A day in the life of Rachael Fowler in Honduras

Today a group of 25 of us had a ‘day on the move,’ literally. Our day began with a ‘Gatorade Run.’…….This means riding through the city on our TORCH bus, looking for the “street cleaners,” which are local Honduran people who clean up the trash in the city streets, and passing out Gatorade to them. You would not believe how something as simple as a bottle of Gatorade could bring so much joy to someone, especially someone who often times doesn’t even gets acknowledged, and furthermore never gets any type of ‘thank you’ for what they do. In addition to the extreme gratitude of the street workers, it’s always fun to see the reaction of the local Hondurans as a bus full of “gringos” (a.k.a. Americans) is driving through the city and then running down sidewalks passing out drinks and yelling “en el nombre de Cristo” (in the name of Christ) and on a few occasions “en el numero de Cristo” (in the number of Christ), hahaha!!

After wrapping up the Gatorade Run we went by our Bodega, a small room we use for storage, and we began an assembly line to move 250 bags of food from the room out to the bus. Several days ago, fellow TORCH team members spent an entire day packing food that would eventually feed hundreds of hungry families in some of the poorest villages around the city……And so today, that is just what those bags did. Each of these black plastic bags of food contain rice, beans, flour, lard, tomato paste, bullion, coffee, sugar and pasta. Just one bag of these simple staple foods will feed a family of 5 for about 2 weeks……and for most of us, that is almost impossible to imagine. After an assembly line & some creative use of rolling office chairs, we got the bus loaded down with those bags of food and headed out to distribute them in a community called Via Nueva Sector 8 (a place where our group worked for several days back in 2003). Once we arrived, we then hauled 150 bags of food up the mountain, not to be confused with hills like we have in the US, and placed them in the Church so we could organize a plan. We divided into four groups of six people, each group with a translator, and then with every person carrying two bags of food, we dispersed across the mountain and began distributing the bags of food. Tonight as I sat down to eat my dinner here at the Mission House, I stopped for a moment, because as I looked at my plate of food, my mind was suddenly flooded with images of the faces of the kids, the moms, the grandmothers and the aunts who looked as us with tear-filled eyes today as we handed them a bag of food and said “God Bless.” And as I took my first bite of dinner tonight, it was like God just gave me a sense peace as to say, ‘don’t worry, because tonight, they’re eating too.’

Today our group also organized and hosted a Vacation Bible School, complete with singing, praying, a puppet show and cookies, for tons of the kids in the village. Another highlight was watching as a group of the kids devoured ice cream cones we bought them from the local ‘ice cream man.’ And for me personally, the highlight of my day, and one of the greatest of my trip thus far, was being able to see my little friend Allan, along with his two brothers and mom, who I met back in 2003 when we worked in this village for the first time. There are truly no words to describe the feelings and emotions you feel when you return to see someone you met several years ago but were only with for a few days, and yet still feel like you’ve never missed a beat…..it’s truly a God thing!

God has truly changed my life through this trip over the past ten years and I feel so blessed to be able to continue to be a part of this team. And though we are here to serve the people of Honduras, every year I leave asking myself, who was really the one who was blessed by this trip??

Please check out the pictures below from our group’s day on the move!!