Coming to this trip, I said that I’d take any task or duty as lessons from God. Interestingly enough, I was mostly assigned to in-house duties for the first few days. On day 1, after worship, orientation, and lunch, I was part of the team that organized evangelism materials because the car arrangement fell through. Everyone was supposed to do visitations, inviting people to the evangelistic series that would start the following night.
Naomi said that when you visit people there, they will invite you in and serve you some food. They don’t have much, but they will serve whatever they have. It’s important for us to accept it. It’s important for you to accept who they are so they can accept who you are.
I actually wanted to go door-to-door.
We were done relatively quickly and then had some down time in the afternoon. It felt weird. I spent some time reading. It turned out that this down time would be a rarity for the rest of the mission trip, which I was happy about.
I should mention the shower situation. For the girls, there are three bathroom stalls and three shower heads. The water was dammed from a creek upstream and channeled to the complex. That was the source of all running water in Buena Vista, which remained cold during the day and night. Showers were done in the dark, unless if you did it during the day, of course. Sometimes bugs and spiders would accompany you too. They didn’t bite.
They also have a stone-made pila where you wash clothes by hand.
A quick rain passed by. It was gone as quickly as it came.
Some people came back soaked from visitation. They air-dried themselves while hanging out with us. I met Ronny, a student at the Bible school there who was from Norway. Crazy life, crazy conversion story, crazy guy. He had lived there for about a year. He decided to go to Honduras without even being a Christian. He told me he was drunk on the plane to Honduras. God turned his life around in Buena Vista and he said, “I will not go back,” to his old life, that is.
Ronny Svensson is a total joker. He would crack himself up a lot and would see humor in Bible verses. One morning he told me he couldn’t stop laughing during his personal devotion from reading Matthew 15:11-14. He also found Proverbs 11:22 funny. He was right. That verse is hilarious.
“Do you want some guayaba?” That’s guava in Spanish.
Buena Vista property is also a guava plantation, which means guavas are everywhere. That’s snack available for 24/7, right off the trees. They wouldn’t hesitate falling on your head too. When that happens, you just hope that the impact would be in such a way that the overripe guava doesn’t splat.
They have mango trees too, although I was tragically disappointed when they said the mango season was over.
Guayaba
Ronny picked some green guavas because he preferred them over yellow ones. The advantage of eating green guavas is that most likely there’s not any worm in it. But they’re sour. When you pick the ripe, soft, and sweet yellow ones, beware of the worms. When it’s greenish yellow, then it’s perfection.
“Look, it’s a frog.” There were these tiny frogs there.
“It took me a year to get used to them.”
I was like, why should anyone get used to frogs?
“No, the guayabas.”
His randomness was quite amusing.
lucky you!