Fiftieth Wedding Aniversary

By Katie

We were invited to a fiftieth wedding aniversary celebration by a couple who raise pigs with the pig project in Guanabano, a community about 45 minutes away. María Ilda Mendoza de Rocha and Matilde Rocha have been married for fifty years and celebrated it in a grand style. In a society where marriage by law and in the church is not common, to celebrate a fiftieth anniversary is unheard of. No one that we talked to at the event had ever heard of anyone celebrating fifty years together before. It was a great testimony of what a happy, healthy marriage can mean for a family and an entire community.

¨
Welcome to the Golden Wedding
Rocha-Mendoza
50th Anniversary

The happy couple: Matilda Rocha and María Ilda Mendoza de Rocha

During the ceremony their daughter-in-law María Elena and her sister sang the most beautiful ranchero song we have ever heard. We thought they sounded a little like the Indigo Girls of rural Honduras.
He is in this wedding, blessing the multitude.

The Rochas have 13 children and many grandkids and great grandkids. Some of them still live in Guanabano. One son named Delson lives in Worthington, Minnesota and works for a farmer there. It´s a small world!

The evening ended with a delicious meal for everyone who attended. Pictured here are some of our co-workers and friends. L-R: Roldan and Conchita, María and Matilde, Rigoberto, Nicol and Rosa.

We counted it a rare priviledge to be invited to attend such a great event. We´ll never forget it!

Progress with Danya

By Katie

Some of you have been following Danya's story since we met her on my first trip to Honduras in 2007. She's about ten years old now and still very nearly deaf, still able to say only a handful of words. But, I've got happy news to report today! She started her first week of school at Casa Ayuda, a ministry of the Catholic church a couple of hours away from her home community. She's enrolled in classes there for language therapy and also to learn sign language. She spends the week living there and comes home every weekend.

This has been a very long road. For one reason or another she's been turned away from the school before. But this time, they've got the money to send her (thanks to those of you who bought coffee from us and gave donations while we were home for Christmas) and she is emotionally mature enough to spend the week away from her parents and community. Her dad Elvin told me that on the first day she walked straight up to the front seat and participated as much as she possibly could and was making friends with the other students there.

More happy news is that medical brigades are returning to Honduras after the political crisis. A brigade is scheduled for March 5 and 6 and will be bringing hearing aids to a privately-funded free hospital in Tegucigalpa. It's been two full years since this brigade has come, and the last time they gave her hearing aids to someone else so she went home with none due to a scheduling error. I go every few months to the hospital to see when the brigade will come, to make sure she's still on the list and for any other updates or information I can follow up on for the family. I'm really hoping and praying very hard that it works this time. I would love it if Danya could hear the sounds of her environment.



Please pray with me that the adjustment to school goes well for both Danya and her family. Also pray that all the many pieces can fall into place at just the right time for Danya to take advantage of the medical brigade. I hope to have more happy news by March 5 or 6!

Ten Big Days

By Katie

The De Kam family got to come to visit us in early February. It was ten big days (followed by seven days of recovery, so we're just blogging about it now). Here's a peak at what we did.


We picked Helen, Verlyn and Kenzie up from the airport and took them straight to the Diaconia office in Tegucigalpa where they got to meet the whole crew and watch and participate as we finished up our monthly meetings.


That night we went out to dinner with Matt's old host family from when he lived in Tegucigalpa for a semester with Calvin in 2005. Everyone had a blast getting to know each other after hearing about one another for so many years.


The next morning we took a little walking tour of downtown Tegucigalpa.


One of the stops was the central park and a peak inside the cathedral.


Later that day we got to visit a high school called El Verbo in Tegucigalpa. Kenzie's high school in Minnesota is starting a relationship with this school, so it was great for her to get to see the place and establish some solid contacts. It was also an opportunity for us to introduce the De Kams to a few more of our friends since the ministry center at that school has many connections to the ministries we are involved in.


By the next day we were already in Olancho hiking up a mountain. It was coffee harvesting time, so the mules were loaded up bringing the harvest down the mountain. Another North American named Don was with us on the hike.


We stopped at Calixto's beautiful coffee farm on the mountain. Here's Verlyn and Calixto (our guide/friend) in front of some of the recently harvested coffee bushes.


Later in the week Kenzie and Helen helped out with the front porch gang as they made friendship bracelets. It happened that the littler kids came this day and the bigger ones didn't, so the bracelets turned out as bracelets do when you're only five years old. Oh well. We all had a nice time and the kids loved the extra attention!


Helen and Kenzie got to try their hand at handwashing laundry in the pila.


The De Kams also got to visit a couple of communities where Matt had meetings during the week. One was the community of Guanabano where we went for coffee with real cow cream at Lorena's house and got to stop in to check on the pigs from the pig project. We spent some time with the pastor Dilma (pictured here) and later went to an all-community meeting to finish up an assessment Matt and David had been working on about the state of agriculture in the community.


The final leg of their time here was a trip to the south, to an island called Amapala. Verlyn, Matt and I got to stop in on two more communities where Diaconia works and where we had done a training on moringa earlier. Unfortunately chickens, iguanas or leaf-cutter ants had eaten all but one of the moringa seedlings, but they all said they had ideas for how to do it better next time and would get some seeds and try again. We also got to spend some time on the beach enjoying the warmth!

All in all, it was a very blessed time. Matt and I really enjoyed showing the fam around and introducing them to our friends here.

Getting Ready for School

By Katie

The new school year is about to begin again at Luz y Verdad. I've been getting the computer lab ready by painting it this weekend. It's the same exact color as the inside and outside of our house, so I feel right at home. Today Matt came to help me set up the computers, and found only three that didn't work (which is better than usual!). The school year starts this Monday. It was supposed to start the following week, but things change pretty quickly around here and the date got moved up.

We've been signing kids up for the school year over the past three weeks. We have almost forty students signed up right now. Last year we had over ninety in total, so the teachers are pretty worried that the numbers will be much lower this year. It's probably due in part to the world economic crisis but also we had a pretty difficult and disappointing school year last year. A few teachers got fired, so what remains is to motivate those who continue to work there. Please pray for us!