Life in Honduras

Hi yáll. I think that I have found an apostrophe an this computer! But maybe it is an accent...

I had an interesting event yesterday - the Lord is always bringing such lessons into my life, it seems that all I have to do is complain about something, and He will faithfully bring it full circle so that I can eat my own words... Well, yesterday was no exception. I had complained to Wanda that it seemed to me that the people that I am around are not making enough of an effort to understand my broken Spanish. I get so close, I say, generator is pretty well the same in both languages, but they will not try to understand, they look at me funny and then, once they understand, they say the same word the same way that I just did, and everyone laughs and understands... Well, Harrison and I were returning to the mission house after dropping something off at the work site, when the phone rings, Harrison points to a different turn and tells me that we need to go to the Clinic, clinicos, to get some bandaidos or something like that. I figure okay, it´s a clinic, it would be natural to get Band Aids. We go past the door of the clinic - I´m now confused and we walk down a 45 degree downhill grade for about 200 yards, I look confused, so Harrison tries to translate into English for me, says something about going to get crowbars. I´m thinking, why are we keeping crowbars at the bottom of the hill - after all, we have a crowbar in the truck (el trucko, for you spanish types). Well, we stop behind a bush, and two ¨crowbars¨are carrying windows from the Mission on the Move house at the bottom of the hill - that is, they were ROBBERS, not crowbars, BANDIDOS not Bandaidos. After I repeated them in my head several times, I could see the reñlationship, and how I had done the same thing that I had accused them of doing. A little change makes a big difference... Amazing, but I have known the spanish word for Bandido since I was a child (i,yi,yi,yi...I am the Frito Bandito) but it never occurred to me to acytally USE that little piece of knowledge.

Well, the adventure was on. Harrison is 22 years old or so, all of 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds, but loaded with testosterone. We watched from behind bushes until they had taken the windows off the property, making them actual robbers, then Harrison turns and sprints up the 45 degree hill. I, myself, dreamed of sprinting, but after about 4 steps I figured that the MI would not be worth it, so I walked up the rest. I called for oxygen at a certain point, but did not know oxygen in spanish, Harrison did not know oxygen in english or chichewa or french or scientific or gasping, so I got none - plus he was fresh out, being in Honduras and all. We got to the car, and off we went. looking for the police. They were not in the station, they were out in the neighborhood, so off we went in search of them. No luck, so Harrison takes his little self to the road where they would have to come out from the field, and their they are, with the windows on the ground nearby. No effort to run, no effort to fight, Harrison just tells them to get in the truck, puts the windows in the truck, and we drive off to the police station. They tell the police that they are innocent, the news is called, a showy guy comes in a truck, the head of the La Guama police comes back, and the interview is held for the local news. Then comes decision time. The men have confessed and told the police where the other 5 windows may be found, so now the police all jump into our truck (they have no truck right now) and head to the ¨fence¨business, get the rest of the windows back.

It turns out that, guilty or not, the local police can only hold the prisoners for 24 hours, then they must be released, unless they are transported and processed at San Pedro Sula, an hour away, and (did I mention?) the police have no vehicle. So, we have to decide whether to pursue prosecution. One of the men has already said that, if he was released, he was going to go back and clean out the building and the container at the hospital - so we figured that the only way they would respect legal authority and leave stuff alone was if it cost them - so, off we went to San Pedro,... but not really - we had to go to another police station, fill out 8 pages of paperwork ourselves, even though we had the thieves and 2 fully armed policemen in the back of the truck as well as the windows for evidence. From there, we could go to San Pedro Sula, with our 3 policement, 2 with Uzzis. In San Pedro at the police station, we got in a complaint line, finally got our turn, all 7 of us, but there was no translator as was promised to take any statement from me, so I stood and waited, sat and waited, and then a huge electric storm hit that completely wiped out all of the computer records, so they had to start over again, this time by hand. Bottom line, we left for Santa Elena at 8 PM, with the band aids in jail, but had a hair-raising trip through crowds of cars, heavy rain, fog, on roads with no center lines or markings, in pitch black, hitting massive potholes in a truck that was not really able to take such a beating, with hundreds and hundreds of heavily loaded semi trucks going back and forth from SPZ to Tegucigalpa. What a ride! What a long day! I realized that I had spent 6 hours around hundreds of people and had spoken not a word to anyone for the whole 6 hours. I was just there as the token gringo so that we would be taken seriously, I guess. Bottom line is, the men are in jail, and that seems like the right thing.

I would like to be writing about the feeding programs, with lots of pictures, as this is the real main event for Mission on the Move in Santa Elena. There are building programs in place, and medical teams slated to come regularly, an excellent facility in need of some repairs, but the children are the real emphasis. However, my computer has gone back out again, and I have not been able to find a USB port to load pictures in directly, so that will have to wait... There may be another post right after this with some pictures, I am going to try...