Sometimes due to the needs of an individual trip, the cultural day is at the front end instead of the last day:
I am writing you at the close of our Honduras cultural awareness day. That’s the fancy way of saying we ate amazing food, collected hand-made souvenirs, and toured the best sites in Copan. Our goal was to enjoy ourselves and learn about the history of the people around us.
Our trek started at the Mayan ruins of Copan. The Mayan culture flourished in this area between the years 300 AD and 700 AD. The people were skilled mathematicians, astronomers and builders. With each new generation, the old Mayan city would be buried and a new city would be created above the old. Archeologists speculate the city temple was rebuilt 16 times like a giant layer cake. The picture below hints at the scale of the temple as it stands now.
This photo was taken by our new friend Obed. He is a native Honduran with a passion for Mayan history. He is talented at bringing the past to life with fascinating stories of the kings of Copan. Below you can see Obed with a pointer made from a stick and the feather of a scarlet macaw.
Macaws were sacred to the ancient Maya of Copan and statues are erected all over the temple site. Macaws, Toucans and other birds are commonplace in this area, so after lunch we visited a bird sanctuary. Here we became very intimate with the birds.
After all the great site seeing we wound down our travels with a worship service of a local Evangelical church. Such a vibrant congregation! The first hour was music and dancing, and then the sermon was powerful and engaging (although my Spanish skill did not understand any it.) We were treated as honored guest and thanked for our service. It was a blessing to feel so welcomed in a new and different land.
Tomorrow we leave early to travel to Comayagua. We will be adding to the bulk of our computers with Honduran Coffee. Please pray for our transportation as we will be driving most of the day.
Together in service, Joel
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Team Member Spotlight: Kathleen is part of the team and joins us from the Resurrection partner church, First United Methodist Church of Roseville California. Even though she was excited to see the Mayan ruins (a lifelong wish) Kathleen shared how touched she was to become an immediate part of our group and not an outsider from California. Her high point of today was to meet people from Honduras, New Jersey, and Ireland and realize that we are all together. “We are brothers and sisters; we are all one family.”