A trip back in time

Trip to Neuva Armenia:
(see pictures)

We became good friends with, Omri, a student here at Dona Elena’s house. He lives in a small rural town, Nuevo Armenia, high in the mountains very near the Guatemala border. His father owns land and raises cattle – so of course we got to talking farming at dinner. His last week here in Copan, he invited us to come up for the weekend, to visit his family and go horseback riding in the country side to see his father’s cattle pastures. Well, how could you pass that up?

It was a great experience. The community is the real thing – caballeros riding through town on horses on their way to or from the fields. Most people live in town and have their pastures and fields in the mountains and valleys outside of town. Cattle being driven to different pastures on rough dirt roads. Milking by hand and making butter and cheese as a way to preserve the milk. We even learned about “cappuccino de vaca” (cappuccina of the cow), which is made by adding lots of sugar and a bit of coffee to a cup, then milking from the cow directly into the cup. According to my language teacher this warm, foamy version of cappuccino is “muy rico”. We didn’t try it, in fact I doubted the drink even existed. But when I asked Omri, he seemed to know about it right away.

We stayed in Omri’s home, taking up a bed his family could ill afford to give up. We are still not sure where everyone ended up sleeping. Saturday we went horseback riding for over four hours in some of the most beautiful country I have seen. As we were coming back riding on a high ridge we saw people walking down from town to a river far below, including women carrying colorful umbrellas against the sun. They were members of Omri’s church going to a baptismal service. When they saw us they waved and yelled for us to join them. Although we were dirty and in jeans, he assured us we would be OK, so we rode on down into the valley to join the service. Kathy and I just couldn’t help ourselves, we began singing “As I went down to the river to pray….” Omri found that very amusing and asked us to translate the words for him. It was just another one of those surreal experiences. As Omri told me, “God made us return late so we could be at (encounter) the service.”

Omri and his father have visions of creating a destination for tourists to experience authentic rural Honduras on horseback. So they were interested in our impressions. We told them it was a great idea but this would be something only a certain group of tourists would venture to try. There would be folks like us that would definitely go for it. But we also told them how sad we thought it would be to lose the pure, untainted nature of the community due to an influx of outsiders. We are not sure where they will go with this, but we do know it was a real privilege for us to have been able to visit with his family in this place called Nuevo Armenia.