Sing Some Menno Song

Recently I was in the tasty, bustling, and exciting 25k population city of Gracias and I met up with a Peace Corps Volunteer. Turns out she graduated from Goshen College in ´06. Its a small world. Anyway, she lent me her blue Hymnal, and I´ve been enjoying it greatly.

A couple of times, I´ve gotten up at around 5ish and hiked up the mountain with the hymnal, some camp songs, and a couple of yellow (but very sweet) oranges. I have a lovely sitting spot around the side of the mountain and up a ways, where theres a good view of the area. I sit on a bed of dried pine needles (Honduras´national tree). I peel my orange and eat a section or two of it between songs. The sun starts to rise at around 5:30, running the sky through shades of purple, red, pink, and yellow. Once there was a horse eating on the slope of another mountain and it made some sighing noises. I was shocked that I could hear it as well as I could since it looked like it was about a half mile away. So I took a deep breath and, at the top of my lungs, joined creation in its morning song with ´What Is This Place?´, imagining it weave all over the valley.

Global Warming Action in La Campa

Yesterday I went to a little meeting where a guy from Chile gave a presentation about global warming and what can be done about it. It was a great presentation, it even had some technical/chemical explaination. The community leaders present were really excited and really thoughtful about what they could do to combat the situation, namely not chop down their forests. The whole time I was sitting there I felt guilty about how I had just recently on my flights to Honduras burned more fossil fuels than they ever will in their whole lives. And yet I´m the one who knew about global warming and had the background to understand at least some of the presentation.


These people already live locally. Most of them grow their own food, use very little electricity and they don´t travel. It seems like anything that they can do to change their lifestyle will only reduce their already small carbon footprint to zero. They´ll probably be taking net carbon out of the atmosphere if they reforest. Nonetheless, it seems that my role in CASM is going to attempt to deal with this by way of appropriate technologies. Among other things, I want to work on introducing ´biodigesters´that capture natural gas for cooking produced by the decomposition of plant and animal matter. These systems would help to make the ´integral farms´(farms with diversified production aimed at supplying all a family´s food needs) that CASM promotes be less reliant on industry and fossil fuels.


Consequences of global warming include plenty of natural disasters. Hurricanes and torrential rains are some of them that occasionally pass through La Campa. Yesterday we went to San Manuel, a nearby town, and were shown the effect of recent mudslides. The guy who showed us around was showing us houses that had been abandonded when people came home and saw that the wall had shifted 10 cm (4 in). He said over a short time last year, a road had sunk a meter (3 ft) and had blocked off a few communities. He then told about one time about a month ago when he had heard a slide and ran to check it out. He said it took out a house and killed a little boy on the way. On our way back into town, he said, ¨These days, life is complicated.¨ The whole experience hit me pretty hard.


I was frustrated by the fact that the tropical countries (third world) are going to be the ones that try the hardest to deal with global warming. It makes sense that they would because when a mudslide kills people you know, you´re motivated to act. The third world has been exploited for so long for so many of its resources, and now it is being asked to deal with the sins of consumption of the first world. The sick part is that while asking the third world to change, I doubt consumerism will change that much in the US. People will probably keep going on huge road trips in monstrous vehicles, eating food thats been flown in from as far away as Chile, and building huge houses that use energy produced by burning coal. Its my hypocracy too, and now I´m going to be asking these people to deal with it.

Ayyyy chile!

Recently I´ve been discovering the joys of Honduran chilies. I was at La Campa´s only comedor (restaurant) the other day and I thought I recognized pickled vegetables in a jar, so I took some. My co-workers assured me that they were ´muy rico´ or very sweet, which didn´t sound so crazy since I don´t recognize a lot of the vegetables that I see here. I ate the little round red one and it burnt like anything! Then today I was at our office and I found a bush in the back that had plenty of black things on it and a few red ones. I picked a red one and squeezed it and much to my delight it smelled really hot, which I confirmed shortly thereafter. So I picked the red ones and I´m going to try to make some sort of mad hot sauce for my frijoles...mmmmmm.

I´ve been discovering a little bit of the local economy here. Since its such a small place, not much is marked, you just have to know that this house sells ´pan de mujer´ or woman´s bread on saturdays and that house up the hill repairs shoes and sells sandals. The house on the corner sells bananas and pineapples when the boys break from studying (I´m sure) long enough to go and get them.

Life is wonderful here in La Campa. And despite the opinions of a couple of local gringos and a Peace Corps volunteer or two, Honduraños (as) are very awesome people. Come visit, soon :)

Food and Fasting

I´ve read a couple of books recently that have made me think about food, that it should be connected a lot closer to religion, our worldview, and our life than we tend to think of it. What are a few things that occupy the most time in our day? Working, probably. Hopefully spending time with loved ones. Buying, preparing, and eating food. Now compare this to the time we spend doing devotions, praying, or joining in fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ.

It made me realize how big of a deal food is compared with what should be taking a big part of our lives. What we turn eating into with our hurried meals and food out of a can is an experience in consumption. Our interactions with our food, planting, watering, and harvesting plants, raising and butchering animals, then cooking and eating our food can and should be a spiritual experience. Food has the potential to connect us very closely to God´s creation, God´s providence and the people around us. A Central African word, Ubuntu comes to mind, meaning ´I am only human to the extent of my interactions with my environment´.

I´ve read some books recently that have advocated fasting as a way to fight consumerism and get us thinking about what we actually need and sharing with each other. I also have thought recently as I´ve felt like all I do is eat some days that I really don´t appreciate the food that I´m given. I mean, I love the way it tastes, but the biggest thought in my head when I get a big plate of food that I´m in no way hungry for is ok, how can I manage to eat this food to convey to the people who gave it to me that I really do like it a lot and appreciate their hospitality? Its good to make sure people know you appreciate what they´re doing for you, but I realized that I don´t think of food as sustenance, as something that is a wonderful gift from God.

I read another book that recommended fasting to think about how much we use that we actually need and what we can do with our excess if we lived with less. It said maybe we could fast for one day a week and give the saved money (or food) to people who could use it and would appreciate it greatly. This book also advocated volutary poverty as a way to connect with people who are hungry, homeless, or otherwise. In a word, solidarity.

I did a kinda-not-really fast at EMU in early ´07. I say kinda-not-really because we ate two meals a day of rice and beans in which portions were unlimited and the food was very nicely spiced=absoloutly delicious. It was still really hard to go to bed late at night feeling a little hungry and looking at the food I had on my dresser. It made me think how difficult that must be to go to sleep hungry and not having assurance that you will have food to eat the next day. Even though the experience was far shy of the real thing, it helped me to think about how it must be to actually be hungry.

Today I´m fasting for the first time ever. Not a kinda-not-really fast, I considered it making one but then it would feel wrong. So all I´m doing is drinking water. I´m going to make it something I do once a week for all of the reasons above plus as a way to practice self-control which, I´m finding, I have very little of. My mind keeps drifting and I keep thinking about how I should probably walk across the street and buy a Chocobanana or maybe a couple of muffins from the bakery at my house until I remember that I´m fasting today and I cannot live by bread alone.

Address! and a long update

Believe it or not, I have an address now. Its sweet too, it reveals how community and people oriented this country is. No numbers or anything, mail can be sent to Gracias (a 25k people town 30 min away) at

Michael Wiebe-Johnson
Voluntario con CASM
La Campa
Gracias, LEMPIRA
Honduras, C.A.

There are couple of Peace Corps people I work with who said that they´ve never really lost anything in the mail, not even packages. It just takes a while.

Anyway I´m in La Campa now! I´ve been here on my own for over a week and I´m getting used to the town, making some friends, and visiting a bunch of communities in the area which are generally about 40 minutes away (going really fast!) on pretty bumpy, hilly roads with the most gorgeous view I´ve ever seen.

My host family is really nice too. I have two brothers and three sisters here, but one sister is in University on the north coast, so I probably won´t see her for a while. Another sister is Elena, a Peace Corps worker who is finishing up her 3rd year here. Its nice to be able to hang out with her sometimes. The other siblings I know are pretty fun, its nice to be able to sit and talk with kids. My host dad is the pastor at the church in La Campa as well as a nurse. We have a medicine shop and a bakery in house. The bakery is part of what the Peace Corps worker at my house has been working on and the baked goods there are wonderful. My spanish is coming along, but its still not so easy sometimes. I just need to work on vocabulary....actually I think I need to work on grammar a lot too hahaha.

Village life is proving to be pretty nice. There are four or five little convenience store things with mostly packaged snacks and candy, but one sells Chocobananos (bananas with a coating of waxy chocolate on a stick) and another is a bakery. La Campa is laid out in a 4x4 square of rocky or dirt roads on the side of a hill looking at a pretty big rock wall. There is a sign painted high on the rock wall that says ´Bienvenidos a La Campa.´ The people here are happy about living in La Campa and they ask a lot how I´m liking it.

Travelling to the little tiny villages (communities) in the area is a lot of fun because people are so proud of the work they´ve done and and so happy to have visitors. At one house we saw the result of a whole lot of CASM work (my organization, Comision Acción Social Menonita). One project is where they put a chimeny onto the indoor cooking fire so that it burns less firewood, burns longer, and the smoke doesn´t cause respiratory illness for their kids. They had a grain silo for storing up for the less productive seasons too. This house also had a chicken pen for producing eggs and they were growing most of their food (even coffee!) for their own family´s consumption. Its great that they have the chance to enjoy the crops that they work so hard to grow. In other places they are building latrines and farming Tilapia fish.

It is so encouraging to see how community organizing and help with simple, practical projects has empowered them to be able to support their own families and take so much pide in the work that they do. I´ve heard of other projects with small scale hydroelectrics and natural gas capture from farm animals that I think would be really good to check out and could be benefitial for other communities in the area.

I´m getting used to being here. The adjustment to the food is a slow one, but I have faith. Thats all for now, internet access is sporadic, but at least it exists in La Campa so I´ll do my best to keep you updated. On the left you can see links for the other Honduras SALTers Rachel and Liz´s blogs. They are both very thoughtful and very awesome people, so you should check them out and leave them comments :) Thank you all for keeping me in your prayers!