Blessings among the bad luck!

 (This is the blog post I wrote on Thursday and planned to post on Friday.. but my Friday turned into a crazy day!! So I'm posting this now, but I'll write a new post about Friday tomorrow, so stay tuned...)

This past week or so I’ve been learning a lot about perspective.. and how I need to aim to be optimistic and seek to have God’s perspective because He sees the big picture and I don’t. Its been a rough week and a fantastic week all rolled into one! I’ve been having a bit of a string of bad luck recently… several weeks ago was the car accident and then since then my Kobo (E reader) has just broken entirely (will need to be sent back with warranty when I return home), I discovered that the grocery store over-charged me by $600 (accidently charged me $600 USD by accident rather than the $60 I should have paid.. someone probably accidentally pushed an extra number on the credit card machine.. but that’s a lot of money to me.. and even more in Honduras with roughly a 20limp:1US conversion) and my credit card was stolen. The tricky part was I needed to sort out the grocery store issue before cancelling the card because if I cancelled the card I’d never get my refund, but trying to explain to the Honduran cashier about the error in Spanish was miserable.  Last Thursday, I ended up on a ridiculous adventure that involved a dodgy cab ride to another city and talking with person after person in the administration at of the grocery store; only to be told that I might get my refund… but it certainly won’t be for another 4 weeks or so… (and we leave in less than 3 weeks..) and while I was on this adventure, the credit card caper was spending more and more money.. then I tried to call VISA Canada, on their emergency/lost & stolen card line, and they told me they couldn’t talk to me since I was on a cell phone.. so after several phone calls to them and a lot of frustration I got the card cancelled. Long and the short of the story, I am praying that I’ll get my refund, waiting for VISA to do an official fraud investigation and I survived a dodgy cab ride mostly by talking about my fictional husband waiting for me.

Kate & the little bundle of joy!

I made it back home just a few mins late for tutoring so I tutored as usual. Then I was exhausted, starving (because I went straight from clinic on my grocery store adventure without eating lunch and forgot my water bottle and had only enough cash for my cab.. so no food or water) and frustrated! I was ready to get home to rest when we got a call about a patient who was in labour!! So we turned around and headed straight back to the clinic to help deliver the baby! After about 3 hours of labouring at the clinic, our patient delivered a healthy baby girl at 7lbs, 1oz! I was helping look after the mom but Kate was totally in her element doing the baby stuff!! She took care of the baby after the delivery and was really helpful in deciding the baby needed suctioning etc and she was helping to teach the Honduran new grad more about labour and delivery/postpartum nursing care. All in all a great experience! So glad we could finally be there for a birth and it was a huge blessing!! We arrived home really late and basically collapsed into our beds! Tuesday was an incredibly long day with some really low/frustrating moments and some really exciting/beautiful moments all rolled into one!!

fresh new baby! :)

Saturday we went on a little adventure to French Key which involved several public buses, and a long walk to the dock where we took a little boat to a secluded island for the day! We had such a great time! Kate, Alisha, Megan, Jessy and I went and we met up with Angely (our receptionist at the clinic) and we really enjoyed the day of bonding and relaxing. Then after supper we just stayed in and watched a movie but I got to do some sewing for the girls. I made some alterations and repairs and it was so nice to be sewing again!! It’s certainly something I miss!

 

Monday Kate and I hosted a ‘Nacho Night’ at our house as a chance for all the volunteers (new and old) to hangout apart from clinic (with our titles aside and just chill/get to know each other!) I really love hosting people so I had so much fun preparing for this! Some of the volunteers asked if I could make red velvet cake, so I decided to give it a whirl! I’ve never actually even tasted it before… but I figured why not? So I made 2 different batches from recipes I found online (one from a big US cooking network and the other from Canadian Living magazine.. so it was semi a battle of which country has better recipes too!) So I baked 2 cakes, and we had a whole feast of nacho dip, baked nachos with chicken, rice, guacamole etc. Quite a few of the volunteers came over and we had a super fun night that ended with a pretty intense game of Dutch Blitz!!

Tuesdays we tutor and afterwards it has become our tradition to go to trivia hosted by a local pub. The clinic usually has enough people to enter several teams and despite our impressive collective education levels.. we suck at random trivia! But we always have a blast despite coming dead last!

This Wednesday we had an end of the year party with our tutoring kids!! We invited them over afterschool to bake cookies and make homemade pizza with us! It was so much fun! These kids had never baked before at all and they had such a great time measuring and stirring!! We had a few fun mishaps along the way, like accidentally adding double the baking soda.. so we just doubled the entire recipe! Interestingly enough, they were all super grossed out by the idea of forming chocolate chip cookies into balls with their hands!!

They thought the texture of cookie dough was gross and slimy! But they eventually warmed up to the idea! And their cookies turned out fantastic!! The pizza was similar; they all had a blast working together to make it and even more fun eating it! Then we took them outside to the beach in front of our house and taught them to swim. Many of these kids live within a mile of the ocean but cannot swim and are very afraid of it (I think it’s a cultural thing for parents to teach their kids to fear the water because it keeps them from trying to swim when they can’t but it is sad because they are missing out on so much fun!) So we borrowed a bunch of life jackets and all jumped in! We taught them some of the basics of swimming and then just swam around together! 

me & Esmerelda

(FYI: Kate & I are wearing life jackets in the pics for three reasons: 1) it makes it ‘cool’ to wear one, 2) we proved that they actually hold you up for the skeptical kids and 3) it made it easier to support the weight of the kids who clung to us because the jacket was keeping us up somewhat. We can both swim on our own, I swear!) So overall, it was a day of learning, of first times and of making sweet memories!! It certainly made my day and blessed my heart to be able to love those kids and bless them with the fun and the food! :) 

   

Clinic these past two weeks has been a chaotic blur!  We have a ton of new volunteers and they need to be orientated plus for the last few days of last week the local public hospital was on strike (which seriously increased our patient load!) We have been having serious computer issues and this is causing a lot of chaos and headache! I’m trying to be optimistic and just focus on the big picture! I think it’s interesting that God seems to always provide blessing and hardship together, but we often get tunnel vision and only see the negative. Like today for example what very chaotic at clinic with two really sick patients that needed to be taken to the hospital (woman with tonsillary abscess who was septic and a young woman visibly pregnant who was bleeding profusely). However, we also provided a lot of great care and helped a lot of people and we had a fun reminder of the good things of life when the baby we helped deliver came to clinic for her one week checkup. (Side note: guess what they named her? Emily!! I’m sure it had nothing to do with me.. but I can wish! And it is my spelling too, not the Hispanic spelling.. so who knows! Lol! But I doubt it!) The baby is adorable, healthy and happy! The mom couldn’t be prouder to bring her in to see us! It certainly made my day! Some people only see the chaos but I’m learning to step back and try to take it all in.. the bad, the good and everything in between! And usually I’m left feeling more positive and optimistic than ever!