Honduras Part 2

As I mentioned the first night we stayed at a B&B, which is not the B&B in American standards.  It was clean, simple, had some AC and warm water.  They fed us breakfast, which was delicious, and it was a nice place for a good night's rest.  The veranda, which was right off the house was an awesome place where we all congregated as a team and just rocked in the rocking chairs in our little down time we had.  The hospitality was amazing and it was a pleasure getting to know our hosts, Saundra and Jimmy.

The next morning we rented a van and traveled 3 hours to La Ceiba where there was a tiny airport with tee tiny airplanes.  Our team basically was the flight.  It was a 19 passenger plane that we flew to Puerto Lempira, our final destination.  Puerto Lempira is really only accessible by boat or plane.  This is apparent when you land on the dirt runway!  Albeit, a very nicely maintained, but dirt no less.  Of course there is no airport, just a souvenir shop and food place.

This souvenir shop is made my locals and supports the Hogar Esperanza orphanage.

We had a short walk to the orphanage where we were staying, Hogar Esperanza (House of Hope).   Some of the team joked that they were already learning Honduran time and meaning is different than ours and yes we did learn that.
The "short walk" was not.  However, I thoroughly enjoyed it especially after traveling ALL day.

Next up was House of Hope (Hogar Esperanza).  One-half of our Young Adult Sunday School class sponsors this orphanage.  This is actually where we stayed while in Puerto Lempira.  They have a mission bunk house on the premises, it’s also fenced in and has a night and day watchman.  This orphanage was very different than that of which we experienced at Mama Tara’s.  The kids were bathed everyday and had a change of clothes and 3 meals a day.  The cooks there did an excellent job of cooking for the “gringo’s” (white people) bellies. There was no AC nor warm water, but we had fans throughout the night until the expected 6 am power outage, that lasted until noon.   That was enough to wake you out of your slumber, but we had our loud wake up call from the resident rooster and all the other local roosters echoing his call, over and over and over and over.

 I literally would laugh out loud in the mornings waking up, "welcome to 3rd world Honduras Joy!" I felt like this rooster was yelling at me.

House of Hope had 4 little boys around the age of 4, they are very small for their age, most likely due to malnutrition, but they would meet us everyday the moment we stepped on the grounds back from Mama Tara's, with up-stretched arms just wanting to be held.  They then would just cling on, wrap their legs around and hug tight!  They were a welcome sight every night and joined us for our time of team dinner, worship and devotions.  You could always find one of our team members snuggling with them at any given point.   I will NEVER forget one night one little was on the lap of another teammate, Becca who sat in a chair and I looked up and here comes another little one across the big courtyard pulling/dragging a chair behind him.  He maneuvered it onto the concrete and pointed down at and reached his arms up to me.  He wanted to be held the exact same way.  Precious is all I can say.  I would have sat there all night if he would have let me.