Time for Vacation

The school year has come to an end and everything is all of the sudden quieter and very relaxed. By the way, it was really nice to be part of IBC Graduation this year – it reminded me a lot of my Matteson Graduation and made me miss all my new friends I won there.

As I am writing this I am in Tegucigalpa with Bonny and waiting to be able to leave the country. Actually another friend, Shanel, is here as well, since she couldn’t leave the country either. 😀

As many of you probably don’t know, the political situation here is very difficult right now. There have been new elections almost a month ago, but the results haven’t been announced till this Sunday – which is very unusual. Just before I continue, I know that in Europe you don’t really hear about this, if you don’t search for it, but it is a quite serious situation – and not only in this country, things are going crazy, also in many other countries. This Sunday, after the new president Juan Orlando Hernandez was officially announced, things turned quite crazy. The new president is not wanted and a large majority of people believes that the results are not true. And there are many evidences to believe that the elections were corrupt. For example: Salvador Nasralla – Hernandez’s main opposition candidate – was in a five-point lead when the electoral courts computer systems mysteriously failed, and when they came back up a day later, Hernandez was far ahead. So basically, the computer system were the votes are registered just went down, and many hours later all of the sudden the other candidate had far more votes. This leaves many doubts open. As well, the OAS and the European Union, the two organizations that monitored the vote, noted irregularities. And the OAS even rejected the official tally, calling for new elections. The people are upset, because they don’t want Juan Orlando as new president and so they protest against it. Many Hondurans feel aggrieved about what they see as stolen election. So now there are many street protests and strikes. Therefore it is a little bit difficult to travel 😀 many flights got cancelled and so for example our friend Shanel had to stay with us for almost a week, because her flight was cancelled twice.

But let me tell you now what happened to us: Approximately two weeks ago Bonny and I wanted to fly on our vacation. Bonny was invited by a family friend, which lives on San Andrés Island, Colombia. Since she didn’t want to fly alone, she invited me to join her and so we were looking forward to almost 5 weeks of vacation on San Andrés Island.

But it shouldn’t be as easy for us 😀 A few days before we wanted to leave I received my Honduran residency. As a Honduran resident you are a minor if you are under 21 years – which I am. Therefore I am not allowed to leave the country without permission of my parents, and this needs to have an official stamp. When I realized that, we basically figured, that there will be no way that I can leave the country. Additionally they told us at the Migration, that we need a Yellow Fever Vaccination, which needs to be done 10 days before the trip. Since it was only 3 days to our trip, we decided, that we will not do that, and we would stay in Honduras. Still we wanted to go to the airport and at least try!

Early in the morning of the 12^th of December we went to the airport and we tried our luck – knowing that most probably we will not be able to fly. After discussing back and forth with migration and the airline they almost let us fly; in the end though it didn’t work, because we didn’t have the vaccination.

After this we had to decide: Either we take the vaccination and try again in 10 days or we just leave it and stay in Honduras. After sleeping one night over this we decided to go and take the vaccination. The Vaccination didn’t cost money, but knowing that I would take it in Honduras – where hygiene and everything is a bit different – made me feel quite a bit uncomfortable. Both of us were pretty scared when we walked into the room, where the vaccination would be taken. And quite surprised we were when after three minutes we walked out again and were done with everything. But see yourself how quick it went.

After taking the vaccination we actually wanted to return to VIDA – the ministry, but because of the political situation we were not able to travel. Therefore we decided to stay in Tegucigalpa with a very friendly family. The next 10 days we spent on fixing Bonny’s documents – which were incorrect since 20 years – basically since her birth and mainly trying to help the family with the things they had to do. We were cooking a lot, I was learning Spanish, we celebrated Bonny’s birthday, sang in church, went shopping with Shanel, visited some friends and so on.

Almost two weeks later we tried to fly to San Andrés again. What happened this time, I will tell you in my next Blog Post.

Merry Christmas to all of you!
Hanna