This past week my team finally got to get out of Tegucigalpa. We went to visit a small village about 4 hours away called Teupasenti. This has probably been my favorite week of ministry yet. We stayed with a young couple, Siamara and Oswaldo on their property which included a nice little house, a small field, and their small church. A pastor at the church named Hiro took care of my team's ministry while we were there. We mainly did house visits in the mornings and evenings, but we also ran games for children's ministry, helped out at a lower school, and even did community service projects. I think what I really liked about this week of ministry is how simple life was. Sure I've already been experiencing that to a degree at Zion's Gate in Tegucigalpa, but really we're only like 20 minutes out of the city which is infested with tons of American food chains, wifi hotspots, and even malls with all the same clothes stores and luxuries You'd find at home. In the village, however, life was truly simple. What modern conveniences they did have were somewhat strange to me though. Almost all of them had cellphones (though outdated compared to our iPhone 5s), satellite televisions, and some even had cars or motorcycles. But besides those things life was very simple. One of my favorite things about it was that there's a much stronger emphasis on people. Friends, family, strangers, whatever. The Hondurans in teupasenti just love people. We were welcomed like highly esteemed guests absolutely anywhere we went. I'm usually not a big fan of doing house visits just to pray for people because I feel like it's to some degree a cheap way to feel like a good Christian without doing harder more time consuming ministry. But in the village it was different. These people just loved hanging out and talking with us even if it meant they'd never see us again. They loved talking about themselves, listening to us, and just being in company is what I really think it boiled down to. By the end of the week we had great memories of meaningful house visits that brought about emotional and even physical healings. In addition, my team grew close to the teenagers involved in the church and I got to jam and lead worship with them a couple times. That was a huge blessing for me.
Besides that I took lots of showers by pouring buckets of water over my body, I helped Kaitlin kill a chicken and prepared it for a lunch, and I even pranked the girls on my team by sneaking a live chicken in their room in the middle of the night with my good Honduran friends, Henry and Arielle. Just a completely normal week on the mission field.
Now since I've been back my team has done more ministry at the loyalty school and more work on the property with Reynaldo. This week we worked with him on the foundation of a girls home for Cassie and all the many girls she's going to pull out of Los Pinos to live with her so she can take care of them. It's been such an honor to be apart of a project as great as this. Next week however, is our last week of ministry here in Honduras. My team is going back to Los Pinos. Please keep us in your prayers that we will finish strong here and embrace the drastic changes that await us in thailand. I really can't imagine leaving this place.
