First Baptist Irving and First Baptist Houston have partnered with a church in Tegucigalpa, Honduras for years. Both churches send groups over every year to assist Comunion Baptista Ingelsia in planting churches in little villages surrounding the city. So far Comunion has planted 10 churches and their goal is to plant another 10 churches in the next few years. It's an awesome partnership!
This is the pastor of the church, Pastor Pena.
So this is how the week went down:
The majority of our trip (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) was spent here:
at this small village outside of Tegucigalpa, Honduras called San Jose.
This village was the most poverty stricken out of the several I have seen and visited. Most of the houses had electricity, but NONE of them had running water. Try to soak that in. They have to purchase dirty water in huge barrels that they use for baths, cleaning dishes and washing clothes (against rocks). They also have to purchase their drinking water which they can barely afford.
MOST of the kids do not have shoes.
They live in homes that have one room, but sometimes the room is big enough to where they can separate it with a sheet so it's like two rooms. I won't really get into how much it changed my perspective on my comfy, cozy life here in America and when I complain in my head how I can't buy this new shirt that I've had my eye on.
But they are happy! As far as I could tell, each child's mother and grandmother loves their children just like we do and is so sweet to them. The children ran around all day playing cheerfully with each other. It brought me great comfort to see that.
Each day consisted of this:
9:00 - Our group of 34 would pile into this big school bus and head for San Jose.
10:00 - 12:30 Curtis (who is an amazing leader for this trip and a blessing to each person in the group) broke us up into about 7 groups of 5 people and half of the groups went door to door to do evangelism and also just prayer with the families. The other half of the group walked up and down each street praying for the people in the village.
2:00 - 4:00 We simultaneously did VBS with the kids and Women's Ministry for, well the women. What happens in all these little villages around the city is the men all leave early in the morning to go into the city to work, while the women and children stay home.
7:00 Evening service at San Jose
9:00 Dinner at the house we stayed in. (Pictures to come later.)
9:30 Group reflection time led by Curtis.
So needless to say it was a long day. :-)
VBS
We had over a 100 children participate in VBS! They are the sweetest, most precious things! We use the same format that we do in the States. The kids are on a rotation between recreation, Bible story, crafts and music.
Opening worship rally.
Red Light, Green Light!
Crafts!
The story of Jesus!
This is the little girl, Catalina, that I got to lead to Christ.
The Women's Ministry
The women's ministry was very special because it was the first time that this had been done on one of our trips. We had about 50 women show up the very first day! A very special girl named Angela who goes on the trip every year and speaks Spanish fluently because she grew up in Guatemala as a missionary kid. As you can imagine, she's amazing. So for the women's ministry she told a story of one of the women of the Bible and then she translated for one of us to tell our testimony. Then they did a craft.
My assignment for the trip was to help with the Women's Ministry, but when the first one started, I saw that there were several women who had little babies that they were holding and as we all know, it's pretty impossible to do anything, let alone pay attention to a story while holding a squirming baby. So I abandoned my position and started what I liked to refer to as "The Baby Ministry". If the mothers let us (which all of them did) we would take their babies into the cooler shelter and feed them, put them to sleep, play with them, whatever was needed so the mothers could enjoy story time and crafts.
It was the PERFECT situation for me. :-) I was missing Ella so much and God was SO SWEET to allow me to spend hours a day loving on these precious babies. It was amazing. It's all I wanted to do.
The Baby Ministry
This is Fernando! We ALL fell in love with him. He was the happiest, sweetest baby! I wish I were holding him right now.
Curtis was an honorary member of the Baby Ministry today. :-)
It was an incredible few days in San Jose.
Thursday and Friday were very different. So I will share about that in the coming days.
Thank you guys so so so so much for all of your prayers for this trip!!!
