Blood, sweat, and tears

All in a days work. Okay, so minus the tears.

Our third day in Honduras started with us having a devotional with the staff of La Providencia. That's the organization that we are working with. They run a k-4 grade school, orphanage, and plan on building houses for widows in the future. They are really focused on improving their community through education.

They gave us a tour through the campus, explaining the past, their struggles, and their hopes for the future. Their largest hurtle was the lack of education in the community. Some people feared them because they didn't understand them-- they told us a sad story of a father who wanted to pull his daughter out of kindergarten. When they asked him why, he said it was pointless-- there was no way that his daughter could learn math, science, English, it was too much for her to ever understand. 

Even though they had a rough time in the beginning, what really struck me was how optimistic they were about the future. They currently have two orphanages built, with plans for ten more. What I loved about their orphan structure is that they don't feel like orphans at all. Each orphan house has a married couple who lives there. The couple commits eighteen years of their life to raise the orphans in the house, like a family. We toured one of the orphan homes-- the couple that lived there was very sweet, even if they spoke no English.

The mother lined up six of us-- the number of her children. She then said that she hopes when her children-- two biological, the rest orphans-- grow up that they are just like us.

After our tour we went into their cafeteria-- a huge multipurpose building. We ate with the kids and then went outside to play with them during recess. They were adorable and very energetic, tugging, pulling, and laughing at us.

Sadly, we couldn't play with the kids forever. After recess the kids dashed back to their classrooms as we headed towards our construction job. Currently the school goes to fourth grade but they plan to add a class a year till they go through high school. We are laying the foundation for their fifth grade classroom. It is hard work in the 100 degree heat, but not unbearable.

After a long day we come back to the hotel. Of course, the first thing we all wanted to do was play ultimate frisbee! The only large lit space was the gravel parking lot. In less than an hour two of us had gone done, scrapping our legs in the sharp gravel. My first battle wound in Honduras; I somehow managed to not hurt myself at the construction site surrounded by sharp tools, but in a parking lot with a frisbee.

I have far too many photos and I wish that I could post them all, but time and wifi stand in the way of that. Once I get home, I'll post a ton more photos on facebook and might come back and edit these posts to put some more pictures up.

Stay tuned for for Honduran fun!

Check out my group's take on day three!

Dia Dos

This morning we headed to a local baptist church, sitting in on Sunday school before attending the service.

Kind of hard to follow since it was all in Spanish, but still it was really cool.

No surprise, football is a huge sport here.

After church we headed to a local restaurant for lunch and enjoyed a taste of Honduran food and delicious strawberry shakes.

We hung out with some local kids at an Awanas meeting, singing some songs, doing a little skit, and then playing some games.

They didn't have much. A small enclosed concrete pad and some bowling pins. Somehow, though, they came up with a surprising variety of fun little games.

The kids were adorable, even though they spoke little English and I spoke even littler Spanish. It was rather hot in the glare of the sun, though the running kids seemed hardly to notice.

Okay so I've tried for the past two nights to upload three more photos to this post and it is not going to happen right now. Later, when the wi-fi is stronger, I'll add a couple more photos of the adorable kids. But for right now I'm going to nurse my first battle wound-- suffice to say, playing ultimate Frisbee in a gravel parking lot might not be the best idea.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more updates on life in Honduras :)

Check out my group's take on day two! 

[[EDIT: finally got those pictures up!]]

Binvenidos a Honduras!

Two flights, three airports, and one bus ride later, I am officially in Honduras!

After a scant three hours of sleep I met the rest of my youth group, most who had enjoyed even less sleep, at the LR airport for our flight to Houston.

Sunrise above the clouds

We flew to Houston then boarded a plan for Honduras. The flight wasn't too long, around two hours flying over the Gulf of Mexico and landing in a large (whose name I have, unsurprisingly, forgotten) city in Honduras.

After a quick lunch the head guy from the organization we're working with picked us up in a huge van. The orphanage/school was a couple hours away, in the mountains. Immediately my mind went to images of rickety mountain roads with razor switchbacks promising a fiery crash with one wrong turn.

All my mountainous third-world images were proven delightfully wrong, as the road was nice and wide, most of it paved.The drivers were rather crazy, but our driver was used to it and didn't flinch like I did ever time a car decided to cut it close, nearing scrapping our sides on multiple occasions. 

The terrain took my breath away from the moment we landed, the slightly undulating land punctuated by impulsive bursts of mountains, shielded by a thin layer of haze.

Driving through the towns and countryside it was hard to understand what day-to-day life really looked like in this new country. People stared at us when we were out in public-- though I can't be too surprised, as we were a huge group of pale foreigners all wearing the same shirt.

My ideas of wealth and poverty were challenged as we flew past little shacks and large mansions-- though the shacks far outnumbered the mansions. Looking out the window I caught glimpses into their lives, a little girl in a pink dress furiously swept at her dirt front yard, two young boys splashed in the shallow end of a sparkling creek, a man swatted his horse as it rambled across the three lane highway, the cart packed high with goods.

It was incredibly hot and humid in the city and that was reflected in the people, many of them slung out in their hammocks in an effort to escape the worst heat of the day. To keep ourselves entertained during the ride we called out every farm animal we passed-- which helped improve my severely lacking Spanish skills. If I ever need to say horse, cow, dog, or chicken I am set.

The wifi here, while I am extremely grateful to have, is pretty slow and almost impossible to use in the rooms. Which is why this post is rather devoid of photos-- one, it's hard to take them from a moving car, and two it's hard to upload photos on this connection. 

And thus ends the first day in Honduras! Tomorrow we are going to church and helping them run their children's program.

Stay tuned for more Spanish-speaking fun!

Check out my youth group's view on day 1!

Le Bel été

Or so says Google Translate. I know, I know, I'm about to go over to France and here I am still using Google translate. But I have a bad habit of not remembering any gender of any noun that I've ever learned, so occasionally I need some outside help.

Regardless, in any language summer is beautiful-- made extra sweet by the fact that finals, and my sophomore year in college, just ended. 

Two years, over. Half-way through my undergrad career-- when did this happen?? I don't want to think about how I only have three semesters left at Hendrix, or that I need to study for the GRE and figure what graduate school I want to go to! I just started college! Or, at least, that's what it feels like.

Ignoring the whole conundrum of my future, summer means more free time, which means more blogging! This Saturday I'm boarding a plane and flying to country I never dreamed of visiting-- the lovely Honduras, haha which my auto-correct wants to correct to 'horrendous'.

I hope that's not a sign. My youth group and I will be spending a week at a orphanage there doing various work, from construction work to going to local schools and hanging out with the kids.

I'm super pumped-- my first overseas mission trip! I've been dreaming of doing an international mission trip but it never worked out, until now.  Also, since blogging is awesome and everyone should have a blog, I'm creating a blog for my youth group. While we are over there we will blog about our experiences and post some photos.

The cafeteria officially closed yesterday morning so my friends and I are on our own *cue Les Mis music* for food. Which means that I will hopefully be posting a lot of cheap, easy, delicious recipes here. That or I'll go hungry.

After playing at graduation-- and being firmly in denial that I will be the one graduation in two years-- I headed home for a brief stay. My researching starts tomorrow so I'll have to head back to Conway tonight.

While at home, though, I was able to snap some photos of my beautiful yard.

The weather has just been perfect-- low 70s with no pesky mosquitoes. Why can't all of summer be like this?

I love this plant because of its stark white color, it's a nice contrast with its green surroundings.

Ma Belle Mére :)

And one of my favorite pictures of the bunch:

Anyway I have a ton of craft projects in mind, a lot of food to make, and, in a couple weeks, an apartment to decorate! So be sure to check back :)

Thanks for reading!

Surprise!

The meaning of the title is two-fold. One, we threw a small surprise party for my roomie's birthday. Two, you (and I) should be surprised to see a post after so long and in the middle of finals none the less!

I exaggerate. Finals just started today, my first one (Modern Physics) isn't till this Friday, which feels far further away than it has any right to be.

Anyway!

Last week was my roommate's birthday. We were all unbelievably swamped in the pre-finals madness but we took a break to bake some red velvet cupcakes and decorate our dorm room to surprise Anna.

Side note, we just took down the streamers last night, more than a week after Anna's birthday. They had begun to fall down; we had to climb through them to get from one side of the room to the other. Like Mission Impossible but not as cool as lasers.

Beautiful garland!

Suffice to say, she was surprised :)

In other news, I went to a lovely volunteer dinner a couple nights ago. Hendrix is awesome and gives you free food if you volunteer-- I wish the real world was like this.

The food was delicious and there was an interesting speaker.

Oh, and I won Mexican hot chocolate! In the form of six dense bricks of chocolate I'm supposed to blend with hot milk. I'm excited.

In other news, some friends and I headed down to Little Rock Sunday for the Jewish Food Festival.

They had some awesome live bands including one with a clarinet that sounded incredibly like a saxophone-- it was weird but really cool.

And, of course, delicious Jewish food! This is a tasty noodle desert covered in cornflakes. :)

Anyway! I have far too much to do, so I should go and well, do something.

Thanks for reading!

A Walk Through the Garden

Aka, the Hendrix campus. I could tell you how beautiful it is here, with the brightness of new life and the warm kiss of Spring.

Or I could just show you pictures.

All of these photos were edited taken by my iPhone and edited with a new program I just found. It's called PhotoStudio-- I was on an email list and was notified when it went on sale for free ;)

I was surprised by how much I really liked this app. It does a ton of cool stuff, square cropping, contrast/brightness, filters, blurs, textures, ect. What I really love about it is that I can put multiple filters on one photo. While this gives me the chance of going dangerously overboard using EVERY FILTER ON ONE PHOTO which I have a very bad habit of trying, it is still a very nice feature.

Spring has sprung

My original intent was to post a semi-tutorial post about another (cheap) method I devised to cover more of my dorm walls with photos. The technique turned out to be so simplistic I would feel foolish posting an actual tutorial about it. Though I thought I would post some pictures and, you know, talk about my life. About the fact that my sophomore year is almost over, which is crazy when I actually sit down and think about it. I mean half of my undergrad experience, over??

The future seems to be accelerating at far too quick of a rate. Sure I'm excited about the future-- possibly taking a gap year doing mission work/anything but physics, going to grad school for the most awesome thing ever: physics. Still, life isn't supposed to go by this quick!

Anyway! Enough musing on my life, here're the photos:

What I did:

I took my photos to a nearby computer lab and made use of their hole puncher to punch two holes at the top of my horizontal photos. I then dropped by my friend's room to get some string she had graciously given me. Then, I simply threaded the string through the photos. For the first and last photo I tied a little knot after threading it through to make sure that they stayed still. Surprisingly, the photos didn't shift around much-- the friction on the string was enough to keep them put, even where they are an angle.

When it came to put them on the wall, I wasn't sure what to do. My muggy walls are notoriously bad at hanging anything and everything. After messing around with it, I realized that I could hook the ends of the strings around my canvas which line the top of the wall. They are the only things that have somehow managed to stay attached the wall the whole year.

Et, volia! Like I said, super straight-forward.

In other news, my friend finally succeeded in convincing me to play Settlers of Catan, a board game I had never heard of. I was hooked from the first game-- it's so much fun! It's like a medieval monopoly, and a lot of fun to play.

Spring has officially hit! Though it's more like late spring/early summer. All the sudden, the cold days dropped away and the temperature skyrocketed it; it's 80 outside. Not that I'm complaining, it's a nice change.

I don't have many photos to post because I've developed this terrible habit of forgetting to bring my camera with me. Last Friday night some friends and I went out to the local 'cliffs' to stargazer. I didn't realize how many awesome long exposure shots I could get until we were already there. =/

We had a sushi-extravaganza this Saturday experimenting with some new ingredients, not that I thought to bring my camera and snap any pictures.

Last year, though, I set out specifically to get some pictures of my beautiful campus and seeing how I'm feeling a little lazy and have homework to finish, I'll post a couple of them.

I mean, look at that light!

The tree was so gorgeous-- I'm still not sure what type of tree it is.

This might be my favorite pick of the bunch.

In other news, my friends chose what apartment they are going to live in next year, and with a bit of luck one of them and I will spend the summer there while we are doing research. It'll be so much fun to set up the apartment and decorate it :) Another friend who is researching this summer as well is bringing a sewing machine so look forward to plenty of mishaps in the wonderful world of crafting this summer!

Thanks for reading :)