Final Days in Honduras

This will be my last blog post while in Honduras, since we leave tomorrow evening. We have to be at the airport in San Pedro at 9 pm to check in, but our flight doesn´t leave til 1 in the morning :( We will be arriving in Rochester around 5 pm on Thursday I think.

Our last two days here have been full of a lot of different activities. Yesterday, we had our last day of work at the work site. We finished putting up all of the wall bricks on the house, and we also starting adding the row of roof bricks that need to get put on. At the end of our day, we had a farewell ceremony at the work site. The family - Juan, Zoila, and Cristian were there, along with Señor Gonzalo, the mason at the site, and other Habitat workers. They expressed their thanks to us for the work that we did on the house, and we also told them how much this experience has meant to us.

We all signed a Bible to give to the family that will be in their new house. The family was also presented with a tree sapling from Habitat that will be planted somewhere near the house. After the ceremony, we ate tamales and said our goodbyes to all the people that we had met this past week. We also donated some of our equipment to Habitat - our work gloves, some pairs of shoes, and we gave a soccer ball to Jaime and Ale. Emily and Kellen wrote letters to the boys, and Jaime wrote one back thanking us for spending time with him this week. They plan to keep in touch with Jaime still through letters.

Our last meal at the hotel was a little exciting. I would post pictures of it, but I don´t have Mr. Clapp´s camera with me right now. It consisted of the typical vegetables, fried plantains, and then an entire fried fish, complete with eyes and fins. It was pretty entertaining to see the looks on some of the girls´ faces when the waitress laid the fish down in front of them.

Today, we traveled to Copan to spend the next day and a half sightseeing. We visited the Mayan ruins before lunch where we learned how to count in Mayan and learned the names of the sixteen Mayan kings. The highlight of our day was in the afternoon when we went on the canopy zipline. We were driven up a winding gravel road to the top of the Copan valley bluffs. From the top, we went on 16 different ziplines, winding our way above the rainforest with a spectacular view of the valley below. Two of the ziplines were 1 kilometer long, and a couple of them were over 350 feet off the ground!

Tomorrow, we plan to spend the day in Copan sightseeing and shopping. We have a 2 hour drive to San Pedro in the evening, and then we will get on the airplane to head home :( Don´t stop checking the blog now, because when we get back, all of us will post an individual reflection about our experience and also put up some more photos of our trip.

Thank you for all of your prayers and support as we went on this trip, and we look forward to seeing all of you in a couple of days!

Mike