The Furrow Journal

The Furrow Journal

We're Jason and Sarah Furrow and we're the directors of Give Hope 2 Kids, a non-profit working in Honduras.  We're starting a home for orphaned and abandoned kids on 100 acres in the jungle.  This is our place to talk about life, from the day-to-day happenings to our big thoughts on the world.

Suffering & Hoping

Sarah:

[After a busy year that included adding a baby, Josiah, to our lives and finally being able to open our Kid's Home in Honduras, I decided I'm overdue in adding to this blog.  So, here I go again.  I think I may even add in some more personal thoughts this time around.]

We are a generation seeking peace and justice and equality.  Thanks to globalization and our connection to the larger world, we know more about human suffering than ever before.  We can sit in luxury and see starvation in video footage from the other side of the world.  If I mention a malnourished child our brains immediately pull up a stock image of one of the thousands of photos we've seen of a kid with a big, bloated belly, and seemingly even bigger eyes, or the near skeleton baby in its mother's arms, gasping for breath.  I think it's made us a compassionate generation that wants to save the world.  That's why I'm in Honduras.  Instead of living the American consumerism dream, I decided my life needs to make a difference.

I think that for this generation the biggest argument against God, whether a person believes he exists or not, is the suffering in the world.  How could a good and compassionate God allow so much pain?  Even though answering this question isn't why I'm writing today, I will have to state my opinion, since I brought it up.  My answer is that God generally allows us to experience the consequences of our actions and our suffering-filled world has a build-up of thousands of generations making wrong decisions.  I know that's not doing justice to the gravity of that question, but I need to keep moving, so on we go.

The earth is waiting, hoping for restoration -- that's what it says in Romans 8.  It says the earth is eagerly anticipating the day when everything will be set right again.  It says we humans groan inwardly, knowing that things aren't as they should be, waiting for the change.  We're waiting for the day when we get to live as we know we're meant to and the world around us will burst into its full glory.  

My son Josiah is teething.  This is one of the hardest things to understand as a parent, because we can't stand to see our kid hurting.  God, why do babies have to go through pain and fevers to get teeth?  These innocent little beings hurt and they don't understand why.  Aren't there enough troubles in the world without making babies suffer?

I think Romans 8 answers some of that question.  We were made with a hole so we would be looking to fill it.  From infancy we know that something just isn't right with the world and we're always searching for the reason why.  Every little kid knows life isn't fair, but sure thinks it should be.  

I believe that God created us with an inborn ideal telling us what life should be, including all the catch-phrases of the day: harmony, equality, peace, justice, love.  

While I can't understand the pain of my son's teething, I sometimes have to make him hurt for his own good.  He's had shots and diaper changes and been scrubbed behind the ears.  Sometimes he gets frustrated with me for putting him in warm clothes and putting him down for a nap, but he needs those things.  

Couldn't it be that we are born broken so that we look to God to be fixed?

6-30 Wednesday

Sarah:

It's time to get back in touch with the world.  Since I last wrote we prepared for a trip to the US, went on the trip, came back, and now we're trying to get back into normal, busy life here.

We planned our trip this year around my sister Rachel's wedding.  She and Ian were married in New Mexico, at a lovely, little ceremony at a bed and breakfast where all of us out-of-town family and friends stayed.  We had a great time celebrating with Rachel and Ian.

After the wedding we went to visit a few friends in Colorado, then we went to Minnesota (where I'm from) for family time and a wedding reception, then on to Indiana and Wisconsin to visit friends and supporters, and then finally to Virginia to see Jason's parents.  Trips like that go so fast.  We had a few slow days to relax with family and then lots of busy days where you have different people to see at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  It's also our big shopping trip for the year, where we buy all our clothes, books, and lots of ministry and construction supplies.  Then we fill up lots of plastic tubs with all our purchases, taking what we can, and depositing tubs with family and friends to come down later.

The news while we were gone is that our property sprouted over 20 columns where our community building will be.  It still is crazy to drive up the road to our place and see such a huge structure right next to the road.  We also have 6 puppies that have joined the community on our porch, bumping us up to 9 dogs and a monkey, temporarily. 

We've been home a week now and this is already our second overnight trip to town to get work done online and prepare for our volunteer group that comes Friday.  Today we bought the second half of the construction supplies, which will be delivered up to our place.  Tomorrow we will run more errands and fill about 4-5 shopping carts full of groceries to feed our hungry work crew (I'm cooking for 30 this week -- the most ever!).  Then it's back home to prepare for the group and make sure we have all the bunks in the right rooms and supper on the table when they roll in on Friday.  We know this will be a great group and that we'll get a ton done when they're here.

5-9 Sunday

Sarah:

When I look back over the last few years, I really see how much God has walked before us. 

It is always my prayer to have an attitude like Mother Theresa, when she said that the only way something would succeed is if it was God's project.  She trusted the working out of things to whether or not God was interested in it.  That attitude takes a mountain of faith and a willingness to give your work up to God's hands, instead of carrying that burden yourself. 

Many years ago, Jason's father had a vision to start a ministry that would encompass a school, a clinic, an orphanage, and a church.  He helped to start Instituto El Rey and Jason came there on a construction trip six years before we moved to Honduras.  Who could have guessed how connected we would be with this school in the future?

Our valley now has the school, Instituto El Rey, the clinic, Healing Hands Global, and us, Give Hope 2 Kids, soon to be the orphanage, as well as a discipleship and agricultural ministry, called the 600.  It is not only amazing that all these ministries exist in our valley, but also that they grew up through individual visions and yet are so connected in friendship today.

When we moved to Honduras in 2006 and taught at the school, we went to serve someone else and gain experience.  We never guessed that this area would become our long-term home.  We fell in love with the valley though, with our students and their families, and with the network of ministries there.  From our time in the classroom, we became known as "Teacher Jason" and "Teacher Sarah" and we moved into our village of Urraco not as strangers, but as respected members of the larger valley.

Now we've spent the past couple of years building and preparing to take in kids.  We never thought it would take this long to receive our approval to care for children, but with last year's political situation things have just moved slowly.  So, here we wait.  We're not ones to sit around though, so we've turned this time of waiting into a time of working with the kids of our community.  If we had started caring for kids full-time last year we never would have started the library project yet or taught these English classes.  We see their value now though, as a means of truly making us a part of the community of Urraco.  This connection with our neighbors will make our future stronger.

Looking back we see how God directed us through these circumstances.  It gives us the patience and trust we need during this season of waiting.  I'm sure in a few years more, with another glance over my shoulder, I will understand even more of the life that God is weaving from my "commonplace" and "happenstance."

5-8 Saturday

Sarah:

After working on the accounting stuff for like 3 days straight, I'm about an hour from being finished.  We just have to go over it and double-check everything and then send it away and be done until next year.  That will be a relief.

Yesterday was a very interesting day and gave me a break from numbers. 

Someone drove all the way up to our place the other week looking for us, to deliver a letter in a country with no addresses or home mail service.  We weren't home, so they drove back by Instituto El Rey asking if anyone knew us.  They know us and so delivered a special invitation to us, to a ceremony for the official certification of half of our mahogany plantation.  This was exciting news!  (The certification for the other half of the plantation is a whole story in itself.) 

We got in the car about 5.30am yesterday to try and make the 8am ceremony part way across the country.  There aren't any addresses here and therefore no internet searches for directions.  We have to do it the old fashioned way and stop and ask several people where something is.  Our place yesterday ended up being about 10 minutes down a dirt road from the main road and we were therefore about 10 minutes late.

Most things start pretty punctually here, so we were a little concerned, but in the end this ceremony didn't start until 9.30am.  They kept announcing that there were some more people they needed to wait for.  When we did start I was able to follow the first 4-5 speeches word-for-word, but by the time we got to speeches 9-12, I was struggling!  My brain still overheats when it has to concentrate that long in Spanish.  The ceremony lasted 2 1/2 hours and half of our trees are now official!

We'll write about this on our main blog, so I don't want to repeat things from that, but getting our trees certified is a really big deal.  Previously in Honduras all the hardwoods, like our mahogany and teak, were owned by the government and even if you grew them on your own land, you didn't have the right to cut them.  Now though the laws are changing as people are becoming more committed to reforestation.

Remember how I said there are no addresses?  Sometimes we are asked give an "address" for official papers and for the hardware stores that deliver all our cement to us, etc.  We have to give: our village, then the county seat, then the state, then the description that you head up this valley, get to our village, go past the soccer field, then count 4 houses on the left, then a fence starts, which is our place, and there's a blue building by the road.  That's our "address."

4-28 Wednesday

Sarah:

This is rather a different week.  Jason is in Baton Rouge attending a conference.  The purpose is to make connections for the future of the ministry, but the Hillsong Band is there and John Maxwell and others, so I'm sure he's enjoying that side of it too.

I am staying at the clinic in Rio Viejo to work online.  I'm wading through last year's receipts to get our accounting finished for 2009.  The nonprofit deadline for that is May 15th, so I have a couple weeks to get all the ducks in a line.  I am competent at crunching numbers, but it's not something I enjoy.

While I'm online I'm also doing my best to keep everyone in the US up to date with what we're doing.  When we only have internet a couple days a week, it is so easy to get behind in our communication to family, friends, and supporters.   We do our best. 

It is amazing to me how internet saturated our culture back home is now.  Most everyone is in constant and immediate contact with the world.  We are not.  Even where I'm staying now with internet it's by splotchy satellite service.  The signal comes and goes, fades in and out, and you never know if that page will load this time around or not.  Once we're used to instant everything we whimper and whine over waiting ten seconds, let alone three minutes. 

We kind of like our lifestyle now, where we have internet just a couple days a week, when we're in our La Ceiba office.  We don't at all like the part of being out of communication the rest of the time, but we've grown to appreciate the amount of time we gain when there's no internet pulling at us.  Instead of searching for stuff there's no chance we'll be buying in the next decade, or looking up one too many articles that don't really give the information we need, we fill our evenings with talking, reading, music, art, and an occasional movie.  We find that without the internet draining away our free time that we have a lot stronger relationship with each other and with our friends here, plus having time to pour into other interests.

One of these days though we'll find an affordable enough system that we can get internet (maybe even phone!) up at our place.  It will totally be worth it for connecting with friends and family back home -- and getting our facebook fix.  Then we'll be back in the boat with the rest of you, trying to figure how many of seconds of each day do we let the internet overtake.

4-22 Thursday

Sarah:

Today is our first full day back at home, after being in town working for a bit.  Due to the pile-up of dirty clothes from our time with the group and our time in town, it is officially laundry day.  We have a washer and the “dryer” consists of the clothes lines outside.  On laundry days I am outside on the porch a lot, which brings me into contact with our animals.  Today we’ve had more animal interaction than normal.

We have three dogs that are fully mutt, but comparable to labs.  Two are black and one is white.  Rocky, the white one is about 9 months old and still very much a puppy in his desire to chew on things and jump on people.  The dogs generally hang out on the porch, especially on hot, humid days like today, when they like to lay on the cool cement.  When I hang laundry it usually involves stepping over and around sleeping dogs that could care less if they’re in your way.

 

We also have a monkey named Chitlin’.  My guess is that not having a parent to care for her as only monkey-mom could do slowed down her development, but she’s doing a lot better now.  She’s growing a lot faster now and seems much healthier than before.  Jason opened her cage door permanently a few months ago to let her roam around the orange trees eating blossoms and to sun herself on the shed roof.  Now that she’s bigger though, she’s wandering ever farther from the cage.  She’s decided she wants to live where the action is.  At first she spent a lot of time being shooed out of Olga’s kitchen and hanging out with David and Olga’s dogs.  Now however, she appears to have moved to our porch, to live with our dogs.

Now, there are lots of people reading this who are thinking: oh, how cute and fun to have a monkey living on your porch. Yes, she is cute, but no, it isn’t fun to have her living on the porch.  The problem is that she is not at all concerned about where she deposits her fecal matter – on herself, on you, all over the floor where everyone is walking.  So, yesterday I decided to drop the hammer and I got out the disciplinary spray bottle. 

 

The spray bottle, filled with water, is basically our only dog training device (which may say why they’re not very well trained).  When the dogs were puppies they had to learn not to ever enter the house, even if the door was left open.  Whenever they came in the door, they were sprayed until they went back outside. 

 

Now the spray bottle has become a monkey training device.  We started spraying Chitlin’ whenever she’s on the porch and she does not like it.  She’s a lot more cunning than a puppy though.  She’ll watch until you’ve turned your back to her and then she’ll sneak back to cuddle up next to the dogs. 

I just made her a new little house off the porch, but still under the overhang of the roof.  I put out a crate with her teddy bear in it and an old welcome mat on top for sunning herself.  She immediately moved in, curled up on the bear and wound her tail around part of the crate. 

So, I was hanging up laundry, the monkey was in the crate, and the dogs were lying on the porch when I heard a scurrying sound through the leaves.  Up runs this little wood rat, right past the monkey and right in front of me.  It started climbing this vine in front of our house and sat there staring at me, just a few feet from me.  I called for Jason and he came out with a broom to try and smack the rat, as they’re an absolute menace once they get in the house.  A broom really isn’t a good weapon though, because those little guys move fast.  But, what do you know, our puppy Rocky got into the fight and became the day’s champion rat killer and rat eater.  At least it was a fresh rat though, because in his young life Rocky has already eaten lots of cardboard, shoes, rocks, frogs, and a poisoned rat. 

 

Well, it’s time for me to go hang another load of laundry on the porch and see if Chitlin’ needs a spray.

4-19 Monday

Sarah:

The Happenings...

Well, a lot has happened since I last wrote.  We've had a group here, from a church in Alabama, my Mom stayed with us for a couple weeks, and we lost our volunteer Christine back to the States. 

The group went really well -- it's amazing to finish off a week like that and not feel dead tired.  For us the work starts well before a group comes and then we have about 12 hour days the whole time they're here.  Usually we spend a day or two in town ahead of time running errands, getting all the food and the supplies for the work projects.  We're getting the group grocery shopping trip down to a fine art, but it still takes a lot of planning and we always run back for like three more things once we're in the check-out line.  We fill about two carts to overflowing, which the grocery store will box up for us, to help it make the journey to our house. 

This time we were already in town with my Mom when we ran all these errands.  So, we had to fit into our double-cab pick-up: three people, 10 cardboard boxes of groceries, a cooler, my Mom's luggage and our bags from staying in town, three 5-gallon buckets of paint, paint brushes and rollers, a container of gasoline for mowing the lawn, six giant watermelons, two huge bags of mangoes, and a few pineapples.  Needless to say, we were a bit crammed in there.  Every time we went over a bump on the dark road home we were really hoping we hadn't left a box of groceries behind.

I do almost all the cooking for the groups right now.  I make everything from scratch too, from my beans to my spaghetti sauce, as there just aren't affordable options here for prepackaged foods.  We're trying out a few local options to help out with the group cooking (and eventually take over) but we need to teach them tactfully how to keep the food clean and how to use less lard and salt. 

This time my Mom was here to help me do the cooking, which was a big blessing.  Not only did I have the companionship in the kitchen and someone to share the work with, but we also would sneak in a Scrabble game or two into the cooking lulls.  She also always helps me with projects that I struggle to get done otherwise.  This time we organized the deep freezer and she finished the binding on the quilt for our bed that I had otherwise finished a couple years ago.  And best of all, we have fun together.

One fun thing we did together was to make salads just from the stuff we have growing on our land.  We put in little carrots and peppers, chayote, okra, cucumber, wild cherry tomatoes, cilantro, and at least four different kinds of spinach.  This group seemed to enjoy vegetables more than most, so we had fun experimenting with these salads for them.

The group (and my Mom) left by early Saturday morning and Jason and I used that day to catch up on a little lost sleep and to have a dinner and date night in town. 

Yesterday, Sunday, we planned on getting some computer work done while we were here in town, but we lost electricity from 8.30am until 6.30pm.  Not only does that mean no computer work and no fans or AC (it's hotter here in town), but also no water in our "office."  So, we decided to take a little road trip.  We called up a house mom candidate for the kid's home and drove off to visit her.  She's from about 2 hours east of La Ceiba, in a town called Tocoa.  We're going to have her come visit our place in a couple weeks as a follow-up interview.

Today we're glued to the computers, doing all the important office work with a little facebook and ebay surfing thrown in. 

4-6 Tuesday

Sarah:

Today was a town day.  We left our La Ceiba "office" at 5.30 in the morning to drop our volunteer Christine off at the bus stop, so she could go help with classes at Instituto El Reyup in Rio Viejo.  We caught the bus in time for us to send some diesel fuel up for our work truck, which is hauling rocks, blocks and sand for the wall we're building at the school. 

After the bus left we waited around in town until a place opened for breakfast, then we dropped our pick-up off for an oil change.  We walked around town for a few hours doing other errands, thankfully finishing up before the day got too steamy.  It was a pretty productive morning. 

This afternoon we've been online: organizing upcoming groups, talking with future volunteers, and of course, writing blogs.

3-28 Sunday

Sarah:

I'm sitting on the end of a dock, swinging in a hammock over the turquoise waters of the Carribean.  Jason and I are on a little vacation with Jason's Dad, Paul Furrow, who is finishing a month sabbatical in Honduras.  We're in the beautiful islands of the Cayos Cochinos, a few miles off the Honduran coast.  The guys are off snorkeling.  I am nursing my blisters and sore limbs from yesterday's mile long snorkeling trip, listening to the doves coo, and swatting insects (the trouble in paradise), while the sun gets lower in the sky.

3-23 Tuesday

Sarah:

The computer class went well yesterday.  When we started there were 4 kids there on time, then we had 12, then 20, then 30+ an hour into it.  Even some older teenagers and a couple parents came to learn.