A Week of Learning in Honduras

Mygel Porter with Matteo, one of the many new friends he made in Honduras.

I recently got back from a week-long mission trip in Honduras which was such a great experience. We partnered with a local church down there to build a house, and that whole journey was so amazing. Also the culture down there was a bit of a different lifestyle. 

The organization I went with was Young Life, a youth ministry. We had partnered with a local church in Choluteca, Honduras, that does many other ministry things besides building houses. They also have their own property, almost like a motel, that they use to host the different groups that come down there. 

The process itself of building the house was quite unique as I don’t have any experience with building a house, so it was all new to me. The even bigger problem was that the main people from the church building the house with us only spoke Spanish, and at the start of the week we only had two translators with us. As the week went on four student translators came to help, so it got a bit easier communicating with everyone, but we still all used an assortment of different hand gestures and fake actions to get our message across. 

We also had this ongoing joke of yelling “TRANSLATOR!” Anytime we couldn’t get by with hand gestures. It started off with one of the students in our group doing that, where everyone else was joking with him about it. Then we started doing it as a joke toward the one student, but it ended up just catching on to the rest of us, so by the end of the week every couple minutes someone would go “TRANSLATOR!” 

The culture down there is also so different. While driving it was a lot of cutting in front of people or just flooring it onto the street in front of traffic. Also a lot of honking, but not in the aggressive way we do it here, more in a way of “I’m here” or “I’m merging right now.” It was interesting to see how people drove more aggressively while still keeping their cool. While here, one minor mistake and there’s people laying on their horn, cussing you out their window, and so many other acts of road rage. 

Soccer was also pretty big in Honduras. In every neighborhood you could find a couple soccer fields and almost all day kids were there playing soccer. I did get the opportunity to play soccer a couple times which was a lot of fun. 

We also could not drink the water, so it was a unique experience having to brush your teeth with a bag of water. Which leads me into my next thing—there are no plastic cups. Liquids are drunk in either a bottle or a plastic bag. In the plastic bag you would tear it slightly with your teeth and then drink from that.

Honduras was such a great experience, I’m glad I was able to go and see the world differently than just my view from America.