Honduras '11

As you may know I just got back from a week-long missions trip to Honduras. I thought that I'd utilize my blog and share about the trip rather than tell people multiple times. If my memory is correct this was my sixth missions trip to Honduras, and fourth specifically to La Venta, a small town about an hour north of the capital, Tegucigalpa.

I started going down because my dad went down and had great experiences there and he has always gone with me before. He was planning on going this year but realized the Thursday before we left that he just couldn't afford to miss an entire week of work so decided that he would not go. That was obviously tough for me and was going to change the trip quite a bit. On Saturday while I was packing we got a call from Kent, the other gentleman who leads the trips with my dad and who has been down probably 15 times. He told my dad that his son, Keith, who was planning on going, had hit a deer on his motorcycle. They rushed Keith to the hospital. My dad decided that he would have to go since Kent was not able to and we could not go without one of them. Thankfully Keith is okay-no broken bones but pretty severe road rash and he was pretty bummed about not being able to go. Once Kent found out that Keith was okay he decided to come down, so he made the flight on Tuesday. My dad, knowing that Kent was planning on coming down knew that he should leave early so he could work, left on Wednesday. Altogether I think everything worked out, it was just stressful at times and definitely not normal.

There were seven people on the trip: Kent/my dad, three college men, a guy who graduated from Taylor a few years ago, and his parents.  All but Cindy, the lone female, had been before. Cindy spent the week with the women, mainly cooking meals for us. The guys worked at a church in La Venta, which is the third year in a row I've worked there. They are adding classrooms and offices behind the church and we worked on pouring the footers for that the first four days. I believe we mixed thirty-nine 100 pound bags of cement, which we added rock, water, and sand to. I'm not exactly sure how much concrete that is, but it's quite a bit for mixing it all by hand. On Friday we worked on Osman and Suyapa's new house digging footers.  Osman is the pastor of the church and Suyapa is his wife; she was diagnosed with cancer last year and has been recovering from that.

Thursday we took the afternoon off to play soccer with some local Hondurans at Monte which was a lot of fun. The five of us who were playing got put on the same team with a couple of Hondurans, against about nine Hondurans. We played for probably an hour and a half and ended up winning 12-11, which we were all really excited about. I think I had three goals and three assists.

One exciting and different aspect of the trip was that Osman gave us all massages after working on Wednesday and Friday. I think he took a class to learn how to give massages and we were all eager to let him practice on us. That was pretty fantastic:) One of the best things about our mission trips to Honduras are the relationships that we've built. Where most people will go down for a week and never go back, there has been a core group of people that have gone down for years. I've been able to build a really strong relationship  with Osman and Suyapa and Eufimeo and his family, the care taker of Monte. Thankfully all three of them know enough English that I don't have to embarrass everyone with my terrible Spanish. I met one gentlemen my very first year that I also have a special bond with. His name is Osman but everyone calls him Little Osman so we don't confuse him with Pastor Osman. He told me that he's twenty-five, but I don't believe him. I'm fairly confident he's closer to 35. He speaks hardly any English so we really can't talk, but we've mixed countless matches of concrete together so have a special bond. He is also the strongest pound for pound man I have ever met. He's about 5'4" and maybe a hundred pounds, but if he has any fat I'd be shocked. All of that to say, he worked with us starting on Wednesday which was really nice. It's always great to see him but not always a guarantee.

On Saturday we decided not to work before heading to Tegucigalpa and the entire group of us besides Kent and Cindy, along with Eufimeo and Little Osman went hiking up a mountain. It's really mountainous and beautiful and green in Honduras and there is a river that comes down one of the mountains near Monte. So we followed that up and then on our way down we stopped in one of the little pools to go swimming. There was a cliff about 8 feet up that we could jump off of into the water that was a lot of fun. After swimming we headed to this really nice bed and breakfast in Tegucigalpa for a cook out. We stayed the night there and flew out in the morning.

That's a quick snapshot of my trip, it was really good and enjoyable and we did not have any sickness or injuries which is always nice:)

Why I Love Sports

This is my counter-post to my previous one, Why I Hate Sports. Ever since I can remember I've been on sports teams, it started as flag football in the fall, then I moved onto basketball during the winter, then to baseball in the spring. Over time I dropped football for soccer, and baseball for track (and then soccer). I've been part of teams coming together and accomplishing things as a team, and being better than anyone ever thought. Anytime you're competing as a team you have to learn how to work with your team-mates, and what you can do to get the best out of them. These characteristics can be taken from the athletic field into pretty much any other part of our lives. No matter how hard we try, we're always going to have to rely on other people, so the better we can interact with them, the better off everyone is.

I was blessed with the chance to go and play basketball on a missions trip to Honduras a few summers ago. We would play against some Honduran team, and then afterwards one of us would share our testimony and we'd share the Gospel with them. It was a great opportunity for sharing about God, especially considering none of us knew Spanish (and none of them knew English). Anytime you compete with or against somebody, there's instantly that bond that you can't form any other way. Without the gift of basketball we may never have gotten the chance to share about Christ's love with those Hondurans.

For me, anytime I need to go think or just blow off steam one of the best ways is just by going and shooting hoops by myself. There's just something special and calming about that time-I'm able to get in my own little world and take a break from my problems for a while.

Like I wrote about in the first post, losing can have a dramatic effect on my overall mood; however winning can have just as good of an affect. I may be having a really tough day, but if my team wins (specifically Illinois), my day will instantly into a good day. It's a lot of fun rooting for a team, especially when they win. Following them in the off-season, and then during practices, and then finally during the season is just an experience that I can't put into words it's so good.

There are numerous bright spots when it comes to athletics, without evening mentioning how healthy it is. It's healthy to be in shape and physically active. And I also believe that it's healthy to be passionate about something, and a lot of people (myself included), are passionate about my teams. Just like liking the 'wrong' team might cause me to judge somebody, liking the 'right' team has the same exact benefit. Once somebody's a teammate, they're a teammate for life, somebody you can always count on, no matter what happens, which is a fantastic feeling. Sports are an amazing part of life, and add more joy and harm to it.

Why I Hate Sports

This is the first of a two part series, the other entry will deal with why I love sports. But first, a little disclaimer about me and my biases...I enjoy playing any sport, and watching pretty much any sport. My dad is a big sports guy, so I've grown up watching and participating, and it's one way that we really bond. I played soccer and basketball in high school, and while I don't play for Huntington, I usually play basketball a couple days a week, and play in all of the intramural seasons. I'd consider myself to be a fairly avid sports fan, and rather knowledgeable.

Like most people in Indiana, I'm a die-hard Colts fan. And they lost last night in the first round of the play-offs. It was a heart-breaking loss. Pretty much ruined my weekend. I went home mainly so I could watch the game with my dad, only to have them lose. One game easily ruin my day, or even weekend if it's bad enough. This can make me rude and hard to be around, and most people have no idea why. Being a Colt's fan means that I loathe the Patriots (and I'm an even bigger University of Illinois fan, so I hate IU), and if I find out that someone likes one of the teams on my 'black' list of teams, I immediately judge that person and think less of them. Even if they're the nicest person in the world, I'll think less of them because they like the Hoosiers. A down-side or organized athletics is the sheer time that it requires. And a lot of this time is at inopportune times (for example my freshman year of hs we had to have basketball practice at 630 in the morning every day). This can take away from other activities-such as sleeping or schoolwork, or even growing friendships or making new friends.  I'd spend several hours a day in practices and games, but even when I wasn't physically doing something with my team, I may have still been thinking about it or talking about things that we could do better, so the time is even greater. I don't have any personal experience with this, but I'm sure that there have been numerous families that have been ruined because one spouse wasn't willing to sacrifice for his/her family. Whether that's drinking after a tough loss, or just constantly being gone with the team, it's hard. College teams are looking harder and harder for the next great player, and that means scouting thousands of high school kids. Several years ago colleges would just look at seniors, and wouldn't pay much attention to anyone else. It's gotten to the point that a few college's have offered 8th graders full-ride scholarships to play at their schools. While that's not the norm, it has become quite normal for high school freshman to have offers from the top basketball programs in the nation. This adds tremendous pressure for these kids. I know that when I was a freshman college was the farthest thing from my mind. But these kids are forced to adjust to being a national name, while adjusting to high school and all of those changes. They're under constant scrutiny, and every mistake they make is instantly a major deal. No fourteen or fifteen year old should be forced to deal with this scrutiny. Most adults couldn't handle it well, let alone high schoolers. And I'm not even going to go into some of the extra 'incentives' that colleges give to high school athletes, but that's another major problem with sports.

There are a lot of problems with sports, things that impact almost everyone negatively in some way or another. With all of the bad things that athletics bring to the world, it's a wonder why it's so popular. In my next post I'll try to explain why it is so popular.

Honduras

I've gone on five missions trips to Honduras, and really love the country and the relationships I've built down there. Several years ago my church started a sister church relationship with a church in the capital, Tegucigalpa. That church then started a church camp up in the mountains for kids, and my church has sent down teams almost every summer since the mid-90's to help with this. My dad was on one of these first trips, and has been down something like 16 times since. So Honduras has always been part of my life, but since these were all work trips and I was just in elementary school when my dad started going down, I could only hear about these trips, even though I was counting down the years until I was "big" enough to go down and work. From my freshman year of high school on I've gone down every time there's been a trip. The church camp has pretty much been finished, but there has been a church plant started a couple kilometer's down the road by a couple of really good friends of mine, Osman and Suyapa Gradiz.The church used to meet on their back porch, but a couple years ago they bought land and have started building a church. Last summer we were able to put trusses up and almost finish the roof (which is an entirely different post, but let's just say it's not easy hoisting solid metal beams weighing a couple tons unto the roof without any machines to help us). This past summer we went down again and were able to pour sidewalks around the church (mixing the concrete by hand of course). The church is looking really good- it's so nice for them to have walls and a roof for their services.

In all of my trip's to Honduras I'm always reminded at how lucky and fortunate I am in America. I take so many things for granted-comfortable beds, hot showers, clean water, and I never have to wonder if what I'm buying at the grocery might make me sick (etc.) But for the vast majority of the people I've met, they're surprisingly happier than most people I know here in the States. They have so little but have so much. It's really a humbling experience for me. And I hope to continue being able to go down every summer and doing whatever God wants me to.

First Blog

I never thought I'd actually have my own blog, but thanks to my jterm class I now have one. I'm probably not going to post much about my life, primarily because no one really wants to read that stuff, I barely even care. But, for the first post, I figure I should introduce myself a little bit. I'm currently a sophomore at Huntington, majoring in finance. I'm hoping to go into financial advising after graduating-I really enjoy investing in the stock market and have personally invested since my junior year of high school, but invested some money for my parents as a sophomore. As of June of this year I have had an average annualized return of about 17% per year, which isn't too bad considering we were in a recession. I played soccer and basketball in high school, and while I don't play on any of the HU teams, I play pretty much every intramural sport. I'm planning on going to Haiti for spring break for a missions trip, which I'm really excited about. I've gone to Honduras almost every year since my freshman year of high school, and am also planning on going there this summer. Most of my trips there have been missions-related, but last year my family took a vacation to Roatan-a small island north of the country. It was beautiful-crystal clear Caribbean, and has the world's second largest coral reef which we snorkeled in. It was the coolest place I've ever been to, and am trying to talk my parents into going there again this summer. Another cool thing about it is that hardly anyone knows about Roata, so the island was empty-we ate almost all of our meal's by ourselves in the restaurants-which let us talk to and get to know some of the owners which was a lot of fun.