We left Wooster shortly after 3 a.m. in Ted’s pickup with our son, Mike, as chauffer. I was in the front with Ron Pycraft. Mike Miller, Beth Pycraft and Ted were squished in the back seat with all of our luggage in the way-back. We looked like a bunch of gypsies off to Honduras, with the credentials of the passengers perhaps a little higher and the medical supplies making the luggage certainly not that of the casual traveler. Even though much is sent ahead on the CAMO truck, everyone takes a second bag so we can use every bit of our weight allowance. Mine was a DeWalt router. Ted’s was filled with dental supplies and Foley catheters. Beth’s had contact lens, back braces and dip sticks for testing blood sugar. Mike had dental supplies and beanie babies for the kids. As we met others at Cleveland Hopkins, I found out that Cindy Mullet had toys from McDonalds and children’s books in Spanish. Linda Lance had pencils and more beanie babies. Thelma Potter, one of our translators, had antibiotics and a printer. Marsha Murphy had boobs for her mammography patients. Robin Hauenstein had pencils for the kids in the eye clinic and hot wheels for the kids in peds. “Honduran kids are just like any other kids,”said Robin, who has been making this trip for about as long as I have. “If they think somebody else has a more flashy hotwheel than they do, they are right up there to complain about it. One kid lifted up his mattress and showed me he had eight of them. He had his own dealership going.” Most creative, I thought, was Lisa Ritenour from Akron, who was carrying 15 pounds of chocolate bars to get the Honduran nurses to her infant monitoring class promptly. She passes out candy for the first five minutes and says it works every time. We took off from Cleveland in the snow. I immediately went to sleep and woke up about ninety minutes later to find the sun streaming in the windows and the first leg of the trip half over. I guess I missed the coffee and muffins but Ted probably ate my share. I loved the sun but didn’t try to watch the scenery below. The farther I am from the window seat, the better I like it, sort of like staying away from the edge of a cliff. If I sit close to the center, it’s easy to pretend I’m just riding in a car. I am one of the original white knuckle flyers and this is as good as it will ever get for me. I no longer consider my fear of flying as a character flaw. Some people are meant to fly and others are meant to drive and I’m just one of the latter. Our world us began to change when we landed in Houston. The gray of Ohio was gone, the sun was bright and I could hear Spanish all around us. Houston appears to be a hub for flights to all parts of Central America and, I suspect, like Honduras, there’s only one flight in and out of each major city each day. We enjoyed our last access to clean restrooms with safe water (this is a biggie for me) until we return to Houston next Sunday. Then we were off again with the Caribbean below us. The flight from Cleveland to Houston was a traditional nobody-talkes-anybody-unless-you-know -them trip. By the end of the flight to San Pedro Sula, our port of entry, we were like one big happy family. We interacted with a group of head and neck surgeons from Anarbor, Michigan who were going to the Caribbean coast somewhere in the mosquito belt and two church missionary groups, one from South Carolina, the other from Arkansas. . As we approached San Pedro, we flew over the reefs of Belize. Even I looked cautiously down at that point because it is so beautiful, like something out of National Geographic. You feel like you can see to the depths of the ocean and maybe you can. It is a meca for divers, I know, and we talked to a group of them headed for the Balize Keys as we waited for our plane in Cleveland. As we prepare to land, however, I was thinking about Lupe and Roger Williams. Last summer on a beautiful night in Wayne County, Ted and I were on the square listening to whatever armed forces band was playing when Lupe appeared out of the crowd, arms outstretched to embrace both of us saying, “Sue and Ted, thank you for loving my country.” We’ve known the Williams’s for many years. Our kids grew up together and we have good soccer memories from days when the program was very young. I had forgotten, however, that Lupe was born and raised in Honduras. As it turns out, her family home was just a few miles from the San Pedro airport and she and Roger met there. She was the local girl, just returning from studying languages and the arts in England and Roger was an American research trainee for the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Banana. They met at a company swimming pool and, as they say, the rest is history. Lupe was in Honduras to see her mother during Hurricane Mitch and couldn’t get out because of the flooding. Each year we come, we comment on the mud-line that exists about five feet up on the walls inside the where the airport buildings were completely under water. I looked again this year and yes, Lupe, the mud line is still there. When you walk out of the door of the airport to where the bus is waiting, you walk into a wall of heat and, while this year the three-hour ride to Santa Rosa was relatively uneventful, it was hot hot hot. I’m no longer shocked at the conditions I see as we ride through the countryside because I’m not a newcomer any more. Instead, I’m renewed by the efforts I see of the many good people who are helping. We arrived in Santa Rosa about 5 p.m., central time. Our destination,
the Hotel Elvir looks like a prison from the street with its hospital-green
stucco walls and bars on the windows but it surely looked good to me.
The Fairmont it is not but the rooms are clean and the people friendly.
It feels like home.
|
