9/24/2007

Shampoo Ginger!....a.k.a. pt. 6 of Weekend Update

A small commercial that Leah and I made while on our weekend adventure. And it really worked too!

pt. 5

pt. 4

9/23/2007

pt. 3

9/19/2007

Weekend Update

Okay, for right now I am just going to post the pictures from my last adventuresome weekend with some brief captions. I promise though I will give a detailed account in the next few days to come, so please check back for more updates!

Woe is me. Yet another weekend relaxing in a hammock in the middle of a tropical jungle.












Weekend out at Lago de Yojoa, located 3 1/2 hours outside of Tegucigalpa. This boat featured here (yes, the one with all of the water in it...rainwater we were told) is what we rowed out for 4 hours into the lake. Leah saw an island in the lake that she really wanted to go to, and islands seem to be much closer than they usually appear.
















Nothing like going to a restaurant where you have to look into the freezer to pick out your very own fish to fry up. Decisions decisions...




Hiking through the jungle and taking in some amazing views as well as some waterfall swims.



Yeah, all of these beautiful (and not quite so beautiful) things grow here in the the jungle. Notice the nice wild blueberries, wild coffee, wild flowers, and wild bugs.




The infamous shampoo ginger. We actually used our bounty of the natural shampoo to wash our hair with while bathing in the waterfall. Does that sound like an Herbal Essences commercial or what??? (Speaking of, please check out our own video commercial in the next post featuring our favorite new product...Shampoo Ginger!)




Walking down to Pulhapansak, the largest waterfall in Honduras. Simply gorgeous.








Before...





And after as I clumsily slip on the observation deck which is continually kept wet, and muddy with all of the waterfall mist. I cannot remember the last time I wiped out so bad. Leah thought it was hilarious and whipped out her camera to take a picture. Just slightly after laughing at me, Leah then fell 2 times on the deck. Gotta love irony.
Good thing I had the foresight to take my waterfall glamour shots before heading to the deck!






9/14/2007

2 little anecdotes...

I often times find myself in situations where I think to myself, I need to write this down so I can remember this funny little memory. Usually, the moment passes or I just completely forget, and so the memory is lost. This time, I happened to remember, so I hope you enjoy.

Yesterday I was in a taxi on my way to meet a friend, and I saw two police officers on the side of the road with a man they had in custody. Since traffic was backed up, I got to sit and watch the scene unfold for a minute. The police wanted to arrest this shirtless man for one reason or another, but did not have any handcuffs on him. So what did this enforcer of the law do? He took the shoelaces out of one of his boots and tied his wrists together with a shoelace.

Later that day, I was taking a taxi back to my house. Here people are pretty expressive with their cars, and taxis are no exception. They will do all kinds of creative re-wiring so that their horns have special sounds or are ultra sensitive so they may play an intricate rhythym on it (sometimes they will re-wire the up/down button for the window to become the horn, or their turn signal, etc.). Anyways, this taxi re-wired it so that everytime he pressed on the brake there was a light inside the car that would illuminate. It just so happened to be a set of praying hands that would light up, and I thought to myself that maybe this taxi driver is trying to tell me something, like that I should pray everytime he applies the brakes. I don't know if that was something that should be comforting or alarming.

Anyways, these thoughts just made me laugh to myself just a little.

9/12/2007

Hurricane Update

Well, it has been a week since the hurricane passed over Tegucigalpa, and I feel like a detailed account of everything that has happened is due. So, here I go.

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Well, that about sums it up. Nothing. Remarkably, miraculously, nothing. At this time last week I was having to think in terms of how I was going to survive this. In Florida we are used to hurricanes, but we think of them in terms of inconvenience. "It will be difficult to be without power for awhile." "I have to board my house." "Will I really have to take cold showers?" "How long will the phone lines be out?" But after hearing the truly horrifying stories that everyone has from Hurricane Mitch and the 11,000 people it killed (of which there are still reminders on every damaged building/bridge/shantytown that has still not fully recovered 9 years since Mitch wreaked havoc on the country), I began to feel scared. Real scared. This hurricane was a strong category 5 coming right for us, and in a city where a few inches of rain mean lives lost due to flooding and mudslides, the forecasted 25 inches in 24 hours was terrifying. Suddenly I was having to think "What will I do if my first floor of my house is flooded out and I am trapped on the second floor with bars over all of my windows?" "How can 3 girls possibly protect themselves by themselves when there are people desperate and willing to do anything that is necessary for their own survival?" "What will we do without weeks and possibly months of clean water since there is no sanitation or waste system in the country?" Probably the scariest thought though was those involving the children from the feeding center in the poorest part of the city, which is also the area most susceptible to landslides and least accessible to emergency services. When I began thinking about them, my heart began to break. How are people expected to protect themselves by buying extra supplies when they can't even afford the necessities of daily life? How are people expected to somehow buy clean water to drink when they don't even have that luxury during everyday life? How are they ever to be expected to "hunker down" (what does this word mean anyways? People only use it in times of hurricanes, and yet I really don't know what that means...) and ride out the category 5 hurricane when a simple storm during rainy season could wash away their shack of a home? To say that I was scared is an underestimate...

Before ever coming to Honduras to live the one deal that my parents and I had was that if a major hurricane was coming my way that I would get on the first plane out of here, and things happened so quickly to where the night before it was a category 2 storm that was going to barely skim the coast and hit Belize to a full-fledge stronger than Hurricane Andrew & Katrina storm coming directly for me. There was no time to react, only enough time to chase down a water truck with our car to buy some of the last bottled water available in the city.

We prepared ourselves, had a great little pre-hurricane party, and went to bed expecting that when we woke we would be within the midst of a life-altering storm. But as we woke in the morning, there was no noise. There was no rain. There was, in fact, even a little bit of sun. The storm somehow split into a "V" to where the top half remained along the coast, and the bottom half trailed into the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing, and completely puzzling at the same time. Tegucigalpa was spared from having its 2nd completely devastating act of nature in 10 years. Thank you so much for those who prayed for us. I just recently found out that the night of the storm all of the area churches opened their doors to anyone who needed shelter, and that they held around the clock prayer vigils for the impending storm. I think God knew that there was no way that poor little Tegucigalpa could handle something like this, and praise Him that the only thing that came raining down in the hurricane was his mercy. And this nasty smelling fruit from our neighbor's tree that hangs over our patio...but that is a story for another time.

Thank you for your prayers.

9/04/2007

Oh crap.


There is a massive hurricane coming right over us. Category 5. Oh crap.