Catch up

Well, I am a bit behind on posting, am I not?

Here we see the airport and the celebration for American airlines coming back to Toncontin for the first time since May 29th....this happened to be the plane the Pleasant View Baptist group headed back on...thus me being there to take the picture of the fire department and their showy way of saying welcome back. The co-pilot flew a Honduran flag out his window of the plane, and the captain remarked how landing there was different, but not hard (he supposedly had her down and sewn up in 700 meters....the "short" runway is 1800 meters long.)

Busy busy busy as usual. Sunday was a clothing distribution after Church (which Soren and Cecilia enjoyed....Leila and Valerie also came with us to take advantage of the trip to visit Lilian at the treatment facility where she is staying, still struggling with that by the way) and then came yesterday and today, construction mostly yesterday. You can see from the picture here that the beams are going up after a lengthy welding process to get ready for the roof. Slow and steady, as it were.

Construction for this group meant: more fill for the new clinic rooms, building the road leading up to the clinic, and some prep work for the footer on top of the pre-fab wall that still needs to be done. All these groups this summer, all the work done, and I still look around and see so much to be done. Ah, all in good time I suppose. This picture shows the before of the work they did....everything you see where they were standing was finished in concrete by the time they were done today.

Today after lunch we went to do corn distribution...this time going with the local Church's evangelism ministry team to reach out to Church members with need. The hospitality we received was humbling to say the least, and I got to see and visit in some homes that I had not seen for quite some time...including one we visited our first week here, eight years ago this week. Funny how that works out. Even the baby that we examined because they were afraid she was blind....was nine and standing in front of me when we were there (extreme right of the photo.) Also note the Meg Ryan sans blonde hair lookalike playing with the baby. Despite the baby being ready to walk out with her, Afton will have to return to the US without her and her squeeky shoes.

Well, to add to the excitement, we got the call while doing that distribution that the clothing container was finally cleared to us, so we beat foot over there before 5:00 (4:52 we arrived by my watch) and began the trip up to the property, with the very slow, and not very talented driver. Given the condition of the road to get to the clinic, we quickly decided with all the above that we would have to park the container down by the bus stop, and use both the Fords to drive the clothes up. It took less than three hours...with the group and several Hondurans working as fast as they could the entire time. Everyone's attitudes were individually and as a group...amazingly good. We even all waited until we were done (a little before 8:00 I believe) to eat supper.
(flash photography makes this looks like they could actually see what they were doing in the dark.)