A Thousand Words - All of Them Wrong

On most houses and businesses in Honduras (and other countries in Latin America), broken bottles are embedded in the tops of concrete walls, bars are over windows, and most doors (interior or exterior) can only be opened from the outside via key. For someone not from here, that can be intimidating, giving the impression that hostile people lurk around every corner. 

They don’t.

Protecting one’s home in these places (where personal firearm ownership is rarer) simply looks different, and relies more on the very understandable dislike of “putting in more effort than it’s worth” than the threat of lethal force. To some, this looks like a prison. To me, it looks like I won’t need a gun.

Power Outages

“The heavens declare the glory of God; The firmament shows the creation of his hands.”

~Psalm 19:1

It is no exaggeration when they say power outages are very common in Honduras. One minute you have power, the next, it’s gone. There is a particular sound that is heard as everything turns off and silence takes over. You don’t realize how much noise there is until the fans, the lights, everything else run by electricity stops working. Some outages last for a few minutes, and others last the entire day or night. The ones that last the entire day are the hardest of all. Thankfully, there are not many of those. Most of the time they are inconvenient, especially if you had plans to cook and your range is electric. With us having two toddlers it can get even more tricky as they don’t understand why they cannot watch “Pocoyo” (one of their favorite shows) on any of the laptops. With no cooking able to get done (unless the power goes out after you finish cooking) and no shows to put on for the kids, it seems like it would spell disaster!

Or does it? It turns out these power outages are not always that bad. My favorite time for us to have a power outage is at night. Usually, dinner is cooked so if anyone wants to eat, we can. But the better part of having a power outage is it brings us closer as a family. Our eyes are off any and all screens, Santi and Soli love playing with the flashlight pretending to be monsters or ghosts. Since there is no light either outside or inside, the stars are amazing. We can sit in the back part of the house where there is no roof and star gaze. As I glance up at the beautiful star filled sky, I am taken back to summer camp where I discovered how amazing star gazing is outside of the city. It dawns on me that these power outages are a gift from God.

God is interrupting our plans for us to see what He wants us to see: Our children playing and enjoying themselves without technological devices, my husband having fun with the flashlight as he makes goofy (spooky) faces for the children, and myself rediscovering how much I love the stars because of the connection I feel with God when I look at them. I can’t help but think, is it really so terrible to be without power? Perhaps what we deem as inconveniences are God’s blessings upon us.

I want to share a journal entry I made the first time the power went out in the evening and lasted into the night:

Last night our electricity was out for quite some time. What started out as an inconvenience was actually God’s blessing - a gift. For the first time in a very long time, I got to stare at a starry night. The stars were gorgeous, and I went back to a time when I was a teenager in Christian camp. Every night we would go out, sit and watch the stars. We would sing songs of praise and worship, and I never felt so close to God than when I looked into the night sky filled with stars. I felt so close to Him as I would stare at the beauty of it all. I had forgotten how marvelous God’s works are and how you can find God when you stop to marvel at His creation. I was reminded last night of how much I love the stars. Gazing at them reveals to me how small we are with all our problems, and how immense the universe is. God fashioned all of it! He knows every star, moon, and planet. Only He knows the vastness of the universe.

-Nancy

Spraznyka! Happy Feast!

Today I went to hold my prison group when my plans got all turned over.  Today is the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, and thus, Fr. Juan Pablo and his parish brought a veritable feast to the prison alongside mass! 

There was a blowback to this: this meant that it wasn’t a day for visitors and therefore I couldn’t have group.

When has the “great feast” from God overturned our plans?

 

Receive the Kingdom Like a Little Child

A couple months ago, I began a psychoeducational group for orphan boys at a place called the Hogar de Niños. After screening the boys, I searched for a good curriculum that would teach them techniques to challenge negative thoughts, relax, practice good sleep hygiene, etc. 

What does it mean to receive the kingdom like a child? In particular, children who are orphaned or abandoned? Maybe it’s to recognize our need for recognition, to be vulnerable enough to reach. 

Manna From Online

 

I had worried about the reliability of my evaluation results until recently.  When I asked the creator of the Cognitive Processing Inventory about the cost of packages, he let me have access to the software and protocols for free for my time here!! You can’t always get what you want, but the way provides!!

-Jacob

Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor

 

“Despite sharp falls in carbon emissions in 2020 linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis – which is driven by the accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere over time – continue to grow.” – Oxfam, 2020  https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621052/mb-confronting-carbon-inequality-210920-en.pdf

 Climate change hits poorer communities first (due to geography), hardest (due to lack of infrastructure) and unjustly (due to their lesser rates of consumption and emission). As I watch our students prepare for activities related to care for creation and righteous stewardship, I can’t help but ask myself - Is their message for themselves? Or for us? How can I take the call to be brother earth’s keeper more seriously? Not only for its own sake, but for the sake of all who do and will live on it, particularly the vulnerable? How have I benefited from practices that spoil me and deprive others?

 To help, I look to Laudato Si action platform, which gauges what actions individuals and parishes can do to conserve the resources of the earth, which are rightfully the property of all. (https://laudatosiactionplatform.org)

 

“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.” -St Basil the Great

Our Lady of Suyapa

The most popular subject of devotion in Honduras is Our Lady of Suyapa. In 1925, Pope Pius XI declared her Patroness of Honduras under the title Our Lady of Suyapa, and selected February 3 as her feast day. In 1954, a large Basilica was built next to the chapel.  The statue of the Virgin spends most of her time in the chapel, but every year before the celebration of her festival, the statue is moved into the larger church to accommodate the crowds. Today, she was brought to the local Catholic university and we (along with the staff and students of the schools run by the diocese) got to meet her!

The statue is considered to have miraculous powers. The swift ending of the Football War between Honduras and El Salvador is attributed to the statue. Many of the Honduran soldiers involved reported visions of the Virgin, which calmed their fears during the fighting. In 1969 The Virgin of Suyapa was declared Captain General of the Armed Forces of Honduras.