Planning for the Dentists – Jan. 25

Friday night, a team of 19 dentists and medical personnel arrived to conduct four days of clinics for people in several surrounding villages. The Board of CPI Honduras has been busy planning and preparing for their coming. I have been struck by the amount of energy and open heartedness of the people as they prepare in so many little ways to ensure the success of this brigade.

Their efforts remind me of the story of Christ and his disciples in the temple watching people give offerings as they came in to worship. The disciples, a number of them with a history of life by the shores of Galilee and long months covered with eau de tilapia, were still awestruck by the opportunity to be in the temple. So, understandably, their eyes focused on the bags of money that thumped out of the hands of well-dressed and obviously rich worshippers. It was a puzzling thing when Christ pointed out the grubby widow sidling up to the plate and dropping in two measly coins worth nothing except in the grungiest and scrap-filled corners of the marketplace. Christ noted that in heavenly balance sheet terms, these two coins were worth more than the sum of all the thundering bags and gleaming piles of shekels.

As the school rooms in the first facility were being hosed and sluiced with buckets of water, school grounds raked and piles of trash moved to the back part of the school yard these people gave their two coins to their communities – quietly, in bare feet, with dirty hands and without fanfare, matching t-shirts or tax-deductible receipts. That, to my way of thinking, is the true gift of grace in this whole process. And, it is, most importantly, this type of hope in action, grace imagined and given structure which tells me that the seeds of growth, renewed life and opportunity are still viable and ready for even the smallest nudge of nurture.

Yesterday, before heading to the cleaning bee, I spent an hour and forty minutes waiting in line at the bank to exchange some of the dollars the dental team brought with them. Fortunately, most of the time was spent inside the bank where the air conditioning made the wait more enjoyable. About half way through the hour, the man in front of me traded places with another gentleman and left. Obviously, he was an employee whose job had been to hold the place in line. Good idea. The new man proved to be a friend of a friend and so knew who I was and some of the things I had done in agriculture. He was also very good at cobbling together one or two Spanish words into full sentences. We managed to talk for the remaining forty minutes about the benefits of Leuceana, Moringa, Ssebania, Chipolin, alternative cattle feeds and so forth. Now, it would really be interesting to get a translation of what was actually understood in the conversation.

As I walked the last bit to the school, I passed a pick up truck which had several crates of hens in the back. Obviously a laying operation was getting rid of spent hens. For $1.50 you could go home with a four pound hen for the next day’s sopa de gallina. The birds were being sold at a brisk rate and flapping wings were headed off in all directions.

In the late afternoon, as I returned home, I tried to locate another foam mattress for this weekend. I stopped at the store where we had previously purchased my first mattress. For some reason, the man misunderstood my attempts to find the price of various mattresses as an attempt to learn new vocabulary about various types of beds and mattresses available in Honduras. So, I obtained a variety of new words about beds but never made it to the “how much it costs” bit. After what I hoped was an appropriate amount of time (much too long in my view) I left and headed for other locales. No luck finding another place for a mattress so will try again today.

Tomorrow the first of the four days of dental work begins and the next day I leave for a couple of weeks in Canada. Will write from there.

Bryan