The end of the second week of our being here in Honduras, the weather was rainy. On December 17th it rained hard most of the day. By evening the road looked like a river. (See picture.) It was pretty cool. Nikki and I went outside, since the rain had let up a bit, to see how deep it was. Ankle deep on the sidewalk and mid-shin on the road. Farther down our road it was even higher. Nikki said she saw somebody standing in it and it was nearly to their waist. Cars kept trying to go through, though. Only a couple of the higher trucks actually made it. The rest got water in their pipes. It was all rather ammusing to watch. Nikki and I contemplated going over to the guys' house, but then we had supper. And after supper we were dry of the previous excersion, so we didn't. Later we heard that they did almost the exact same thing.
The third Sunday we were here, out team went downtown to find the place that has international phone calls for 2 Lempiras per minute (instead of the standard 3). While we were there, a guy comes in and sits down to wait for a phone. He gets out a ziplock bag with about ten Visa credit cards in it, pulls out five, and studies the back of the first one. After a bit, he writes something down, studies it again, writes again, and moves on to the next card. Now, if that doesn't sound suspicious, I don't know what does. It looked all the world like he was practicing signatures. He mastered three of them before he got board with waiting for a phone and left.
So my Christmas...here everything happens on Christmas Eve. They stay up all night, like we do for New Year's Eve. Teresa's aunt and uncle (she calls them mom and dad since they raised her because her mom has some problems, but I'm not sure what they are) invited us over because they had heard so much about us and wanted to meet us. We walked in, sat down, and the first thing the guy there says us is, "Would you like some wine? We also have rum, scotch and whiskey." We all look at each other for a moment and then Brent says, "Um, no thank you." And then the guys tells us he knew we didn't drink. So why'd he offer in the first place?
New Year's wasn't near as big a deal as Christmas. We went to the service at church in the evening and had communion. After that we hung out at the church until most the people left, (which by the way, is rather quickly. I was surprised at how fast people get out of there. He dismisses us and it's like a mass exodus.) to see if Carlos and Suyapa would invite us to their house, since we thought they had said something about it. But they didn't invite us over, so we walked back. It was almost 10 and Brent wanted to go to bed, so he went to their house. The other two guys hung out at our house until 12:30 or so. I stayed up until 11, said Happy New Year to everyone in Pennsylvania, and then went to sleep.
That's the day Oscar took us to the river to swim. Now, when he said that, I was thinking big flat river, like the one right near where we live. But then we go up in the mountains and walk back in somewhere and come to these waterfalls with clear green-blue pools of water. (See picture.) The picture is only of two of the smaller waterfalls and you can't see any big pool of water. It was prettier than that.
We put our stuff on the far side of the river and went swimming. At one point, we walked a little farther up river, out of sight of our stuff. There was no one around, so we figured it would be all right for 10 minutes. But when Brent goes back to check on it, he sees someone climbing up the steep hill right behind our stuff. All the backpacks are still there, but we later discover that both my and Derek's watches are missing. Both watches were just five dollar Wal-Mart ones though, so we didn't really care about them. But he did say he couldn't live without a watch and he would buy one that night at the mall. I figure I'd like to figure out how to better tell time by the sun. And Nikki never wears her watch, so she said I could.
