Thursday, May 19, 2011

Honduras

That is sort of odd that they would try to pretend that we were from Honduras just because we had a record player. The only Honduran connection that I know of was David Davenport's mother who grew up a missionary kid in Honduras in maybe the 1940s. I would not know anything about that. It is not like she ever told us much about that. You would have to ask David about Honduras because I do not know very much. It does seem odd that the Smeyas would later move to Honduras after being in El Salvador. Why not move to Chile or Argentina for that matter? It is all the same to me, just another set of people to meet, another set of churches for them to serve, another variation on Spanish culture, etc. No reason for us to get involved in these internal political conflicts that do not really concern us. With the city power plants shut down at 6 p.m. to baffle Honduran bombers, we spent the evenings of the soccer war on the terrace listening to wartime broadcasts on the battery-powered shortwave radio. In both countries, the president's wife left the country with a suitcase carrying all of the country's money, or so we heard on the radio. So we do not really know very much about that, not being native Salvadorans. A lot of people were displaced during that conflict but I only know what I heard on the radio. Now the U.S. diplomatic people, they probably knew a lot about that but it is not like they would ever tell us very much. We might hear something through the grapevine or not but it really does not matter very much to us. We do not need to know very much unless of course a bomb were to fall in the backyard or something like that. Then we would be directly affected. Otherwise, our purpose was very different from theirs. Our mission was with the local church which is always going to be there, hopefully, regardless of the shifting tides of politics.