Our First Day on the Job

Monday started when Cuatro awoke at 4:30, which gave us a generous 3 hours to get ready before the start of school.:)  In fact, we put him down for his morning nap just before we left the house, and Tante Corrie stayed at the house with him while the rest of us walked down to greet the students and reconnect with the teachers.  It was so good to see them all again!!

Hubry is teaching 6 Social Studies classes in a row, with a 10 minute break after the first 3.  And he's doing it mostly in Spanish.  So by the end of his last class, his brain was hurting, and he felt pretty exhausted!

The kids and I helped Karen and her daughter Sarah with the arts and crafts classes.  They were making clay beads to string together necklaces.  Songbird helped the group from Mobile build a wall out of cinderblocks, and Raindrop, Bro, and I visited Hubry's class and students here and there until Cuatro awoke, and then Corrie and I switched places.

After lunch Sarah, who is 16 and wants to be a professional ballerina, shared the gospel message via a dance routine that she created.  It was beautifully done, and I'm pretty sure our little Raindrop thinks that Sarah hangs the moon!

After lunch I began the sea turtle project with the 7th graders.  I have 45 students in class at the same time, which is a lot for an art class, especially when it comes to tracking whether or not everyone is following along.  But overall they did a great job.  None of the students have ever seen / used oil pastels, so I'm excited to get to introduce them.  The teacher is so excited to have the watercolor paper, too.  She says it is really difficult to buy nice art supplies at a reasonable price in the city.

After school was over, we decided to take a family walk through the village to buy some Sprite at a Pulperia.  We wanted to show the kids the village, and the animals, and see if we could see any students while we were out and about.  Also, the backpack is one of the only ways we can contain Cuatro where he remains content.  We can't let him play on the grass because of all the ants.  And we have to be careful with the drop-offs and the dogs, and the chemicals, and the electric outlets (where he's already been shocked once) and, and, and...

He's waking up again.

Family walk

Chatting with girls outside the local elementary school 

So many beautiful butterflies

The Sabbath

I am so glad we came to Rio Viejo on a Saturday, so that our first day here was the Sabbath.  I remember the long school days and the hot Sun and feeling so exhausted from daily work, but the Sabbath is equally long and equally restful.

The government decides to save electricity around here by just turning all the power off for 8 hours at a time.  That, coupled with natural power outages, makes for power that works about 4 out of 7 days. Sunday morning they decided it would be a good time to save electricity, so off went the fans (and the oven that was cooking breakfast).  Somehow, even with the loud noise of dogs barking all around, Cuatro was still able to take cat naps throughout the day, which he needed after our long day of travel.

After waking up at 4:30, breakfast at 8:00 felt like an eternity away:)  By the time we gathered for a house church service, Cuatro was pretty much ready for his afternoon nap.

We spent most of the day getting to know the other group, lazing around on the hammocks, chasing Cuatro, and talking about the week ahead.  In the afternoon we went down the road for a swim in the river, which ended up being a raging river because of the storm from the night before.  We did get to play near the edges, and the children were able to collect some lovely stones.

Because we enjoy learning about birds together as a family, I thought it'd be fun to bring down Peterson's Bird guide to this region.  It's funny, but Hubry and I remember very little about the birds down here.  Even though we lived here for 14 months, I only remembered in specific seeing the Rainbow Macaw's of Copan Ruins, and hearing this enchanting Lark at the tip-top of our El Tigre hike.

Within our first 2 days here, the children had identified 8 different species, and had located multiple nests with babies in tact.  The birds seem so extravagantly dressed here.  They wear so much bright blue, green, yellow and red.  And they are everywhere!!  How could we have missed them before?

Here is Songbird's list:
Crimson-collared Taniger
Grackle
Chachalacha
Black-Headed Trogon
Lessens Mot-Mot
Great Kiscade
Various Hummingbirds
Egret
Pelican
Weaver Bird

And this is just the beginning!

We have also enjoyed watching the geckos in the window screens, gigantic toads, frogs (which we can not touch because many are poisonous), and some large fish in the Caribbean Sea.

Bird-watching above the school

The King's Institute

Do you see him?

Atlanta to Honduras

Saturday, July 29th

We left our house around 7 Am in the morning, and we arrived to our volunteer house in Rio Viejo around 6 PM in the evening.  After getting to the airport and having to wait in a long check-in line, we were told that they could find no ticket on record for our infant in arms.  After momentary panic, and 30 minutes of checking through our records and trying to find a paper trail, we ended up having to purchase another ticket for him.  I am so thankful it was only his ticket that was missing, and not an actual seat ticket, or we would have been in trouble.  We still aren't sure what happened, as Hubry made all the flight arrangements over the telephone (because we had an infant in arms!!!!!)  But I am thankful for a helpful Delta representative who spent a lot of time on our behalf.  And I am thankful that we still got to the gate in the nick of time.

After fighting loopiness for the first hour of the flight, Cuatro finally fell into a deep sleep.  The other children enjoyed having their own TV's and watching multiple movies.

When we landed, someone was waiting with a sign that had Hubry's name on it, which was very much a surprise to us.  He said he was there to take us to the ferry, so he took our bags and told us to follow him.  We did happen to see my sister in a crowd of people as we were rushing to follow Frankie, and called her hither.  Aside from Cuatro somehow wriggling out a leg hole of the backpack and almost choking himself (thank you kind lady in line behind us for catching this before it turned into a tragedy!!) we made it through customs without any issues.

Once we were safely in the van with all our luggage and Frankie, we were finally able to ask hime who he was and how he knew we were coming.  I, for one, would have like to know this before we got in the car with him, but it turned out for the best.  Apparently the school had arranged this ride for us, and we thought they were arranging our ride from La Ceiba.

The most exciting part of our journey was on the ferry.  Our two girls boarded the ferry with wiggly teeth, and left the ferry having lost their teeth!  Raindrop lost her tooth first, and after it came out she said, "This is such an important day for me.  It's my first time to lose a tooth, and my first time to go to Honduras!."

For Songbird it was her 10th tooth to lose, and she decided to throw her tooth into the Caribbean Sea!  "I think this would make a romantic story to tell my Grandchildren someday..."  We thought it would make a fun creative story as well - the eccentric travels of Songbird's 10th tooth...

The ride from La Ceiba to Rio Viejo is about 1.5 hours of extreme bumps going on average 15 miles per hour.  I had to strap Cuatro into the baby Bjorn and then hold his head steady to keep him from jostling around too much.  He was not happy about the situation, but finally fell asleep 15 minutes before we reached our destination.

Our hosts, Cindy and Dave, who are the school administrators, were so welcoming and had the volunteer house all ready for us and a delicious dinner as well.  There is another group from Mobile Alabama here this week as well, and within the group are three generations that have been coming to the school every Summer for 8 years now!

Because there's a 2 hour time difference, and it was a full day of travel, the kids were all asleep by 7:00, and we were asleep by 8:40.

Deboarding the plane on Roatan

Spotting their first exotic fish outside the ferry

Aboard the Roatan ferry