Father of 3: Day 1 - Saturday, June 30th

The Team!!

Our team of more than 30 people from Providence Baptist Church in Augusta, GA and Harvest Baptist Church in Lugoff, SC had the privilege of working through Final Frontiers Foundation in the country of Honduras in Central America. Our team was based in the city of San Juan de Flores which is about an hour drive through the mountains northeast of Tegucigalpa, the capital city. San Juan de Flores, known locally as Cantarranas, sits near the base of a very mountainous area with unbelievably rugged terrain and very few paved roads. Cantarranas is only a square mile or so at the most and is home to only a few thousand people. There are many smaller villages up in the mountains and in the area surrounding Cantarranas within a few hours walking distance. Many of the people in these smaller villages will come to Cantarranas to buy and sell things as needed.

Descending into San Juan de Flores (aka Cantarranas)
to pass out invitations and tracts

As a mainly agricultural region with plenty of rain throughout the year, most of the men work on farms and in the banana and sugarcane fields during the day. The women mainly stay at home to take care of the children, and to work the smaller crops that supply food for their family, primarily corn and beans. Most families are extremely poor and do what they can to survive on a just a few dollars a month. The children are required by the Honduran government to attend school, but they are also required to wear uniforms which many of them cannot afford.

Saturday we spent most of the day in preparation for the week ahead. Through the support that was raised throughout the past year from several churches and many faithful members we were able to take with us several hundred pairs of flip-flops, clothes, tracts, portions of Scripture, materials to make hand-made invitations, and funds to purchase and assemble almost 200 bags of food that would feed a family for a week. The individual items for the food bags were purchased locally in bulk and were primarily a portion of corn meal, rice, beans, pasta, tomato paste, shortening, and coffee. Our team took all of the bulk items and used an assembly line method to package the individual items into each food bag unit.

The Food Bag assembly line

Almost 200 food bags were
distributed during the week.

Much of Saturday was also spent writing handmade invitations for our church service on Sunday and the Vacation Bible School that we held later in the week for the children there in Cantarranas. As an extra treat for the children, we brought with us the supplies to assemble several hundred “goodie bags” consisting of a balloon, a small toy, a pencil, a couple of crayons, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

Writing invitations in Spanish was a challenge.

The Goodie Bag assembly line

Saturday evening the entire group assembled in the town square for prayer before going in teams down every street and corner of Cantarranas to pass out the invitations and Gospel tracts to every person we came in contact with. We were blessed to have a few members of the group that were fluent in Spanish, but most of us were not. This didn’t slow us down a bit. The Lord equipped every one of us with a smile and a friendly wave as we distributed the materials. The children were especially excited to see us and would often run out to greet us with the same smile and wave we had given to them. What an honor to serve the Lord in this beautiful country – and this was only day 1!