El Volcan Agua, a story from the past.

El Volcan Agua taken form Cerro de la Cruz, Antigua, Guatemala

We have had two world travelers staying with us these past few days. As we have sat around swapping travel stories, (mine don't even come close to comparing with theirs), a story came to mind that I hadn't thought of in years.

Being a true storyteller and keeping in mind that many years have passed, I tell you the story as I remember it.

1981 Antigua, Guatemala.

I was seventeen and had been in Antigua long enough to begin to pick up on Spanish pretty well. One of the things I loved to do was to sit in Antigua's central park. Back then the Kaqchikel Mayan women were allowed to sell their weaving in the park, (now they can only vend from the market area) and I became acquainted with a little Mayan maiden by the name of Rosita. It was a very innocent and platonic friendship, but we passed many hours together along with her mother and her several siblings.

One day Rosita asked her mother, Maria, if she could invite me to their house for coffee. Maria agreed, the only stipulation being that she would be there too. So one afternoon I caught a chicken bus to San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a small village 5 or 6 miles outside of Antigua. Their home wasn't much, just bamboo walls and a thatched roof, but it was a nice home. Rosita met me at the door, invited me in and very politely offered me coffee which she had just brewed over the open fire. I, not wanting to offend her, just as politely accepted the coffee. Surely it would be okay as coffee is always boiled, right? Wrong! I knew I was in trouble as soon as I took my first sip of the lukewarm brew. Gallantly I drank it to the bottom, complementing her on the flavor and her hospitality.

That night was a night to be remembered. I have never been so sick. Seated on the commode for hours, afraid I was going to die, afraid I wouldn't. We, thankfully, were staying at the home of a doctor and I can still remember him coming into the bathroom with a needle somewhere around a foot long. The serum entering my hip burned and he must of also hit my hip bone because I couldn't walk without limping for a week. I felt like Jacob must have felt after wrestling with the angel all night...gimpy and worn out. Anyway, whatever was in the shot worked. It dried up my stomach, dried up my intestines and dried up my skin so badly that it started peeling and flaking.

Two days after this I climbed El Volcan Agua, the extinct volcano which overshadows Antigua. The volcano received it's name Agua, which in Spanish means "water", because centuries ago the crater had once been filled with water which had formed a sizable lagoon. On September the 10th, 1541, one wall of the crater broke away and the water from the lagoon surged down the mountain and swept away the then capital of Guatemala,  Ciudad Vieja.  Rising to the height of 12, 340 ft above sea level, Agua is a sight to behold.

My brother and I and several friends had made plans a week before to climb the volcano the following Saturday. I decided that rather than cancel the climb, and even though I was still weak and very thin, we'd go ahead and attempt it.

We drove to Santa Maria de Jesus, a village far up the side of the volcano, and picked up the trail there. The trail zig-zagged and switched back up the volcano through fields of corn and coffee until those gave way to barren rocky slopes far above the tree line. It was then that my recent illness combined with the altitude began to take it's toll on me.

I was determined to make it to the top despite the fact that it felt as though my heart was going burst, my lungs explode and the pounding in my ears was so intense I was pretty sure you could have seen them pulsating with every exaggerated beat of my heart. Step by slow excruciating step I made my way to the top, and as I vividly remember it, I reached the rim, the broken off part of the crater and threw myself over the edge and down into the hollow of the crater below. Laying there on my stomach for several minutes, gasping for air, sweat pouring from my body, waiting for the pounding in my head to subside, thankful that I had made it to the top without dying, I lifted my head to find that I had prostrated myself before the Virgin Mary who had been ensconced in a small shrine someone, many years ago, had built inside the crater.

A blurry photo taken of the shrine inside the crater of Agua. (photo owner unknown)

My

One Year Ago Today....

One year ago today we arrived in Siguatepeque, Honduras. After 23 days on the road and 4783 miles in “la fiesta bus” we finished the journey which had begun in Farmington, Maine on January 15^th, 2013. Truth be told, the journey actually began in 1981…maybe even as far back as 1964 when I first traveled to Guatemala at the age of six months. But I’ll start in 1981.

In 1981 I was seventeen, a shy, very awkward teenager who loved to read, to work and to travel. My family had moved to Maine from Kansas when I was five years old because my father had been offered a position at UMF as a physics professor. Later on, he became the pastor of a small church and when UMF laid him off he chose to stay in Maine rather than leave the church he was pastoring. After the Mariel Cuban boat lift in 1980, we became acquainted with several Cuban refugees and became involved in helping them adapt to their new lives here. My father and I even went so far as to travel to Havana, an almost unheard of event at the time, to see if we could help one of the men bring his wife and son to the US.

Antigua, with el Volcan Agua in the background 

As we became more involved with the Cubans, my father decided that we, as a family, should travel to Antigua, Guatemala to study Spanish for 4 months. He and I drove to Guatemala in a diesel VW Rabbit, crisscrossing Mexico in what became a truly epic adventure. The rest of the family arrived later by air. Those months spent in Central America were for me some of the richest moments in my life and awakened in me the person who I am today.

In 2007 when our church in Maine asked Barbe and me to plan and lead their first ever short-term missions trip, the destination was an easy choice for me. Central America! When we returned from that trip, the seed that had been planted back in 1981 had begun to sprout and by 2012 was in full bloom. Following a bumper year in business, we decided that as a family, we too would travel to Central America to study Spanish for two months. Instead of Guatemala, we chose Honduras having heard of the Spanish Language Institute which had only recently opened.

Upon our return to the States, we began to plan in earnest for a move to Honduras…for just a year or so. Well, here we are a year later and making plans to remain indefinitely. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked as Pastor Park always used to say.

Life. Freedom. Work. Missions. Friends. Love….

• Life…and that abundantly. I can honestly say that our life here in Honduras is abundant, rich and full. I literally have to pinch myself almost daily to make sure I’m not dreaming and that I will wake up and find myself back in my tractor trailer pounding down the road in a snow storm. But, it goes far deeper than that. Spiritually, relationally, emotionally, physical health, creativity, enthusiasm…every area of my life is more whole…and better…and richer for being here.

• The freedom we experience here is enormous. Freedom from a set schedule, freedom from the rat race, freedom from the many, many laws that regulate life in the USA, the so called “land of the free”. Freedom to live life on our own terms.

• I have not worked, as in I have not had a job that has generated any income in 14 months now, and amazingly, we are not broke. But I love to work, so it isn’t as though I have been doing nothing. Believe me, I have been busy. As I write this post, several days in advance, I am at 35,000 feet flying from San Pedro Sula to Tampa, FL for a meeting with Sawyer Products for whom I am their distributor in Honduras. From there, I will visit family in Florida and do a stm team training with our home church in Jacksonville who will be sending us a team in June. Drilling wells, managing two businesses and the language school (the same one where we studied 2 years ago), Bible Studies and the list goes on, keeps me busy.

• In a sense, every day here is a day of missions. Opportunity abounds to love others, to share out of our abundance, to do something as simple as give another person a ride or a glass of pure water, little things that I believe in God’s eternal plan really do make a difference.

• We have made many wonderful friends here, Honduran and Gringo alike. It is part of what makes our life abundant. As I watch our sons busy and engaged with other teens, I am happy and filled with gratitude. I watch my wife enjoying the company of other missionary women, taking part in Bible studies and sewing classes, finding time to digital scrapbook and I know that we are truly blessed. I too am blessed with friends who share like passions, who possess along with me the desire to make a difference in the world around us, both now and for eternity. Opening our house to the language school and to travelers who pass through Siguatepeque has broadened and widened our relationships and our horizons in innumerable ways. Blessed, blessed, blessed.  

• We have come to love this place, this country, this life and these people. It’s easy to be here when you love. Love covers over a multitude of sins…just like the good book says...and there are many. Honduras is not the Garden of Eden. Life here is not perfect, people here are not perfect and certainly there are risks involved to living here, but as we love others, that love is returned to us over and over again, time after time.  I’m thinking just now of Florencia, an elderly lady in the little church we attend. Poor, very poor, not much of a house, not much food in the pantry, but when Barbe and I visited her the other day she insisted on giving us half of the fresh picked black beans she was preparing for dinner. I couldn’t refuse even knowing that she could ill afford it. It was her way of showing her love for us.

What does the rest of the family think about staying? All of us are 100% in agreement. We stay. Mark of course will be graduating soon and will be making his own decisions on where his path leads, but staying in Honduras is not out of the question for him either.

Part of our decision to stay will depend on my ability to provide for our financial needs in the not too distant future. I am working on that now, hence my flight to Tampa and a probable trip to China in May, but I am confident that all our needs will be provided for, although I'm not sure what that actually looks like yet. Until then, we live, we enjoy life and trust God for the future...no matter where and what that will be!

Honduras...I've missed you

I can't wait to get home, and that's the truth. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss Alfredo and I missed watching the Seahawks win with my Seattle born wife. I miss my life!

It has been over a year since I have set foot on American soil and I kind of wondered if I would have reverse culture shock. Well...I did. Here's a list of some of the things I noticed I had to adjust to.

• At first I had to resist the urge every time I heard someone behind me speaking English to turn around to see if I knew them.
• I found myself speaking English very slowly to make sure the waitress understood.
• Walking the aisles in Walmart is an amazing experience. The amount and variety of products we have to choose from is almost overwhelming. 
• It was all I could do to flush the toilet paper down the toilet.
• Driving here is boring. In 600 miles I did not meet one car passing on a blind curve...wish they could say the same. (Just kidding)
• Driving here is dangerous. Pedestrians have the right of way, you can't pass stopped school buses and when someone turns on their left turn signal it actually means they are turning left instead of letting you know it's okay to pass.
• AND I got diarrhea! What's up with that?

Here are some of the things I enjoyed.

• Seeing family and friends.
• Eating a big greasy bacon hamburger...or two.
• Eating 2 pounds of bacon.
• Finding size fourteen shoes for my son.

So four days later after a business meting in Tampa, visiting my sisters in Lakeland, driving to Jacksonville to visit our home church and doing a team training with our next short-term missions team coming in June, I am sitting in Tampa Int'l airport waiting on my flight to Houston and anxious to get back home.

I miss you Honduras!