Camping in the Jungle of Honduras

Hello from Honduras! The squad is now in Comayagua Honduras. We have been here for over a week now and I am excited to let you know the details of what our time here is and will look like.

For starters we have been placed into new teams for these two months here. For me they placed the ten guys on to one team, then split all the girls up into five other teams. So my time here will be spent largely with the fellas which I am really looking forward to. However, this first month in Honduras is an all squad month. So all forty something of us are in one location for the month of May. We will then have a quick debrief at the end of the month before us guys will head to a different location in Honduras for “manistry” month in June.

This month will be living off the grid. We traveled and arrived last Wednesday after about twenty hours of traveling by bus from Guatemala. We drove through the town of Comayagua to start heading up this mountain. After a few minutes still traveling by bus up the mountain we stopped on the road when we were greeted by several pickup trucks and four-wheelers plus many Hondurans and a couple gringos. We loaded our bags on the four-wheelers with trailers, then we all hopped on the back of these pickup trucks. From there we took off up the mountain and through the jungle for another hour to finally arrive at a location different then I was expecting.

When I heard we would be camping for a month as a whole squad I figured we would probably have a large plot of open land in the mountain with maybe a decent sized building to hang out in, shower, and go to the bathroom in. Not exactly the case however. We are literally at the top of this mountain camping on the side of it in the middle of the jungle. The “bathroom” is in the middle of the campsite with a curtain as the door. A few showers (Praise God) also with curtains for doors. 

When we arrived it was roughly seven o’clock at night, aka dark. Had to try to maneuver some steep hills to find where we could place our tent. There was barely room for all of us. Also we had ten people stay back in Guatemala for five days because of a positive test and close contact. So if we had all come at once there wouldn’t have been room for all of us. Some of us guys when we literally just got out of the truck had to head back down this super steep hill that leads to our site to help push a truck up which was shooting rocks out from behind it. 

The day after our twenty hour travel day and scrambling to figure out our new living situation we were thrown right into things and haven’t really slowed down since. We worked seven straight days before finally arriving to today being our first off day allowing us guys to ride back an hour and a half maybe into town. Praise God for this couple, who are former racers, to take us in for these two days before heading back to the camping site off the grid.

The ministry so far has been completely manual labor. Our first priority was to create enough tent spots for the people coming a few days after us. This included macheteing the jungle, pickaxing the ground to start digging out the spots, leveling out the ground, trying to make it so the spots won’t collect water with it being the rainy season, and building a barrier so a mudslide hopefully doesn’t happen. Other work includes doing basically the same thing but for a church they are wanting to build on this mountain. We often need to hike up or down the mountain to either collect wood or bamboo to carry back for various projects. We have built some tables to grow our eating and chilling area. Then the women got to do some women’s ministry in the community yesterday. So some pretty tough work. I already have at least eight blisters between my two hands. Definitely will be a month of physical and mental toughness to survive it well.

Our schedule is something like:

Breakfast at 7:30. 

8:30 start meeting to figure out what the day will look like. 

9 start getting to work if things are on time. 

Stop for lunch around 12:30. 

Have a quick team time after lunch until about 2. 

Then work until 5-5:30. 

Get a little time to chill until dinner at 6:30-7. 

Then hang out until I head to my tent around 8:30. 

For my team we are getting up three days a week to meet at 6:30 to start going through testimonies, having times of prayer, bible studies, etc. So for me finding quiet time can at times be difficult either being at night when I head to my tent or waking up before breakfast/team meetings. 

So a fairly busy schedule. There are also 20ish Hondurans who are camping with us. Meaning there are probably close to 70 of us camping at this site which is a whole different kind of busy. A lot of the Hondurans are local high schoolers who were excited about the potential of learning English. Our host (pastor Paul) who speaks very little English says that probably half of these kids don’t have a relationship with God. So a bit of a unique opportunity for us. They have been super sweet to cook every meal for us, and I think my body is starting to get used to the portion sizes which are pretty small especially considering the fact we are doing manual labor. 

So yeah there’s my attempt to catch you up on this past week as quickly as possible. Going to be a wild ride in these circumstances. But we have a pretty sweet and unique opportunity and it is cool we are experiencing this month as an entire squad.

Lots of prayer for physical and mental endurance, health, sleep, safety, time with God to be fruitful, growth with one another, people on the squad to feel seen and loved when we are all together, and God’s presence to really rest on this mountain. Also prayers for the ministry, for resources and needed connections, for the Hondurans helping us to know and love God, for the thirteen year old girls in the communities that already have kids because they were abused, for alcoholism to be driven out, and in general for God to really move in this place. Thank you.

Love y’all lots! Jesus loves you a heck of a lot more!

Peace, JD.