Miscellaneous goings-on ...

I honestly don’t think I can remember the last time I wrote a blog update – it’s been really handy to just let Faith write them. But then, she only writes the things she sees and feels and does. And so now, 2 of the 3 people who read our blog have asked if all I do is lay around the house in my ******* (Faith says I can't put the word 'underwear' here) and watch TV and drink coca-cola while my wife works; the time, it seems, has come to write something about what I’ve been up to lately.

Yesterday was a trip to San Pedro Sula. This is the second largest city in Honduras, and a four hour drive from here, each way, if you include stopping once at the Texaco in La Entrada and about 5 stops at police checkpoints. Yesterday’s trip was actually a follow-up to the trip last Friday – Friday I drove to San Pedro to pick up four motorcycles for local pastors. The trip was heinous; I left home at 6am and got home after 10pm; the traffic was horrific; I got done only about half the errands I wanted to do while in the city. I had to stop about 5 times on the way home to adjust and re-strap the two motorcycles in the trailer that were trying to tip over, in the dark, amidst two broken motorcycle straps and a broken kick-stand on one motorcycles - around here, after dark, this is best done at someplace well-lit, under the watchful eye of a security guard with a nice, big, fat shotgun, and a six-shooter on his hip. I did save someone’s life on the way home, though – driving along out in the middle of no-where, pitch dark, no houses around, all of a sudden here’s some guy laying in the middle of the road! Curled up in the fetal position right in the middle of the lane. After not running over him, I stopped and got out to check him out. No, not dead. Sleeping. Drunk as a skunk and sleeping like a baby. I half-helped, half-picked him up and moved him out of the road and off the shoulder as far as he would go, amid a cloud of complaining and bickering about my having woke him up. He quickly got irritated and combative, and insisted on laying down again, but not before I got him off into the ditch, saving his soggy self and justifying my existence here for the year.

But I digress. One of the many happy facets of the trip on Friday was that certain paperwork for the motorcycles that had to be signed at the police station in San Pedro didn’t get delivered until 4pm, after the necessary person was unavailable. So, I had to make another trip today to pick up said paperwork. The trip today was much better; after only a half hour waiting at the police station, I found the paperwork signed and ready to go. I even managed to get a few other things done in town, learned a couple new parts of the city and got home before dark. Around here, dark is when the monstrous pot-holes come out and lurk in the shadows.

Sunday morning Allen Sowers and I traveled with a local pastor to a small village about an hour and a half from here to visit a new church plant and see the building they are planning. The church currently meets in the house of one of the members; they squeeze about 50 adults and kids into a room with pure adobe walls and rafters the level of my shoulders. I was truly blessed by being with them for the morning.

A couple weeks ago we spent three days building and installing trusses and purlings for a roof on another church in a nearby village. The walls are completed and they had the lumber already there – more-or-less 3/6’s by 35 feet long. This job turned out pretty well; we had all the village kids there the last two days after school watching, and the building is now ready for the tin roof as soon as they get the rest of the money together. I would guess we’ll be back there in a few weeks helping put the tin on.

A few weeks ago Allen Sowers and I traveled – again – a few hours out into the mountains.
(“Ain’t this place just a geographical oddity!! – A few hours from ev’ywhere!”) Allen was contacted a while back by a humanitarian organization about helping with the design and construction of several cable suspension bridges. We spent two half-days in and around a town called Mapulaca, near the border with El Salvador. The bridges will be pedestrian walk bridges with spans of from 80 to 120 feet long, and will span rivers that are a foot deep - easily wade-able for part of the year, but that then turn into raging torrents for weeks at a time during the rainy season. After throwing a few ideas around and putting new batteries in the calculator and blowing the dust off

the engineering books, we have a design pretty well ironed out. I hope to have finalized drawings finished this week for them, and I think they are planning to start moving forward within the next few weeks.

I have spent several days over the past weeks working on a number of computers that have arrived here in the last couple of shipments from the US. These are donated computers, most in pretty good condition, though a couple have required some inspection and troubleshooting. I have pared up CPUs, monitors, mouse and keyboards to piece together 8 complete computers that we are now in the process of placing with local churches and schools. I delivered two to one of the bi-lingual schools last week, and am in the process of contacting the other school. I also gave one to one local church last week, and then brought it back over the weekend and added a printer to it, finding and loading the driver files off the internet. I am meeting with another pastor today about giving his church one or two computers as well.

Thursday and Friday of this week I am translating for some sort of short-term mission team in the area. I’m still not sure what their focus is; I think I’ve heard they’re doing medical something and something else.

Other than that, not much has been going on. Well, other than trying to get our internet connection back on line, getting the massive hole in our roof fixed and doing the general day-to-day stuff that keeps our truck on the road and food in the frig and the lights on. I guess I’ll hurry up and post this so I can get back to the TV.