friday photo dump // november 7

Welcome to the Friday Photo Dump! 

As an October baby, all Lesley wanted for her birthday was pumpkin! Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin candle, pumpkin anything. We searched and searched here, with no luck. But thanks to Lesley's dad and stepmom, she ended up getting all three! Now we're trying to convince our Honduran friends that it's a great idea to eat big orange gourds that they've seen sit on your front porch. 

We have been busy bees at the children's development center figuring out creative ways to bring construction paper and glue to life for our students. Recently, as you may have seen on the CDI's Facebook page that we and the students created a table-sized board game to review all of the English they've learned all year. The craziest part is, most of them have never played a board game before and some of our kids are 11 years old or older.

In addition to other things our students have never played before, we are reviewing English numbers with our homemade Bingo cards! 

While traveling to Northern Honduras, we had two Honduran friends with us that once again taught us the art of car travel here... you stop at the shakiest looking little fruit stand and buy a huge bag of your favorite fruit, especially if it's known for growing better in the part of the country you're in. Though Jamey still has a hard time opening them, we enjoyed eat licha! 
(Also known in other parts of the world as rambutan.)

The reason for our travel was to go to the October GCLA Leadership Conference in La Ceiba, Honduras. Though we didn't spend as much time outside as we would have liked, it was beautiful to get to see green mountains and the Atlantic Ocean right beside each other. 
Honduras, you're pretty. 

During the conference, we had the pleasure of getting to attend a special session where we heard one pastor's story of living and ministering in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, where it is incredibly dangerous to even identify yourself as a Christian. It was so amazing to hear his stories and wisdom, and once again praise God for all of the countries who have religious freedom, while so many are still fighting for it.  

One of the biggest parts of Lesley joining the trip to the conference was having the chance to visit another CDI in the GCLA network at the Iglesia Gran Comision church in La Ceiba. They currently have over 100+ children in their program, which was great to see and learn from. It definitely helped us gain more vision for the direction our CDI in Danli could go as we continue to grow. 
We would love to visit more CDIs if God permits!

As many of you probably already know, we have other missionary friends from the States that live in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. They were kind enough to make the trip out to see us and us their tools/talents to help us get some projects done around our home, which was an amazing help to us. 
In this picture: we were cutting back our "weeds".

Just to realize the size of our crazy weeds trees, use Jamey as a reference!  

We were out in Urrutia, the community where we are doing our pilot water project, recently conducting bacteriological tests to see if there is contamination in the well due to lack of sanitation. You can also see that most of the people out there don't understand proper water storage because their collector bin is sitting outside uncovered where rain, animals, trash, mosquitoes, and more can get into it. 

Speaking of the water project, our website for the Total Water ministry is in the works right now and will be making it's debut VERY SOON! Be excited. Seriously, excited. If you haven't yet go like our Total Water Facebook Page to get more updates on our ministry here.

We had a good response to our first installment of our "missionary cookbook" series of recipes, which began with Honduran empanadas. Comment to let us know which recipe you'd like to see next in the series: perfect banana muffins, lasagna made abroad (without ricotta cheese!), or one of our favorite meatless Monday meals, pasta primavera.