Quebrada Grande, Day 5, February 9, 2015

The request for blankets from the hotelier has finally been heard. We, the lucky six - Jane, Nineth, Leigh, Marie, Frank and Harlon - have all managed to have a warm sleep. 

Breakfast is at 7 a.m. We need to be at work by 8 a.m. The cold front has passed and great weather returns.

It is the final day for training for both water operators and students. In the afternoon both groups will visit each other's work place and do a show and tell!

LWW Team

Water House team

Completion ceremony

Congratulations on another job well done

Quebrada Grande, Day 4, February 8, 2015

It is Sunday and the sugar trains are still running! The donkeys and cockerel too enjoy this early morning (4 a.m.) enthusiasm for the new day. 

In the night party ravers from the carnival passed in high spirits. Samir, the hotelier, tells us that Ponca the monkey freed herself from her leash by biting through the string so she is now on a chain leash.  Her companion monkey, Klavaskin, is grumpy.

A survey reconnaissance trip is planned for today, a three hour drive east of our current location. Alex will drive Robert, Marie and Nineth to ?  it is a 3 hour drive into the mountain east of our current location.  The water survey will be conducted alone with water testing and an opportunity to speak with the villagers. They are greeted ted by the whole town.

The water crew today have news that the water is filling the holding tank on the roof, a tanker  truck is pumping water up onto the roof to start the system flushing.

The education team, Leigh and Jane, start planning the celebration of the water building opening. This is scheduled for  Tuesday night. No school today as this group requested a day off to spend with family. We finish their education program on Monday.

High temperatures have returned on this beautiful Sunday. We hear the sound of the pump running the water through the system, a process known as flushing.

The mayor of Villa San Francisco has invited us to the local rodeo so at 5 p.m. we all gather in the court yard of the hotel. We hear from Robert and Marie about their adventure to the mountain villages. The Mayor arrives and we all pile into our bus for a short drive.  Our host gives us complimentary entrance tickets valued at 100 lempiras. The rodeo is held in a wooden circular shaped stadium with a simple guard rail. There are three tiers of seating. The wooden planking is uneven so we are careful as we go to our seats on the walkway. We step up and walk on top of the bull pen to find our seats in the VIP section.

Rodeo

Honduran cowboys decked out in their big hats, leather boots and jeans riding beautiful horses that can make skillful, quick turns from the bulls. A bull and rider enter the stadium. The rider needs to stay on the bucking animal for a measured time then the bull is lassoed so the rider can dismount and seek safety behind the boards. The bull is mad that his "manhood" has a tight band added before coming into the arena. The clown now has the task of distracting the bull with a red cape.  Once he knelt in front of the bull which remained silent and calm. 

The Villa San Francisco mayor has confided that he wants our help and we make a plan for Monday morning. He wants the team to test the water and discusses the possibility of creating a larger water filtration system - he has a plan for a reservoir for 10,000 people! 

Quebrada Grande, Day 3, February 7, 2015

Early wake up call from our now familiar sounds of crowing, braying and sugar train rumble. Dogs are owned only to bark at people and cows. The dust from the sugar trucks has given us all sore throats, nasal congestion and allergy eyes. That's aside from the smell, a brackish odor from the sugar processing plant in the town. 

The weather temperature has plummeted. It's actually cold and not the warmth we expected. The beds in the hotel only have a top sheet and no blankets so sleeping in our clothes is now the norm.

On the way to breakfast a chained monkey falls from the tree and appears to be strangling itself. You step a little closer and BAM! I do not like monkeys on my head thank you. Generally we have a shared sense of kindliness towards the local animals - we feel the need to fed the strays - but I still do not care for monkeys!

Innkeeper Samir and Marie have produced yet another excellent meal - breakfast pancakes, frittata, local honey, cream, papaya, banana served in a melon bowl.

On site at QB we all start the day with our new recruits. Mary, who is helping Marie cleaning the five gallon bottles and adding the Living Water labels. She is soon joined by two boys. A great job and well done.

Marie and Mary

Leigh welcomes her group back and tells them that we will start every morning with a spiritual lesson so we can create a play. This requires costumes and props for Moses's exodus from Egypt. This is always a great fun project. Everyone is relaxed as the story is narrated by Leigh, reading in English, with Nineth reading Spanish. After Moses attempts three times to let his people go our Pharaoh sends them packing. We have children lined up to become the Red Sea, all holding their water wands with much swishing and our major drama concludes. We recap on all we have learned. Leigh then arranges charades and singing Spanish songs with actions. It's been an extreme busy morning.

Meanwhile, the water project needs sand so Pastor Enrique, Marie,Bob and two fellows go to the local river to fill buckets with sand. The water tank is now on the roof. A request for missing supplies that are urgently needed. So Robert and Marie, who have just finished sand banging, are off to the hardware store for a chisel, drain, screws, two faucets, tape, and elbow parts. 

Lunch is a true delight. Alex's wife, Selenia Ordonez, and his sister, Eli, make us soft corn tortilla filled with chicken and beef, freshly made salsa avocado sauce, cilantro and for dessert, locally grown banana. 

The best lunch

Leigh's new teachers take the afternoons class so we can sit back and watch. They have bought all their children with them so we set up coloring tables for at least thirty children. Class begins with glitter handshaking - a demonstration of how one handshake can travel and end up on everyone in the room. The glitter is on their hands,shoulders, faces and even clothes. Spreading germs is too easy. Next the taste test experiment. Muddy colored water flavored with chocolate cookie and another with salt water. Both look bad but neither in this experiment will make you sick. You would think we had added poison, not salt, to the water. 

Wearily we return to our hotel. At dinner we have a guest, the mayor of Villa San Francisco, Janio Borjas. He has invited us to join him at the rodeo on Sunday night. The town is celebrating a weekend carnival. We have missed the crowning of the carnival queen, but we will all go to the rodeo. Nineth has taken our coffee orders - 60 lempiras or around $US 4 per pound. It is from her home town of Santa Barbara and has won awards for the best coffee in Honduras. The coffee will be delivered to us in Tegucigalpa when we leave.

Quebrada Grande, Day 2, February 6, 2015

It's 4 a.m., not a spit of light, yet a scrawny cockerel with a sore throat squawking cock-a-doodle-doo! By 4:30 the whole town comes alive with the first sugar cane trucks rumbling slowly up the hill past my window - three massive dumpsters joined together behind the truck forming a "sugar train". Our hotel is on the sugar cane route. Oh boy! And somewhere there is a donkey bray, hee-haw! 

Sugar "train"

More sugar "train"

5 a.m. and up and at em! Some other observations of the hotel - you can hear your neighbor coughing and other human noises, we share music and conversation without leaving our rooms. Too much information - say no more. Weather is in the high 70s and promising to push upwards. The leaky shower pipe is turned on by a simple lever at the pipe. Ohhh, it's cold water only. What a treat ! Nineth has warned us not to go bare foot in the bathroom area as fungal infection lurks in the floor. 

Breakfast is plantains, beans, egg, ham  and soft tortilla.

Education classes will be Friday, Saturday, and Monday,  9 a.m. - 11 a.m. for the trainers. We explain that introductions are important and that they will all need to practice speaking to others to continue the education work. Lessons are in three parts, spiritually, craft, science experiment. We begin with the creation story, water sent to us to drink and save our soul. Leigh is giving the lesson and Nineth is translating. 
Linking the creation story to the present day time includes a quick pollution update. We ask why do we have germs that you cannot see without a microscope, are they everywhere? Passing around the spy glass we ask can we see germs on our hands, can we smell them. Germs can be on everything, especially they can be hidden in the water.

During the repeat of first half lesson the students tittle tattle on the Pastor as to who gets the use of this water system. This concerns us and we share this with the team at our evening debrief.

At the water building the board has been installed and the pump is fixed to the board. George and Pastor Enrique sift dirt from stones and then grade into pebble sizes. They need these to build a sand barrel filter. They then wash the stone using a brand new concrete mixer, a gift from the Tampa Bay Presbytery. It is clean as no concrete has been mixed in it. When we started the day all indications were that our plan was off track - installing the water system could be a longer process as many jobs that should have been completed before our arrival had not been done. We are amazed at the energy and enthusiasm of the people as they push the project status to the next level. People and materials arrive. We ask for a woman operator and welcome Oneida to the team.

Sifting stones

Cleaning stones

We are all very tired  but we are back safely in the hotel enjoying a dinner of pork chops, delicious pickled beets, carrots and rice. Next the local bar to try dancing to punta music, drinking (more) salvavida beer with Johnny, Frank, Marie, Leigh, Jane and our best friend Alex.

Quebrada Grande - Day 1, February 5, 2015

Greetings from Atlanta airport, mid morning on Thursday, February 5.  The team is finally together despite fun and games with winter air travel (lots of snow in the north east, none in the south). We far prefer Atlanta airport to Miami as the airport is much calmer, a rail system "plane train " expedites our transit across the terminals quickly with enough time for a quick trip to duty free.

We arrive in Honduras. Robert and Leigh go through the Tegucigalpa baggage claim first and busied themselves collecting the trunks. A new immigration system is in place (finger prints and face photo) and we giggled afterwards when Robert explained his experience. He was asked to place his forefinger on the scan, which he did, but was then was told "no, four fingers". Leigh was reprimanded for having a clementine in her bag. Frank made it through with a New Jersey apple. 

Our trunks  do look as if we intend to open a theater.  We have props for the classes we will be holding along with the water filtration system and plumbing parts.  As a result we have little space in our luggage for clothes.

Our week begins at 7am Friday morning. We are greeted by our Honduran team members who quickly load our trunks and bags.  We lunch at a nearby city restaurant and Robert is told that our hotel will only take cash. So he goes to a nearby bank but is refused. Of course, Robert is still wearing his leather jacket and New Jersey winter gangster clothing and is clearly suspicious.  Mark drives us back to the airport where we eventually change money with a man standing on the street (the exchange rate of 21 "limps" to the $ is the deal from the man). 

Robert (without NJ gangster clothing)

We stay at Marie Christina hotel in the town principality of Villa San Francisco. Then "the water crew" travel to Quebrada Grande. We first look for Pastor Enrique Ochua. He greets us with bloody feathered hands - he has just killed a chicken for dinner - and rightly did not wish to embrace us. We are paired into rooms. My sleep buddy is Nineth (Mumguia Alvarado), our living water assistant. The TV has a bigger shelf than the space we have been given to unpack. The rooms have two beds and an extra large TV stand as well as a leaky shower pipe, cracked toilet and wall sink with no trim. Why does tile grout have to be lumpy and discolored? Nineth has assured me this is not a bad room. She is correct - it does indeed function.

Frank and I walk across the road to our newly discovered beer provider. It's a small one room store with ornate metal bars. The room is full of refrigerators and shelves stocked full of drinks, plantain chips and toilet rolls . You only get a tiny view into the room and that's all we could see. The room is attached to the owner's home, off the living room. TV was on and we caught the smell of dinner cooking.  We bought small quantities (4) of cold quart-size Salvavida beer. After an adventurous first day, drinking this beer  was "pure nectar. " We dine on meat kebab, avocado, salsas and feta cheese tortilla.  Finally a team meeting to discuss who is ready for day 2.

Go Water Team 

Quebrada Grande group photo

Quebrada Grande , Honduras
Living Waters Team arrive at Tegucigalpa February 5th, 2015
Jane Collingwood, Olvin Duron, George Ganter, Frank Johnson, Robert Mayer , Harlon Mills,
Nineth Munguia, Franklin Ruiz, Marie Shmaruk, Leigh Willis, Alex Ordonez, Mark Wright.
Trainee, Jhonney.
contributing members ,David Gellatly, Justin Tharaud.
Iglesia Presbiterana Johova Nisi, Quebrada Grande Pastor Enrique Ochua
Water System donated from First Presbyterian Church Lancaster Ohio to be installed February 2015.

Next water installation is in February,  2015 ~  we are going to Quebrada Grande.

A letter from Mark and Ashley Wright in Honduras

SPRING 2014

The Presbyterian Church of Honduras, enthusiastically approved at the General Assembly meeting at the end of January 2014,  to build its own camp/retreat facility on property that the church already owns in the village of Quebrada Grande, southeast of Tegucigalpa.  The retreat center has been a dream of Pastor Juan Rodas, President of the Presbytery of Honduras, for some time.  Pastor Juan believes the new center will allow the church to expand its ministry and opportunities and be able to do things that have not been possible due to the cost of holding gatherings at other sites.

Recognizing the value of the new camp, the Honduran youth agreed to forego this summer’s retreat and, instead, to use any funds for this year’s retreat toward the camp and to hold one or more work camps to help in the construction of the center.  The church women have challenged each woman to donate one cement block per month for the construction of the dormitories and dining facility.  Each individual congregation is expected to provide work crews and donations for the construction as well.  This is a project of the entire Presbyterian Church of Honduras and a demonstration of the growing unity among the various congregations.

I’m writing today so that you too may share this joy of the church of Honduras and tell others about the growth and excitement of the church here.  Also, we would like to give all who share an interest in the church and work in Honduras the opportunity to give toward making this dream a reality.  The project will consist of four dormitory buildings, two for men and two for women, a dining facility, a sports field, and landscaping.  To make your gifts more “concrete,” we are suggesting that individuals, churches, or groups consider supporting the construction or outfitting of a specific element of the retreat center—perhaps a roof, flooring, plumbing, or bunks for a particular “cabaña”—if the entire cost of that part of the camp isn’t possible.  Already one New Jersey congregation, together with support from a congregation in Ohio, is planning to install a clean water system that will serve the camp and community.  Every part of the center is important and needs support!  You can make a gift to the Presbyterian Church of Honduras here.  Please let me know directly of your donation and its intention by emailing markwrightsemail@gmail.com.