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.