With the small team here from Master Provisions taking video and pictures to share back in the US, we got to take another trip up to Sampedrana, all the way up to the coffee farm at about 5,800'  

We stopped at the Church to pick up Alfonso, Henry, several bags of sand (used for making concrete for a ditch they need to pour for the road to clear water better) and wood (for fence posts.) 

It is hard to fathom how hard is to build anything up there, given the difficulties of transportation.  I say hard when what I really mean is...expensive and time consuming.  

It is also hard to capture in pictures the steep nature of the property we have.  It is beautiful...but quite impressive in the heights covered in relatively little distance.  Driving in the Ford the maximum angle the dashboard shows is about 16 degrees.  But my less scientific reading of the hill we walk up to get to the tree shown in the picture showed (taken via the compass on my phone) was somewhere around 25-30 degrees.  

You would think that a farm so remote would not have many people just passing by, but we have noticed that our avocado trees, which we hoped would produce to give roughly 25% away to people in the Church there, 25% to use as a mission (Milk Project, staff, volunteers) and 50% to sell, has had "disappearing fruit."  It appears that when there is little to harvest, some on the mountain are then quite motivated to walk up to our trees for something to eat when they are ripe.    

So this is the first time we have been up there to help pick quite a few, albeit a bit early to get them before others do.  Oscar and I are the first paying customers in this case, just to get some income and since we had wheels.  The next bunch Alfonso will get (hopefully) will be for the Church.  

Long term, we need to find another worker that wants a job as well as a place to stay to have someone there full time to keep an eye on things.  Especially since we are looking to plant more fruit bearing trees to be along side the coffee in the future.  

We have been letting Alfonso grow some beans, onions, and beets as well on the lower portion of the property to help his family out.  He surprised us with a gift of some before we headed back.  The onions will also mix well with the avocados for some great guacamole.  

I will admit that when we started doing devotions as a "leadership" group a couple years ago, that I was not sure how it was really going to go.  

Two years in...and the sharing that goes on in those times has been extremely beneficial.  Not to mention getting to know everyone better, and get to share more of who we are, a deeper getting to know struggles, praises, and being able to just relate better.

In July some of the students from Lesly's (Maria's daughter who also volunteers in the Milk Project...who will also graduate from high school this year after much hard work on her part, and her mother's part over the years) school came to serve with the Milk Project.

Those studying finance making a fruit salad for the kids, and those studying health giving classes related to such to the kids.  This makes the first group of Hondurans coming to serve in the Milk Project, a very exciting thing that will hopefully not be the last.  

More hands make the load easier as the saying goes, and we are praying about seeking funding to add another full time staff member to the Milk Project in the future.  The needs of managing and loving the kids, and the families, is something Maria does extremely well, but there is certainly room for more help.  There is a psychologist that comes up once a week now to volunteer, still getting to know the kids, but hopefully in the future can help with some of the particular issues the kids face.  

Maria has also been trying to be a marriage counselor, not something she was particularly seeking, but in this case it involved one of our volunteers wanting to leave her husband for a new lover.  What surprised me even more than hearing that was that the husband was willing for her to continue to live in their home, being separated but for her to still be there in one house to be there for the children (seen here to the right in the picture.)  The desires to leave were strong though, and now a dad tries to work and care for the kids as best he can.  Normally we see this same situation flipped around.  

This situation is not unique to Honduras of course.  How to serve these children and families, all involved?  How to love them enough and correctly?  These are daily battles to fight.  Spiritual fruit is like fruit salad...it is time consuming, messy, you might get hurt, comes in pieces...and is beautiful when it comes together in the end.    
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We were blessed with a trip back to the US for about a month as as a family, first time in about three years.  These trips are always different...sometimes vacation, sometimes work, sometimes a mix of the two.  They are hard to define, and harder to put together.  When the kids were younger, they were also very hard on them.  This was probably the first one we have done as a family that we would say was an all around relaxing/enjoyable time.  
All of them before have been good...but they can be stressful, challenging, and tiring.  We tried to learn from past mistakes, life lessons, etc. to make this one as good as possible, and it worked pretty well.  

More than our planning though, was just how overwhelmingly well everyone we visited took care of us, loved on us, and just made everything so easy, fun, painless and delightful.  

I mention that because in talking to other missionaries I find that is more often than not...not the case.  

Included in that trip we were able via some very inexpensive tickets, take another overseas trip.  This time it just jumped out to me to try to visit some of our friends from Tegucigalpa that live in Barcelona.  

It was so good to get to see them again.  These are friends from back in our first mission trip days, doing eye brigades together in the rented house that was being used for the Church back then.    We got to see all the big tourist sites with much help from them, and they even put us up for our few days there.  

While we were there, among many good/interesting conversations...we were talking about living in a foreign country, with a different language (although Spanish is of course spoken...Catalan is what you see on all signs and what everyone born there also speaks with much pride) and maintaining their identity as Hondurans while living in a different country with different standards and norms.  

I was thinking about their unique challenges living cross culturally, and then my own.  I am constantly reminded (in my own mind) all the times that I feel like I screw that up, or do not make the jump, transition or whatever, successfully...going both ways.  

I remember doing counseling a few years ago and the counselor very strongly rejecting my definition of myself as being weird.  I never could understand why he thought I was not weird, nor what truth he was seemingly trying to impart to me...it was like hearing someone implore to you in a foreign language, no matter how hard I thought I was listening, I couldn't get it.  

Maybe he was getting at that no matter how weird we might feel or seem to others,  that the "normal" of who we are, and who we are in God, is what matters?  Maybe not to focus on where we feel screw things up, don't understand, or feel like we are sticking out because of who we are...but to concentrate on being God's emissary/missionary/sent worker...no matter in which culture, language, or country we find ourselves.  Let Him work the rest out.