The Weekend Kelly & Nolvia Came to Town

Kelly has been working at an orphanage in Santa Barbara, Honduras since January. I found out she was there a month or two later when Union posted an article she had written about it for her hometown newspaper on their facebook. Ever since then, we had been trying to figure out when we could get together. It finally worked for her to come visit last Wednesday! She brought a girl from the orphanage, Nolvia (14 years old), that she has become close to. We had such a blast! Nolvia really liked the little tiny UNO cards Union sent to me.

Thursday I showed them around Comayagua. This is in front of the most famous cathedral located in the central park.

While I was showing them the different parks and cathedrals, we also stopped in a couple souvenir shops. It's so hard to shop for that stuff after you've been living here though!

Next we continued on with the grocery shopping and walked all the way to Mall Premier where the biggest grocery store is. This is at a little monument to mothers that is on the way.

Nolvia loves guava

For lunch we ate grilled cheese (although sadly the sliced cheese here doesn't really melt) with tomato soup and for supper we had lasagna, green beans, and garlic bread. We made a menu of lots of "home" food that Kelly had been missing after eating so much rice & beans at the hogar.

Thursday night was the night of the carpet making. At first it was pouring and Kelly and I were sort of hoping that it would be canceled. We were enjoying our night in, talking and hanging out. We tried to sleep for an hour before we had to leave, but then we ended up talking about our boyfriends instead. I didn't realize how much I've missed that! It was great. However, then we finally got a phone call around 12:30am. We got ready to leave, waited around for a taxi that was supposedly being sent, and then finally left on our own an hour later. We arrived around 2am. Some groups like the one above had already gotten pretty far.

Cia, Nelly, Kelly, and I waiting around to get started. After seeing the other groups and how much work it was going to be, the realization of "all night" began to set in for me.

Everybody jumped right in. They didn't really teach us, just told us to start. So there we were, padding down slightly damp dyed sawdust to a giant piece of paper in the middle of the street. Great. I was not happy to be there at first. I just kept thinking about how I really wanted to be in bed sleeping and that this was absolutely insane. However, a couple days later Kelly was reading through my notes from SM class and reminded me of something important--most other countries don't care about efficiency. They are relational. True indeed.

As we all got the hang of it and started making real progress it became a lot more fun. The time was passing so quickly, and we all wanted to finish in time for the procession.

As you can imagine, being hunched over, leaning, bending, straining, staring intently, stretching--all night--can really take it's toll. My shoulders got really sore!

Apart from sawdust, we also used other materials like sand, salt, and rocks.

By the time it was light out, we were all exhausted and really wanting to be done. We had to wait around for a while for the rocks to come.

See our dirty hands. We were a mess. Pictures can't truly capture it.