Honduras, part 2

I am writing this from the cool airconditioning of my room. I was out in the town this morning trying to buy supper to feed all the kids. The sun is so hot and it is easy to get burned here. Going to the market is quite the task since you have to haggle with the local market vendors to see who gives the best prices for produce. Thankfully one of the staff guys loves to barter so it makes things much easier. I need to take pictures of the market though. There are some pretty nasty things around there. Today, we saw these bloody chuncks of meat laying in the back of an absolutley bloody truck bed. I couldn't even identify what part of the animal it was. And it just lays out in the sun and rots. So gross!

Please continue to pray for our meetings here. Blessings are still coming out of the work here. You can go to the students blog and read some of them there. Last night at one of the sites, the non-Adventist translator was really touched by the sermon on the law of God and was very convicted. He said he is bringing a lot of friends tonight to hear the message. Pray esp. this weekend since the topic is on Sabbath vs. Sunday.

In addition to the meetings, we are tyring to get out and see some of the Honduran country side. We went on an exucursion yesterday to a national park called Punta Sal. The beaches are amazing and the water nice and warm. We took a walk through a jungle path which was really neat. And we saw lots of monkeys. Here are just a few photos of our time.

One of the boats we rode to the island.

This island is called "Cocolito" or "Little Coconut" (I don't know if I spelled that right.)

These birds are called "Friggets." They have an incredible large wingspan and a very long tail.

This was the hike through the jungle.

This monkey looks like he wants to throw something on me. The tour guide said the monkeys do like to throw things.

Another monkey.

A banana flower.

A very poisonous banana spider. They can't kill you, but they make you very sick.

The beach where we spent three hours snorkling, swimming, exploring, and eating a picnic lunch.

A picnic lunch on the beach.

Two students and I.

Yours truly trying to not get burnt. I actually did very well.

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/

This and That...

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks that I don't even know what I should write about. School let out on the 10th of December, and then I joined the entire student body for a week long choir tour all throughout California. It was the first choir trip I have been able to go on since I always had to stay home before to get caught up on grading and lesson planning. It was great fun, but by the time we all arrived in San Jose on the 17th for GYC, we were all ready to stay in one location for longer than a day. We performed twice at GYC--once for an evening special music and then three selections during a Friday afternoon musical concert. It was fun. Here is a video of one of our performances.



This is a photo of all of us on stage at GYC. Photo credit by Alden Ho.

The students even made up a performance of their own. My kids never cease to amaze me in coming up with creative ways to entertain themselves when they are bored. I thought I would include a little clip of what they do when they need something to do. This year, yodeling has become a fun past time at school and one of our students has gotten quite a number of the guys to join along. Saturday night after the last GYC meeting, I walked into a room to find my students giving a yodeling concert. We were all laughing so hard since it was so amusing. There was a huge Christmas gathering in a park directly across from the convention center and there were a lot of passersby in the downtown area. One of our students suggested that they go out onto the street and see if they could get people to stop by and listen to them. They even decided to open the accordion case and see if people would throw money into the case. They actually did have people stop by and several stayed for quite a while. They even got a few donations for their cause. As you will notice in the clip, they had no qualms about asking for donations! To say the least, I thought it was a clever way to pass the time!



Now I am finally back at home and am enjoying a wonderful time with my family. It feels really good to just sit around! But in reality, I brought a lot of work with me and eventually I will get some stuff done. But in the meantime, I am enjoying just spending time with the best family ever!!

In the beauty of this season, I hope you will remember what matters most--family, friends, and most importantly a Savior who loved us enough to give us a reason for the season. May you appreciate His sacrificial gift all the more this Christmas.

so cute!

Canada is full of bears! Lots of bears! I have so wanted to get a picture of one to show everyone, but most of them have been out at night, but those don't make for good photos. (Besides the fact that I am not so fool-hardy as to run around at night trying to snap photos of bears!) Anyway, last month there was a little cub that decided Fountainview would make a great home. No one ever saw his mommy or daddy, but he loved making frequent stops on campus and grabbing a few bites to eat out of people's compost piles. And there was one tree on campus that was "his" tree. Here are just a few photos of him in his tree. I can't wait for Heaven where I can just cuddle with the little creature and give him a great big hug! That will be amazing!

International Supper

Every year, Fountainview puts on an international supper for the surrounding communities. This time, it was combined with a program that honored each of the people that were involved in the rescue of our students/staff from the Mt. Askom back in September. It was a wonderful evening, but we were so exhausted at the end of it from all the cooking and decorating... and of course, EATING! I ate so much! We had booths represented from all over: Philippines, Mexico, Africa, Japan, Korea, Israel, Italy, Caribbean, Swiss Alps, Canada, Southern USA, Ireland, Holland, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Romania, and two others I can't remember. It was amazing food! The kids did a wonderful job. And of course, this year I helped with the Korean booth again, but thankfully this time I had another Caucasian to keep me company! Here are just a few photos.

The student in the middle and her mom have spent quite a bit of time in Africa doing missionary work.

My "Jewish" students.

The young man wearing the pharoah's hat is one of our students who is actually from Egypt.

This is the Swiss Alps booth. This student is an excellent yodeler. He's started a crazy trend in the guys dorm!

The Korean crew.

The Southern kids with good ol' Southern cookin'! Complete with greens and grits and sugared apples!

This is what happens when a Southern boy crosses the border into Mexico!

I have the greatest students!

During my excursions on the mountain, I must have gotten myself into poison ivy or poison oak because on Tuesday, I had developed small rash like bumps on my wrist. I smeared Benadryl cream on it to alleviate the rash. Not wanting to get white cream all over my clothes, I rolled plastic seran wrap around my wrist. When I got to class, my chemistry students kept asking why I had plastic wrap on my wrist. Joking with them, I told them it was a new fashion statement and then of course I explained why I had it on.

Yesterday when I got to class, I found almost half my class wearing seran wrap on their wrists. I guess they wanted to be a part of the new fashion! I laughed so hard! It totally made my day! Here are seven of the nine that had it on.

The experience of a lifetime...

...and one I don't think I ever want to do again!! Of course, not backpacking. I would love to try that again, but I don't think I ever want to climb Mt. Askom again. That was one grueling hike--both up and down. So this is the story...

We got off late to start with so we didn't start hiking until about 2:30pm. When we got to the "trailhead" (ya, right, there was no trail! It was authentic bush whacking and making your own trail!), I stared at it in disbelief. We had to scale hundreds of yards up the side of the mountain (which was nearly vertical) until we got onto the ridge and into the treeline. Climbing up that ledge was treacherous. We were using all fours to make our way up the side and had to grab onto bushes and shrubs to keep from sliding all the way down. With a 30 pound pack on your back, it makes it quite interesting. Here, my student Karen is looking back toward the way we just came. The picture doesn't do it justice, but right in front of her was the steep part we had to climb.

Once we made it into the tree line, things were better, but it was straight up the side of the mountain (at least we could stand on our feet though and not use all fours!). There were quite a few downed trees in the forest, so we were scrambling over logs and branches as we creeped along. Here Karen and Stephanie are tackling the mountain.

Our group of five (myself, Stephanie, Karen, Sondra Smith and Danny Houghten) got separated from the rest of the group so we trudged on alone for nearly 2 hours. I was leading the group and was doing my best to follow the footprints of those before us since there was no trail to follow and I wasn't too sure where we were going. At one point, the trail seem to split and both looked like they had been followed. We turned down one path but after about 30 feet, it disappeared. So we retraced our steps and proceeded up the other path. I yelled down to Sondra and Danny who had fallen way behind. Sondra had twisted her ankle and was having to go very slow. We put an ace bandage on it and proceeded on. After several hundreds of yards, we lost the trail again so we were on our own. We forged our own trail for a while, but I was growing more concerned that I really didn't know where we were going, so I was hestitant to keep going. We thought there was one group still behind us so we waited for them to catch up. Now with a group of 10 we continued on. With Sondra's ankle and our extreme tiredness, the going was slow. We came out of the tree line and faced a looming shale face right above us. It was a long hard hike and we kept dreaming about the top. Just when we crested one slope, we saw another in front of us. It was tough going. The view was spectacular though. If you look through the trees into the valley, you can see Fountainview way below. In the second photo, it is off to the left.


Along the way, my left eye clouded over and I couldn't see. I wiped my eye on my sleeve and saw blood. I couldn't tell exactly where the blood was coming from nor could I even figure our what had happened. I wasn't sure if a bug bit me or a tree branch scraped me, but I didn't feel any pain or itchiness or anything. It was weird. It took a while for it to stop bleeding but finally it did and we were able to move on. Karen, Stephanie, and myself paused for a picture before we moved on.

We were fast running out of daylight and were still about 4 hours from our destination. (They told us the hike would only be 3 hours long. Right! We had already hiked for 5 1/2 and had another 4 to go!) Sondra's ankle was getting more sore and we were all exhausted. We made it almost to the top of the first peak (still another 45 minutes to the summit) and decided to pitch camp. It was a precarious place to camp considering we were on a very steep part of the mountain, it was covered in slick shale, and the wind blasted across the top. But with no choice, we found the most level spot around and laid out our tarps and sleeping bags. We were all grateful for really warm clothes and the tarps which we wrapped around our bags. The gusts of wind that hit us that night were so strong and we kept rolling since we were on the slope. One person thankfully had put huge rocks along his bag and several times they prevented him from rolling down the slope. I do have to admit though that the view was spectacular. Here we were almost at the very top of the peak and all you could see was a panoramic view of a clear night sky. We saw the moon creep up over the mountain range on the other side of the valley and it was blood red. It was amazing. Here we were breaking camp in the morning. In the second photo, the black area is really way below us though the picture doesn't really show it.


The next morning I woke up with my left eye so swollen and crusty from drainage all night. I looked hideous! I still could detect no bite or scratch. Some in our group wondered if I was having a sensitivity to the altitude that was causing pressure behind my eye. I was sure it was related to the bleeding from the day before, but still wasn't sure of the cause. Not risking it, I decided to make my way down the mountain with Danny and Sondra and go to the hospital to get it checked out. If you look closely at the second picture, you can see my left eye is quite swollen. (The doctor who checked my eye was rather perplexed by my symptoms. He detected no severe problem. His best guess was that some weird bug must have bit me but left no bite mark and my body reacted to it later.)


The three of us left right after breakfast and were confident the trip down would only take about 2 hours. It ended up taking us as long to get down as it did up. Since we hadn't eaten much food, our packs were still enormously heavy. All that weight on our backs put a lot of pressure on our knees. After a while, we felt like our knees where jelly and it was hard to balance. We got to some severely steep inclines that were only passible by rear--meaning you sat on your rear and slid on the way down. We had to dig our heels into the slope and grab plants and bushes on the way down just to prevent sliding off the ledge. At other times, we had to walk sideways and lean into the slope to prevent a head over heel tumble down the mountain side. It was insane! All we could think about was getting back to the car! This is a view on the way down.

At one point, we could actually see the cars way below along the logging road. While we were dreaming about being there, we looked way up the road and saw this huge bear lumbering his way down to the car. We kept musing to ourselves that we would probably make it to the car the same time he did and after all our effort on the mountain would just become bear meat. Thankfully that didn't happen!

Sabbath evening we were so grateful to be back at home esp. when it started raining and snowing on the mountain. The rest of the group on the mountain had a very snowy, chilly night. (One students thermometer registered -10C or 14F.) Most of them made it back by 5pm Sunday evening except for one group of 10 that got disoriented in the thick fog. They proceeded down the wrong ridge and found themselves all turned around. By Sunday evening, helicopters started searching for them, but saw no trace of them. Several search and rescue ground teams were dispatched Monday morning including two helicopters and a surveillance airplane. At noon, one of the helicopters spotted the group and they were airvaced to the hospital. All of us here on campus were fervently praying for them knowing that the weather was getting colder (it snowed again Sunday night) and their food and water supply was small. Thankfully, they had been able to start a fire Sunday night, but with all their belongings and their clothes being completely soaked from the snow and rain, they were one cold group. We were concerned about hypothermia and dehydration. Thankfully, we only had one student that had dehydration.

Last night, we had a session of prayer and praise after the group arrived back from the hospital. Through the whole ordeal, they held up well, but upon arriving back to school and being able to finally mentally process the whole experience, the group broke down and cried. It was quite the experience for them all. Individuals got up and share what blessings they had experienced while stranded out there. They shared how the felt so sure that God would send help to them by noon. Miraculously, it was at 12:15, the helicopter spotted them. Another experience they related was that they kept praying that God would stop it from snowing. But instead, it snowed even more. They couldn't figure out why God kept letting it snow. When they were finally picked up in the helicopter, the pilot told them that if it hadn't been for the snow, she would have had a more difficult time finding them. As she was flying, she noticed a melted area and that alerted her of their possible location. (Due to the fire and the group staying in that one spot, the snow was more melted there than anywhere else.)

And looking back on the event, I have a blessing of my own. On the way up, Stephanie and Karen and I stayed together the whole time. I most likely would have decided to hike back with them down the mountain. And they were a part of the group that got stranded. If it hadn't been for an unknown issue with my eye, I would probably have to be recalling a rescue story myself... Maybe God send a bug to bite me to get me off the mountain!

Here is one last picture just to put the mountain in perspective... It is the one in the center.

If you want to read what the media had to say about the ordeal, you can go to these two sites...

Hikers rescued from Askom Mountain

Lost campers rescued from mountain near Lillooet