REAL Life Living in a Tent in the Honduran Mountains

I’ve decided that for every location I live on the world race, I’m going to write a blog about the quirks of living there. Why? Well honestly, I love living in these places and each one has their own little quirks. Little quirks that I hope to remember forever, and honestly some of which I find hard to believe myself because they are just so darn random!

Due to awe of the gift, and sometimes astonishment of the hilarity of my circumstances, I find myself exclaiming at least once a day: “how is this my life?!” LOL

Without further ado, here are eleven quirks of living up in the mountains of Comayagua, Honduras! 11 quirks that had become as normal to me as breathing and are some of the reasons I just loved my life on the mountain!

1) Keeping my tent clean was an Olympic sport: If you haven’t figured it out by now, baby wipes are essential to the race! Over the course of two months I have mastered the art of hanging my dirt encrusted feet out of my tent door while I baby wiped them clean. A good foot cleaning could take up to five baby wipes! No dirt in my tent, people!

2) Flicking bugs off of my tent for sport: The bugs on the mountain were no joke! Spiders and little buggies liked to hang out between the mesh of my tent and the rain fly. Rude. *Flick.* Knocking bugs off my tent, what a delightful nightly ritual! One of my favorite instances regarding bugs on the mountain was when we were attacked by a swarm of termites! It was quite comical to watch people swatting the bugs with cardboard signs and finding buggies crawling in their pockets!

3) Febreeze is my perfume: With lack of showers and ability to wash our clothes, how did we cover up the smell? A healthy dose of Febreeze sprayed everywhere!!!

4) Sneaking food to Snickers and Yote was a sport: There were stray dogs all over the mountain! Sometimes they were cute, and sometimes their barking drove us up a wall. What started as a request to not feed the dogs, by the end of the month had transformed into everyone feeding their meal scraps to the puppers. I’ve seen H squad and Hondurans alike both feeding dogs and yelling at them to get away from the table because they brought their odor with them! The trick: chuck the scraps as far from the table as possible!

5) Toilet lights, flushing, and the last square: Our bathroom consisted of a dirty toilet behind a curtain and a flush bucket (when the water was turned on)! How did people know that someone was in the bathroom at night? A headlamp shining through the curtain! Similar to Chichi, how do the people know if you just pooped? You come out for a bucket of water to flush it with! Does privacy still exist? Haven’t seen her in months lol. Also, if you were the unlucky sole that got the last square of toilet paper, you better have had been kind enough to hike up the hill and get a roll for your next friend in line!

6) Slipping down hills in the rain: Grip with your toes people! When you live in the mountains during rainy season, every surface becomes mud. Since all of our tent spaces were just carved into the mountain, you basically had to go uphill or downhill to get literally anywhere. Flat ground was a myth! So when it was raining we took 10x the amount of time to get places because every step was a slip risk! Toward the end of the month they actually had rope along one of the slippier and most used hills so we could hold on to the rope and not slip!

7) Get your headlamp before dinner or good luck tripping on your way to bed: The amount of times I have lent my headlamp to someone so that they could get their own or vise versa is really funny. Not much else to say about that one, headlamps before bed was a must!

8) Sometimes our showers exploded, and sometimes the best showers were taken with a hose: After a hard days work shoveling or carrying bamboo, where do you go? Shower line! We had about 70 people living on the mountain at some points and only 3 showers! It got interesting, people! After living in places without access to a shower, I will forever be grateful for one, even if it is cold! What made these showers really interesting was that occasionally the pipes would burst and the shower heads would pop off! Don’t worry, a friend would always retrieve it for you! Also, sometimes the shower water just flat out refused to turn on, an issue quickly remedied by the addition of a bucket or hose passed between the three shower stalls. Hose water pressure was the best! It got windy, so if you were showering on a windy day you had to make sure to have a trusty friend to hold your curtain closed! (I didn’t have a picture of the showers, but here is a picture of a beautiful mountain view, because why not!)

9) Beans, Eggs, Tortillas, yep: Most meals on the mountain consisted of these three staples, with a healthy dose of plantains and rice sprinkled in as well. Although it took a while for our stomach and bowels to catch up, we grew to get used to these meals! We had some darn hard working women cooking in the kitchen so anything they made me was more than appreciated! Let me not forget that we also had coffee everyday made straight from the coffee trees on the mountain; what’s better?!

10) Competitions judging the longevity of not washing our hair or clothes: No where else in my life have I seen people so liberally hand out compliments and approval for someone lasting a week or even two weeks without washing their hair. I mean… it truly is a feat, more power to em! The same goes for not washing clothes. We didn’t really have the ability to wash clothes on the mountain much unless we washed our clothes with us in the shower or found a free bucket. So if someone could make a single pair of work pants last a few weeks until they could get to a washer: you’ve done good, friend! (Special shootout again to the Febreeze with this one!) Here is a picture of me and my friends just sitting in some holes to show you why our clothes got so dang dirty in the first place!

11) TRUCK RIDES: When riding up and down the mountain in trucks there was one rule: hold on for dear life and pray! Gosh I loved these rides, even if sometimes I was convinved we weren’t going to make it lol. Sometimes we had up to 17 people shoved in one truck. Sometimes the trucks couldn’t make it up an intense hill that we creatively named; “Big Hungry,” and we’d have to walk up. Sometimes you’d have to get out and push the trucks stuck in the mud. Even when there were so many people shoved in a truck bed that I couldn’t tell where my own feet were, I loved the whole experience. The views, the laughs, and the scares, I’m already missing these hour long truck rides up and down the mountain!

This post consists of a lot of funny things, but in all seriousness, I wouldn’t trade my time on the mountain for anything! The Lord is moving on this mountain and in the hearts of His people here! Lord, thank you for our time spent on this mountain in Comayagua, Honduras! Next stop: South Africa!