Monday, March 08, 2010

A long weekend (finally!); good friends; a good story...

Well, it seems that Swine Flu is spreading itself around Tegus again. Unfortunately, several kids at Pinares caught it, including one of my students. On Wednesday my kids weren't allowed to come to school, and then when even more cases were discovered they just closed all of the elementary for Thursday and Friday. Which meant our first long weekend in a long time! If you read my previous post about Donald Miller, or if you've read his latest book, you know what I mean by living a good story. I feel that I did a pretty good job this weekend!
So, I started with a little TLC by spending a lazy Thursday meeting friends for lunch, hanging out by the pool at Hotel Maya, and dinner with the novio.
On Friday a group of 5 of us headed up the mountain to the entrance to the national park we live near, called La Tigra. Our amazing friend and coworker Janice borrowed a car and drove us there--she's the best! We took our time and hiked for a couple of hoursout to a waterfall where we ate lunch and then we kept hiking across the mountain to the other entrance that is in a tiny pueblo called San Juancito, it's an old mining town that still has abandoned wood-and-tin-roof-houses built by the New York mining company that split about 50 years or so ago. Once in San Juancito we walked out to a little hostel (really just a cabin big enough for 5) owned by a German couple who moved here about 11 years ago. They made us a delicious vegetarian dinner and we got a tour of their awesome property!

We left earlyish on Saturday because Sarah and I were going to meet up with Macayla that afternoon to head out to a transition home. The ministry that Macayla is very involved in, Manos Extendidas, recently started a transition home that houses 4 girls who were in orphanages or detention centers. This was their response after discovering that most of these young teen girls would wind up pregnant within 6 months of leaving the orphanages. So Sarah, Macayla, and I spent the evening baking, watching a movie, and just having fun with these wonderful, precious girls. Oh, and we got our hair done, as well. :)



And to top it all off, I even went to a little museum of Honduras' air force with Daniel on Sunday. Let's just say, by the time my alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, I felt quite accomplished, but also not really in the mood to let my long weekend of amazingness end!