I am in Honduras!

Written Sabbath evening:
Well, we've been in Honduras now for four days and it has been a whirlwind! In just four days, I have seen the devil try to derail our work and discourage my students. But God always prevails. There are multiple areas around this part of Honduras that are holding campaigns, but this site seems to be one that has the least amount of ground work preparation. I cannot fault the pastors or leaders because each pastor here is responsible for many churches (13+) so they are running around trying to get everything worked out. There was aparently a lot of miscommunication with the pastors here about the students coming. Only about 4 of the 13 sites were able to be visited ahead of time. The rest of the sites, the students saw for the first time right before there meetings. Transporation was a huge issue since they didn't realize that most of the sites had two speakers. So last minute transportion had to be worked out. Some students didn't even get to their site until after they had already started Friday evening. And then there were so many issues with the translators... 13-15 year old kids who knew English well but didn't speak Spanish very well (odd problem, right?) and ones that didn't even know how to read Bible texts or translate words like 'Lord'. One site was so bad that the elder ended up preaching some random sermon because no one could understand the translator. Then at another site, there wasn't even a translator who showed up. So they just packed up and left. Then at another site, no one showed up so they canceled the crusade there. It was such a mess and students were all wondering what could be done. I kept encouraging them to have patience and flexiblilty. I just didn't want them to get discouraged since they have put there whole heart into preparing for these meetings. I have had to be in the middle of multiple meetings with the pastors, the union president, and our site coordinator for SHARE HIM just to try to make sense of what is happening here. The local people are swamped with 13 sites and didn't have the man power to run them. So we cut back from 13 to 7 sites and reorganized all the student teams and got new drivers and translators. It has been a lot of tedious details and has been a very exhausting past couple of days. But I do believe that God has big plans for these students and there must be miracles that are going to happen here considering the devil worked so hard at the onset. Tonight I got very good reports from most of the sites, so I think things are finally going to work out. Praise the Lord! So here are just a few pictures of some of the sites.

This last picture is of the site that was canceled Friday night because no one showed up. The pastor today in church pled with the people to bring friends to the meeting. This afternoon when they decided to cut sites, they again cut out this site. But the pastor had pled so hard with his congregation that morning and the church members went out to invite people, that they just couldn't cancel it. So one of my students agreed last minute to go preach at this site. There were quite a number of people there and God blessed my student so much as she preached the message. In the congregation is a Catholic gentlemen who goes to church on Sabbath because he is convinced the Catholic church changed the day of worship. My student commented that he is not going to be Catholic for long!

Please continue to pray for the meetings here. At one site we have a non-Adventist translator who is actually one of the drivers who was recruited to translate. He is actually doing quite well and the students are excited that he is hearing the messages as he is translating for them. They are praying that he will give his life to Christ as he helps them present the message each night.

Today was the first time I have had time to go to the beach. It was really nice. Here are just a few photos.

Some random funny things:

Some in our group are still getting used to the new fruit down here. They went shopping the other day and bought a "papaya". When I got it out for breakfast, I thought it looked kinda strange. But I cut it anyway. I laughed when we opened it. It turned out to be a squash instead. I think we need to teach some people in our group how to tell different foods apart!!

The first night we are in our hotel, my student was just getting ready to walk down the stairs from the second floor of the hotel and all of a sudden she screamed at the top of her lungs and began dancing around at the top of the stairs. All of us wondered if she saw a rat or snake or what. We laughed when this is what we saw. Up on the second floor is an area that has a lot of plants. This toad must live in the plants and eat the bugs there. He was a great big guy but so cute too!

If you want to keep up with the kids site, it is:
http://telagrams09.blogspot.com/