Pizza Hut and Valentine´s Day Concert

Written Thursday Feb. 14, 2008 Happy Valentine’s Day! Honestly I did not even attempt to teach today. I have learned that on Holidays or before a vacation there is no use to even try. The students are so hyped up on candy and excitement for the day that there is no use in even trying to open a book. So today I just let them make Valentine’s Day Cards and run around the class room. I took a lot of pictures today. They always love the camera and go crazy when they see it. It’s hard to get pictures that aren’t blurry cause they move around so much…but I got some really cute ones. After school they took all the teachers and staff to Pizza Hut to celebrate Valentine’s Day. It might sound weird but Pizza Hut seems to be the way they celebrate everything here. Pizza Hut is what they consider fine dining here. They took us to Pizza Hut the first day we came to Honduras, they took us to Pizza Hut for Women’s day (yup they have a woman’s day and this is different from mother’s day…don’t ask cause we don’t totally understand it either), and now for Valentine’s Day. It’s an interesting way to celebrate but hey its free food so we are not complaining. After Pizza Hut we came back to the house and got showered and dressed up for the music program…pretty much this program was put on by the missionaries. All 8 of us sang Glory Glory together…and then there were quite a few other songs put on by various groups of missionaries, a few songs by some students, and staff…Karen’s 6th grade class did a painful piece on their recorders with Karen on the flute. Pastor/principle Trundles song was supposed to be the second to last song but toward the end of his song the power blacked out and everything went pitch black…all the kids started screaming and freaking out…the best part was I was recording and got it all on video. We had a good laugh about that, and the program was cut just a little short. As we were trying to clean and pack up the gym in the dark the power came back on. They have the craziest power outages here. The sucky things is you never know how long they will last…anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours…I have heard it can sometimes take days…but luckily we have not had to go through that yet. On my way back from the program I was talking with Mark about how crazy it is that this is our life for 10 months. It really is such a temporary thing here. Next year we will be back at our schools and living our lives back home…but for 10 months this is our life. Honduras is where we live. These people are people we have grown to know and love. This culture is what we have come to know and become accustomed to…things don’t surprise us anymore…we still get frustrated but we don’t get surprised by it.This is life here and now…I am learning to live in the here and now…I am living life, I am loving life…and that life is now…my life is here in Honduras…it’s not what I had last year…it’s not what I will have in 6 months from now…yes, that will be my life then too…but this is my life now.We always get caught up on the future and we seem to live our lives for the future. I was just reading a book called ¨the life you’ve always wanted¨ it talks about how we are always waiting to live life. We are always saying I’ll be happy “when”...you know you do it…we all do! But the thing is when we do that we are not truly living life…we are merely getting by…it’s like waiting in line your whole life. Just waiting to get to the next point, then once you reach that point you find yourself waiting to get to the next one. There will always be a next point and to some extent this is good. We all need to have goals and destinations in life…but we can’t forget that we need to live and enjoy the life that we have. Every part of our life is important. We can learn from everything that happens to us and everything that we go through.I don’t have this all figured out…I am only now coming to this realization after being here in Honduras for 6 months now…I am just beginning to realize that this is life…what I am doing is life…I can’t live my life waiting to get back home…this is home…we can’t live life waiting to get back to what we call ¨normal life¨…this is real life. Like the Black Eyed Peas sing ¨we only got one world¨…it might be a messed up world, but this is our world, our life, and we need to learn to live it to the fullest!