My Last Day

Honduras. Day 65.

It's been a crazy past two months, so why wouldn't it be a crazy last day too?

This morning I took a small group of guys to go and re-do a roof on Anna's (Danella, Josilyn, and Lester's mom) house. I promised to get her a new roof back in June, if you remember that from one of the old blog entries, and I was fearing that that promise was going to fall through and I'd never get to fix the roof of one of my favorite families in all of Hondo. But Marc gave me enough money to buy all of the wood and tin I would need to go and get it done today, and he let me pick four other guys and basically just said, "Go do it!"

So me, Nolan, Parker, Lee, and Justin went out to Villa Nueva Sector Ocho for the last day of our trip. And what a day it was. The roof was much more complicated than we expected. We were trying to salvage as much of the old tin and wood as possible (and dodging all of the way too scary electrical wiring). The problem was, some of the wood didn't want to be salvaged; it was way too weak and kept threatening to break all day long. And, of course, you knew it had to happen sooner or later... It broke. And guess who it broke under? If you guessed, "Arroz," you guessed right. The roof split right underneath me about 30 minutes into the tear-down, and I broke through all the way to the ground. Thankfully, their bed was right under where I fell.

I saw Jesus in a conveniently placed bed today.

We eventually got the roof off, and then argued through how we were going to assemble the new roof pieces (as Lee said, we were "free-styling" today because no one had ever tried to re-roof on a concrete block house before). We got a good roof support system laid out, took a Wendy's break (David and Stacy Maharrey are now adding the last tick mark to how many times I've eaten out this summer), and then went to go buy some extra tin. We hauled the tin back and finished the house.

Awesome, awesome, awesome day.

I got to say my "goodbye's" and "I love you's" to several of my kids in Sector Ocho, and then it was time to go because it was getting so late. And as we rolled out of that village for

one last time

I heard all of the kids and brothers and sisters I had come to know so well saying, "Adios! Adios!" But among those "Adios!'s," I heard Anna crying out, "Gracias! Gracias! Gracias!" And her neighbors saying, "Gracias a Dios!" ("Thank you, God!") It's been a long, crazy, challenging summer, but hearing the cries of a people who say, "Thank you," and not to me but to God, makes it all seem complete in some way.

God has a way of completing things, I suppose.