Ally Kwan & Rachael Weening at Hospital Atlantida.                The group on its way to paint a school in Los Limpios.

This year has been one of many firsts. This has been the first year to have a dorm, the first year with so many teams, and the first year with a team for 8 weeks. That's right...we are a little bit crazy! 

We hosted a team of 15 high school students and their 3 leaders for an 8 week missions experience. They spent their time serving with the 4 different ministries in the mountain area (The 600, Instituto El Rey, Give Hope to Kids and HHIM). We organized for them to rotate through the different ministries every 2 weeks in order to learn what it is like to live like a missionary. 

While they were here in Honduras they: painted murals in two village schools and at the government hospital in La Ceiba; poured concrete foundations and driveways; dug footers; planted tomatoes, pineapples, vanilla, beans and corn; built and maintained a compost pile; assisted in minor procedures at the clinic; observed live births in the Honduran hospital; cut, bagged and labeled pills; packaged soap, tooth brushes, toothpaste, band-aids and alcohol wipes; taught community education classes on basic hygiene; administered antiparasitic medication to over 400 hundred children at 4 different schools; learned Spanish in a total immersion setting; participated in 5 different local church experiences and lived for two months in a culture very different than their own.

We were all stretched out of our comfort zones and pushed past what we thought  our limits were. We watched as the students, AKA “mini-terns”, expanded their spiritual and cultural horizons, and began to wrestle with some of the tough questions in life. One of the incredible things about mission trips, regardless of their length, is that they shake your world up a bit; you have to make decisions in your life based on what you have seen and touched not just what you have heard about.

It was an all around incredible experience and we are praying about what God would have us do with our new found relationship with Toronto District Christian High School.