Escuela and the Clinics in poor "colonias", but I am so very, very much aware that there are still so many, many, many more people that we will never, never be able to reach.

4 months and counting.....

It seems I kind of remember to write a blog  every month. Life is not that busy and I could certainly do it more often.  I have to admit I am guilty of not keeping my daily journal either. Sometimes things are not that easy and they seem to get bigger when we see them on writing. Maybe that is why I have not been writing that often.
I have to admit that if I had been here all by myself I probably would have requested to be relocated. Having each other has been a lifesaving gift. The violence is more than I could imagine. There has been 24 journalists killed in the last 24 months and none of these homicides have been solved.
We don't buy the paper everyday but maybe once a week just to get in touch with reality and not acquire a false sense of security and to realize that things are still as bad as they were the week before if not worse.
They surveyed the Hondurans to see if they were in favor of a curfew and about 90% were in favor.

This has made me think of the things I miss the most:

Family and friends (ALL MY CHILDREN,GRANDCHILDREN, ALL THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS- IN- LAW,  BROTHER, SISTER, etc. etc. etc.) yes you all!!!

Our extended Church family of St. Leo the Great in Winston-Salem, and our adopted church families from Our Lady of Mercy  and Our Lady of Fatima daily Masses.

We miss our "reserved pew" at St. Leo's, where Mary  Gallagher,would be sitting behind us and we would be joined by our son Hernan and his wife Lesha. ( We have adopted some pews here in Tegucigalpa but they are not the same).

We miss the way Father Cook begins each Sunday his celebration of the Mass "as we live in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (paraphrased)

Being able to go downtown and walk without fear. We have our own curfew since we have no transportation except our God given feet we do all our outings before 6PM and mostly around where we live. We walk to church about 1.4 miles back and forth and the same for groceries etc. Hernan walks to the Hospital Escuela in the mornings and  a motorist  takes us to the clinic where we give the Diabetes  and  the other talks

and........

I miss our down comforter, having good  water pressure for a nice hot shower  and my oven!  
I will either become lazy about cooking or cook up a storm when I get back!!!

March 2012

March was a busy month helping with a vaccination initiative that took us to San Pedro Sula to help monitor the vaccination process. We went to several schools and the kids were all so beautiful 

(they are kids and I am partial to kids!)

We went to some schools in an area called El Merendon, it is a mountain,and the ride was very ,very bumpy, beautiful but very bumpy.



I tried to download a video but was unable to.


The weather up there was very nice and a few degrees cooler than in the city. The schools were so poor. There was a school that had two classrooms, in one they had 45 children in the other there were supposed to have 64. The children were not there that day because the teacher was sick and they don't have substitute teachers. Can you imagine a regular size classroom (maybe smaller )with 64 children? The children were very happy and while we waited for some preparations they showed us some games
 they play at recess.







Another school was even smaller they had about 12 kids and even though the school was supposed to start at 1PM it was about 2 o'clock and the kids were trickling in.
In another school while we were monitoring, we saw this little boy climb a tree outside the school's fence. Lo and behold the teacher sees him and very casually and non threateningly told him that even though he was skipping school that day he had to come in to get his shot. I thought it was funny that he was so curious about what he was missing and got caught to get his shot.
The violence in San Pedro Sula is so much higher than in Tegucigalpa that we were very happy to leave and come back "home".
There were some faces that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Something in their facial expression that was quite hard to pinpoint.

Holy Week in Tegucigalpa

Last week was Holy Week and in Honduras it is celebrated like a National Holiday. No one works and schools are out. People leave the capital to go back to their hometowns and the ones who can, go on vacation to the Bay Islands or to the beach.
The ones that stay participate in the religious customs which are quite a few. Among one of the showiest ones are the carpets made of colored sawdust. On Wednesday our landlords took us downtown to see the people making them. Oh, how I wanted to get down on all four and help!, I guess it was so obvious that Gloria (our landlady) mentioned that it looked like I wanted to join in. There were youth groups from churches and Scouts from Honduras and other people making them.





Then on Thursday they took us again to see them  when they were all finished and  before the procession would go through. My favorite one was "La Dolorosa", a Virgin with a tear rolling down her cheek, quite an artwork.



They cover the streets of downtown Tegucigalpa where the procession of the Holy Sepulchre is going to be going through, from the Cathedral to the  Church of the Calvary.  Needless to say once the procession goes through the streets all the artwork is gone. It is quite an amazing site.