Water is NOT a Simple Substance

By Katie

"Water is a problem here." This is a sentence we hear often, and let me tell you, it's the truth. We get and use our water in extremely different ways than those of you who live in North America. Here's a little picture tour of all things water in our neck of the woods.

Our water comes mainly in a truck. We call the water man when we're out. Sometimes it takes him 24 hours to come, but once we were without water for five LONG days because he kept putting off coming. We need water about every three weeks. The cost for 450 gallons is about $11.

We have two places that we keep the water; one is this tank, which provides the water for our toilet and shower through a tube to the house. Here the water man is filling it up.

The other place we keep water is in the pila in the back yard. On this day, the pila was empty so I was scrubbing it out. It gets dirty because it is open all the time. Once we tried covering it with a plastic tarp, but the mosquitos loved the nice protection the tarp gave and breed like crazy in the water. We never did that again!


After the time we waited for five days to get water, we bought a fifty gallon barrel so we could go to the local water pump when the water ran out and we were still waiting for the water man. On this day, our neighbors came with us and we loaded up every water container we could find in our truck.

After all the work at the pump, don't forget that there's still the work of unloading all the water into the pilas (water containers).

There are two other ways of acquiring water, both shown in this picture. You can see the PVC pipe cut in half and used as a downspout and the container that collects the rain water off the roof. The other is covered in the green tarp. It is a small cement-lined basin that has a spigot from the city. Sometimes there is a little bit of water that comes through this pipe. Our neighbors use both of these methods, but we do not.

Sometimes we get an unfortunate visitor in our water, these little squirmy bugs. We always pour bleach in the water, and we have a sock filled with a chemical that is supposed to kill them, but it's not always successful.

So thank goodness we use different water for drinking! We buy five-gallon jugs of drinking water from the store for about $1.50. We use a little more than five gallons per week.

We are fortunate to have a modern bathroom, most of our neighbors have outhouses. The water from the black tank flushes the toilets and provides water for the shower. The sink does not work. There is no hot water, so if we want to take a warm shower, we boil the water on our stove and take a bucket shower.

One of the challenges of not having a kitchen sink is doing dishes in the dark. We have a light in the back, but it's not sufficient to see whether a dish is truly clean, so we use the headlamp at night.



And of course, there's no washing machine, or rather, I am the washing machine.

This is one example of one way the people here deal with water. Each location presents its own challenges and opportunities. We've been to places where the people are much more disadvantaged in other ways, but have running water in a kitchen sink. Development of water projects is slow in coming to this mountainous country and often gets set back with each passing hurricane or tropical storm.

Our Church in Catacamas

By Katie

Before coming to Catacamas, one of our biggest prayers was finding a church because we've learned how important that is to settling down into a new place. The second week we were here we went to Iglesia Cristiana Reformada, La Mora (one of two CRC churches in Catacamas), and they instantly put us to work. We took that as a welcome sign, and have dug our heels in there ever since. Hardly a day goes by when we're not there for one reason or another. Our car has become the church bus and the side lot has become where I store my bike most days.

We eat Sunday dinner with this family every week. The rest of the small congregation has been very welcoming and supportive as well.


Row 1: Pastor Isidro, his wife Delia, Angela, Katie, Brian, "Abuelo" (Grandpa) Roberto
Row 2: Elias, Raúl, Angel

Matt, Pastor Isidro, Oscar Jr. and Oscar Sr. are also deep into a project growing peppers and tomatoes at the school to sell.


We're incredibly thankful for these people. There's no doubt that being far from home would be much more difficult without them. We praise God for them and continue to pray for the increasing vitality this small church is experiencing.

Book Review: Freedom of Simplicity

By Katie

Recently Matt and I were in a hotel and had the opportunity to watch CNN and Good Morning America in English. It was interesting to hear how many times words like “less”, “fewer” and “shoestring” were used. It seems the economic recession is really creating a fad of “less is best” in the United States these days.

I had been reading this book, Freedom of Simplicity by Richard J. Foster, when I saw the tv shows. The book is very aptly named; Foster breaks down what simplicity is and how to find freedom in it. Simplicity is much deeper than what the media is promoting these days.

Of course Foster talks about the things you would expect in a book on simplicity: prayer, money, time. He also talks about how simplicity is both a grace and a discipline. If he were to write “Five Simple Steps to Simplicity”, he would be focusing too much on discipline and neglecting grace, therefore crossing into an ugly legalism. In fact, the first chapter is called “The Complexity of Simplicity” and sets the stage well for the rest of the book.

Another thing that deserves mentioning is the sources Foster draws from to write the book. He quotes the Old and New Testament, of course, but also includes examples from the saints of all denominations through the centuries, along with examples from his own life and the lives of his friends. In doing this, he shatters any thoughts that simplicity is a new idea with the Green Revolution or the recession (the book was written in 1981, before all that anyway).

It’s a beautiful book, one that I will definitely re-read often as my life changes. Read it for a breath of fresh air.

Singing in Spanish

By Katie

Señor Nate Vanderzee of Grand Rapids Christian High School put in a request for a song to share with his Spanish classes. Here´s what we at La Iglesia Cristiana Reformada La Mora have to share with you.

First, an introduction by my two favorite three-year-olds, Elias and Raúl:




No importa la iglesia que vaya,
Si detrás de Calvario tú estás.
Si tu corazón es como el mío, Dame la mano y mi hermano será.

Dame la mano, dame la mano,
Dame la mano y mi hermano será. (Repetir)

A few notes on the video:

We sing this coro at every service. When shaking hands, one needs to go as fast as possible, trying to get to every single person in the room before the song is over. This seems to be the manner in which this is done, almost as if your life depends on it!

This is one coro in a cadena de coros, a chain of choruses. Coros are very short songs all sung to the same chords and strung together to make one song that's about ten minutes long. You can hear the end of one and the beginning of another one in the video. The song leader sings them in whatever order the spirit moves, and there are no written words. This style of praising really got Matt and I down at first because it's really difficult to learn the songs and participate. We're doing better now, though, and learning more all the time.

Feliz Año Nuevo (Happy New Year)

by Matt

After Katie's family left we came back to Catacamas, and were kind of sad. Probably sad because we had such a great time with her family, and it was time to get back to reality. Also because it is hard to be apart from your friends and family during the holidays, and even harder in a foreign country. Anyway we decided to get right back on a bus and go visit some old friends near Minas de Oro, Honduras.

While studying at the U of MN I had done an internship with some coffee farmers for an organization called Tierra Nueva. We always keep in contact, and they invited us to stop by for the new year since we had the time off anyway.
First we went to a small village high in the mountains called Pocitos to the house of Tobias. Tobias showed us his ripe coffee which is just starting to be harvested. We had a great time with the family. There is no electricity in Pocitos, so we went to bed early, and slept well because it is really cool at night up in the mountains.





Next we got a ride from Pocitos through the mountains to Tablon, where Apolinario and his family lives. We spent new years eve there in Tablon eating lots of Tamales and drinking lots of really good coffee. Actually there was a period of about two days during which the only thing we ate for breakfast lunch and dinner were tamales! Good thing they taste good and agree well with my stomach. In Honduras it is tradition to celebrate the new year by "burning the old man". So, you take a bunch of old clothes, stuff them with sticks, grass, and fireworks and make it look like a person. Then at midnight you light it on fire. It is supposed to represent leaving behind all the bad things of the past year. We stayed up well past midnight waiting for the old man to burn since he was a little damp and didn't really want to start up.





Finally we passed through San Luis visiting Carlos briefly, and then on to Minas de Oro where we met up with Dagoberto. We ate some more tamales, got to look at Dago's coffee processing operation, and then roasted coffee with Dagoberto. Dago is the only Honduran I know that brews coffee without sugar. Katie and I were happy to have some rich, dark, fresh, bitter coffee!





It was really a blessing to see all these people again and it helped prepare us for coming back to live in Catacamas where we have the luxuries of electricity and relatively easily accessible transportation.