Camp Emmanuel Heights

Well, we are officially back in California. It has been 3 weeks now, and though we have adjusted mostly, there are still times that we feel out of place or slightly socially awkward in North American culture.

25 weeks :)

Karen, 25 weeks pregnant!

We are now living in Creston at Emmanuel Heights Christian Camp and Retreat Center. We will be spending the summer volunteering here and helping out in whatever ways are needed. Darrell has been helping design a golf course similar to miniature golf and supporting various projects around the camp grounds such as cleaning out the barn and mowing the weeds/grass. Karen has been helping organize the office better and assisting the cook in the kitchen as she learns how to cook for 100 people.

All in all it has been a great first week and a half out here, and we are glad to be here this summer. 

 
Here are some pictures of our camp, and where we are living this summer:

The pond and dining hall.

The lake and blob!

The softball field and main camp area.

A view of our camp property.

Our home for the summer!

The kitchen.

The hall leading to bedroom and bath.

The "dining room".

The living room.

Good Bye Honduras

We are done with our year of teaching here in Honduras, and at times it still seems surreal. We are currently packing up our apartment and trying to fit everything into four 50lb bags, saying good bye to all the friends we made here, and doing all of our ‘last time’ activities in Siguatepeque (ex. last time walking down town, last time eating at this restaurant, last time going to this church, etc.).

Monday we are going to Tela, a beach on the Caribbean, with some of the other teachers at our school. We will spend two days with our coworkers there, celebrating the end of our year together. Then after we say good bye to them we will stay another day just the two of us to celebrate our 3yr wedding anniversary before flying to LAX and heading up to the San Luis Obispo area.

We are excited to head back to California to see our family and friends there again, but are at the same time sad to be leaving the life we have built here and all of the friends we have made. Everyone here wants us to return and visit after we have our baby, and we are hoping to be able to do that as well. Lord willing, Darrell will be able to get a job and have vacation time so we can make that trip.

Thank you for following our blog this year, and for all of your prayers and support. We will write another update once we are back in California with our plans for the summer and pictures.

Dios le bendiga ustedes y su familia.

Saying Good-Bye

We are currently in our last week of exams, and can hardly believe that they year is almost over. It seems like it took so long at times, yet went by so quickly that we are now finishing the school year. As we are having our last classes with students, saying good-bye and preparing for our return to California in a few weeks, we have been spending a lot of time reminiscing over this past year. There have definitely been hard times and stressful weeks trying to get prepared for our classes, but over all, we are both glad to have had this year here in Honduras. As we look back over the year we are choosing to focus on the good, the reasons we are glad we came here.

Panacom Hike

• 

  The Beautiful Caribbean as seen in Belize 

Here are a few of our highlights from this school year:

Volcano in Guatemala

• Hiking Panacom, a beautiful natural reserve here in Honduras, with some of our coworkers
• Spending a week in Belize over our Christmas break
• Visiting Antigua, Guatemala and hiking a volcano with some of our coworkers

• Being in a Honduran parade with our students
• Learning how to cook Honduran food from our friends here

• Spending weekends at the beach or Panacom and taking in God's beautiful creation 
• Chaperoning the trip to the Island of Utila with some of our students and all of the adventures that ensued there... 
  

  

  Karen and grade 10

  

  Darrell and grade 11 on a hike

Water Park with coworkers Fany and Osiris

• Spending teacher appreciation day at a water park with all of our coworkers and going down water slides with our non-adventurous Spanish coworkers 

•  Dinners and game nights with our friends, Ben and Kaitlyn
• Having dinners at the homes of various Honduran families and experiencing their wonderful hospitality
• Teaching some of our coworkers and their husbands how to country line dance and couple dances
• Watching our students compete in mini-Olympics (below), and various soccer games 

  

• Performing High School Musical for our students (Karen was called Sharpea for weeks after) 
  

  

  Cultural Dancing
  

The High School Musical Crew

• Dancing a traditional Honduran dance with our students on Culture Day 
  
• Playing ultimate frisbee almost every weekend with our Bible study (below)

   

Zip-line in Nicaragua

 Some of Darrell's highlights:

• Grade 2 science fair presentations
• Goofing off with grade 11
  
• Soccer/basketball with the Samuel and Jairo
  
• Learning to play backgammon 
• Sports Day, 2 full days of competition between local churches playing soccer, basketball, and volleyball
• Zip-lining in Nicaragua 
• Coffee
• Being the Mister of Science
• Watching Olympia win the championship, twice
• Amazing lunches of fajitas, pupusas, tacos mexicanos, and baleadas from Dona Kati
  

Some of Karen's highlights: 

• Being attacked with hugs and high fives every time I enter the grade 7 classroom
• Assigning my students projects and presentations and being blown away by how some of my students perform above and beyond my expectations
• Getting random notes from students and coworkers about how they are glad for my service here
• Being invited to eat meals with my Spanish coworkers during recess

  

  Pupusas with Becky
  

• Watching my grade 10 students dress up professionally for their mock-interviews
• Teaching science to my grade 9 students, I just love that class
• Having random tangent conversations with my grade 8 science class about topics like WWII and the nuclear bomb, how traits are passed from parents to children, or the way things decay 
• Making a movie with my grade 11 class for one of their media projects 
• Grading science fair projects and seeing the adorable pictures of my students working on their projects and their creative ideas 



Science Fair

• Running every week with my good friend, Debra 

  

  Yeah for Debra!
  

Talent Night

Hope you enjoy our skit as much as our students did!

What a Wonderful Weekend!

Friday was our staff retreat. We went to a lovely hotel in Comayagua (about an hour from Siguatepeque) with a pool! We had a time for reflection and devotion in the morning, a delicious lunch, and time to hang out with our other staff and swim in the pool that afternoon. Darrell started a game of phase 10 with some of the Spanish teachers (a huge hit among Hondurans), and had a great time laughing about the game with them. One of Karen's students, Carlos, came along with his father (the speaker for the retreat) and had a great time trying to dunk her in the pool. Karen enjoyed his youthful energy and had a lot of good laughs about his creative attempts st dunking her. Darrell had to come to her rescue in the end, and that is all Carlos has been talking about at school this week.

The reflection time was wonderful. God was able to show us how He is working on our personal relationships with Him, and how He desires to make us more like Him. It was nice spending that time with our coworkers as well.


Saturday we had the opportunity to help out one of the English teacher's husband, Travis, pick a crop of beans he was growing at a local seminary. It was hard but strangely relaxing work. At the end of picking 2-3 rows of beans, we went home to rest.



Our reflection from that experience was realizing how poor this country is. We spent almost 2 hours in the field picking beans, and at the end of all our hard work, we had barely enough beans to sell for about 50 Lempiras ($2.50) at the market. It was humbling to think that for some people, that is how they make their living.


Sunday we were invited to a Spanish coworker's house for Dinner. Margoth and her husband, Javier, were wonderful hosts. Another coworker, Fanny, and her husband, Jose, also joined us. It was refreshing for us to spend some time with other married couples.
After dinner they asked us to teach them to country dance, so we spent the next two hours explaining (in Spanish!) and practicing the electric slide and the couple's barn dance. Javier and Margoth's daughter and niece were having a ball watching their parents/aunt and uncle dance and taking pictures. All in all it was a fantastically wonderful night. Fanny and Margoth had such a great time that they want to perform a line dance with Karen for the upcoming school talent show!

Visa Trip - Belize

Every three months we have to leave Honduras to renew our visa. In December we took a trip just the two of us to Belize. It was an amazing time of relaxation and quality time together. We stayed at a nice little hotel on the beach front, and to our surprise (literally we got of the boat and said "habla espanol?" to the first person we met) we found out that everyone speaks English in Belize. It used to be an English colony, so English is one of the main languages. The overall atmosphere is laid back and relaxed. Which made the little beach town of Placencia a great spot to take a vacation.


The beach in front of our hotel was simply beautiful!

We rented bikes one day and biked up the peninsula to Maya Beach for lunch and some relaxing in the hammocks. It was a fabulous day and the fish there was delicious!


Biking up to Maya Beach.

This one is for my cousin, Maya ;)


The super awesome ocean cabana, built over the ocean!


Relaxing in the ocean cabana after filling our stomachs with delicious fish.

We spent another afternoon kayaking through a lagoon to the open ocean where we unknowingly caught a fish that literally jumped into Darrell's lap, that was quite unexpected and made for a good laugh.

It was so nice to be on vacation and have the ability to sleep in each morning without any plans for the day or anywhere we needed to be, to go on dates each night and eat delicious food - shrimp, fish, vegetables, cajan food, etc.

One day we took a tour to Laughing Bird Caye (pronounced key) to snorkel. The island they took us to was a national park and was the most beautiful turquoise ocean we had ever seen. It looked like the pictures you see on post cards and think they are edited in Photoshop, but they're not!

While snorkeling we saw squid, gigantic lobsters, many brightly colored fish, swam with schools of fish, and even saw a nurse shark! It was awesome.


The beautiful Laughing Bird Caye...

...where we snorkeled!

Our vacation was wonderful. We returned to Siguatepeque, Honduras to spend Christmas and New Years in our home here. Sadly, Karen was sick for the holidays.

Now we are back working at our school, and are very busy once again. We are glad to be here, and glad to be investing in our students lives. We know God is using us here to further His kingdom and are thankful. Please keep us in your prayers as we continue to teach and work here in Honduras.

Cooking Honduran Food

Over our past four months here, Karen has had the opportunity to learn how to cook various types of traditional Honduran food. Darrell has had the opportunity to eat them.

Check out some pictures of Karen making homemade tortillas, refried beans, and fried plantains to make baleadas with our neighbors, Dixie, Reina, Zeida, and Nancy.

homemade refried beans

Platano Fritos - Karen's Favorite!

Making Tortillas

The finished product - to make a baleada, you simply take a tortilla, spread some refried beans, mantequilla, and cheese inside with your favorite toppings, in our case avacado and plantanos!

Everyone enjoying their baleadas.


Check out some pictures of Karen and her coworkers learning how to make papusas with our friend Becky Vega and her family.

First you have to chop up all the ingredients for the filling, toppings and sauce.

Then you have to grind your fillings so they become soft (kind of like ground beef)

When all the prep is done, you put your fillings inside the papusa dough, roll it into a ball, flatten the ball so it looks like a tortilla, then cook it like a pancake.

Karen got to be in charge of the grill.

The finished product - Papusas! mmmm, so delicious!