The Twilight of Childhood

So far all of my favorite seasons in a child’s life are those moments leading up to a big transition. Like the moment before boys hit puberty: all sweetness and innocence, they don’t think it at all weird to play with action figures….until the monster hits.

Elijah is in one of those twilight moments. Next week he starts school and I will need to hand him over to his peers. He will have to be independent. I will not be there to open his goldfish bag or to guy him when he’s sad.

In this season of life his mama is his hero. He picks me to be the coolest character, no matter how hard his dad works to convince him that he is Optimus Prime. He just wants to hang out with me and sit as close as possible and offers spontaneous tokens of affection: “YOU are my sweetness!”

I don’t want to let him go. What will happen to our “invisible umbilical”?

*             *            *

My everything just walked out the door. With a sweet kiss and a casual “bye Mama,” he is off to school…off to childhood, off to independence from me, as it should be, I suppose.

Moving Back

If anyone is still reading this, I apologize for the stillness of my blog over the last year. It’s not because I have given up blogging, it’s that I couldn’t talk about what we have been going through…what was really on the hearts and minds of the Diaz family.

Last June on our fundraising trip to the United States it became apparent that God was calling us back to the United States and back to Washington Cathedral.

When we moved to Honduras four years ago, it was without a return date. We sold and gave away everything we had in the States (which wasn’t much). When asked, we told people our plan was to serve in Honduras 3 – 5 years, then we would reassess (but in our hearts, we were thinking more like 10 years).

Then last year something began happening that surprised us. God began whispering “pastor” to Rey….and he didn’t know quite what to do with that. In June 2011, church leaders met with us and they asked us to come back and help – long term.

We called Pastor Jeony from the United States and tears came to my eyes as he generously and without hesitation encouraged us to go….if the church needs us, then we must. Honduras is a country that tops the lists of violent crime worldwide. It has more problems than it knows what to do with. And it has become home.

In three weeks we will pack our bags and board a plane, as we are so accustomed to….but this time to stay. I think I can speak for my family when I say that our heart strings are too entangled to figure out which to loosen, which to firm up and tie more tightly. The good news is that we are keeping our house here in Honduras, and our jobs require us to come back a couple times a year.

But this family’s pilgrimage will certainly look different…May God be venerated.

Holidays in Honduras

December is a time for family and for graduations...and this year was extra special.

We spent Thanksgiving in Washington with our friends and family, then came back to Tegucigalpa just in time for AFE's first-ever high school graduation! In a community with an average of only a third-grade education, nine bright young people are headed for college.

There was a lot to be thankful for this year.

When we returned to Honduras, Jesi Ordonez had snuck into our house and decorated for Christmas!

AFE's 6th grade and kindergarten graduation.

AFE's High School Graduation

Elijah's Christmas Performance at Preschool

The North American's Guide to Semana Santa in Teguc

The week leading up to “Pascua” is much different from the Easter I am accustomed to in the United States. To me, Easter meant decorating brightly colored eggs, buying new Easter clothes (the frillier the better), and then on Sunday morning attending a sunrise service among fragrant lilies with a Easter brunch following afterward.
Things couldn’t be more different here in Tegucigalpa. Instead of protesting the differences, I decided to fuse the two customs together this year into a new Diaz family tradition. Here’s how it worked out for me, and my guide to celebrating Semana Santa in Honduras for North Americans.

DO:
Think ahead when it comes to dying eggs. Thinking ahead means asking someone to bring you an egg decorating kit from the US (because it will be cheaper than buying from Mas x Menos). Thinking ahead means boiling the eggs ahead of the day you want to do it…because the likelihood of power-outages is quite certain in my community.
Think ahead about Easter clothes. The weekend leading up to Easter, most of the stores (including the stores in the mall) were closed. However, Zara never lets me down.

DON’T
Go to one of the big, overplayed beaches. Last year we went to Los Delagitos in the South. It took an extra hour to get there because of the traffic….An hour trapped in the hot car, sweating out our need to go to the bathroom. It was so crowded with people, trash, thrashing music that a headache was always near. It was still fun, but we found a better option this year.

Expect to relax at the Mayan’s pool. This is one of my favorite spots because of $15 massages, ice-cream delivered pool side, and a beautiful environment to sun bathe. However, during Semana Santa my oasis becomes a latin frat party. There was a 20 foot tall blow-up corona and people videotaping girls in bikinis. My massage therapist rubbed my back to the beat of “Danza Kurudro” – the antithesis of relaxing.

DO
Check out Amapala. It’s not easy to get to the beach beach…You must park a ways away, board the hectic dock, crowd on to the right collectivo boat, and then jump in the back of the truck to arrive at one of the less-popular beaches (this takes roughly an hour). But it is worth it! I can’t reveal my secret spot, but I’ll give you a clue: it has black sand! The best part about it is that the moment we arrived on the uninhabited beach, a restaurant owner invited us to put our things down as his table under his make-shift tent. He asked what we would like for lunch, when we would like it, and our music preference. The water was perfect, the sand was perfect, and the company was perfect. It was a great day!DON’T expect to find your Easter service back home. Church attendance is so low this week, in fact, that our Spanish service was canceled. Thus, my advice to you is:

DO embrace the Catholic tradition. Palm Sunday they hand out palm branches all over the city. People tie them to cars, carry them around. I’m not sure what else. Next year I’m parking myself in mass at the Cathedral Metropolitano to see what happens. I also find the Good Friday celebration and funeral march down town instructive. There is a tangible grief that permeates the crowd. Good Friday is an important part of our Christian tradition that sometimes gets somewhat overlooked in Evangelicalism.

All in all, I discovered that my American tradition of decorating eggs and receiving things from the Easter bunny came from some pagan goddess of fertility (including the name, “Easter”). Yet “Pascua,” (as they call it here in Honduras), comes from the word Passover…the original holiday leading up to the resurrection of Christ. So perhaps I have some things to learn about this celebration.

So there is my guide to celebrating Semana Santa in Teguc (based on three years of experience). I would love to hear other expat comments about their experiencing during the days leading up to Pascua in Honduras.

Christmastime and Giving

This Christmas Elijah would be three and was beginning to understand the concept of presents. We knew this because after his third birthday party he asked for “mas regalos?”
A note of explanation here. Rey and I share the view that wealth and materialism and toys and things provide dangerous possibilities of entrapment. And greed (although one of the more popular cardinal sins) is actually idolatry. This being said, it was time to take radical action in Elijah’s development.

As presents began to accumulate under our plastic Christmas tree, Elijah began to get more and more excited. So one day I took him into his room and I said, “Elijah, look at all of your stuffed animals in your toy hammock. Look at all of your cars, books, trains, and action figures on your shelf. You know Yoli, Eibyn, Daniel and Jimmy at AFE? They don’t have any of those things. They don’t have any toys in their house. They don’t have a Christmas tree. They are not going to receive presents for Christmas.

"How about you give each of them one of your toys, since you have so many?”

A light dawned in his eyes. He promptly presented me with Bob (his favorite stuffed animal heasleeps with every night) and said: “Yoli.” Tears leaped into my eyes. I didn’t expect Elijah to understand this concept let alone display such generosity. So I did what many mothers would do. As Elijah was sorting through his toys, deciding which ones to give away, I snuck Bob underneath his bed instead of into the “AFE” box. Generosity should only go so far, right?

At AFE’s Christmas party Elijah handed out his toys to his friends. And came home with a new toy himself. Denis, (who most will know at AFE as “sweet little voice”) gave Elijah the one Christmas toy he received (from a donor), a “Mater” toy truck. And so the cycle goes. Generosity begets generosity. And we can’t out give God. And it sounds like I need to learn this lesson even more than Elijah.