La Ceiba

One of my most humorous situations in dealing with multiple languages is back in 1989, I was living in a refugee community in the remote eastern corner of Honduras among the mosquito culture.

And a friend of ours from La Ceiba, a young girl named Maria Belinda Montoya, wanted to learn English.

So we invited her to come and live with us in our community called Alca, which is south of Puerto Limpia, and it's just close to Cabo Gracias a Dios, which is that pointy end where the Cocoa River comes into the Caribbean.

And Maria Belinda came, and she was learning English.

And she looked at me and she said, yes, Mike, I have poop.

I meant to ask her, are you afraid? And she said, instead I said, do you have excrement or poop? And she started laughing.

And we still laugh about that because Maria Belinda is a dentist in La Ceiba, and she has a scar on her right forearm where Oogly bit her.

And I see her on occasion when I'm in La Ceiba.

Here's a picture of that.

La Ceiba, C-E-I-B-A, La Ceiba.

It's on the northern coast.

And it was once the heart of the banana industry in Honduras.

The area believed to be the spot where hungry workers invented baleada, which is Honduras' unofficial national dish.

It's made of beans, cheese, sour cream, curtido, which is this kind of cabbage relish, meat or eggs folded inside a grilled tortilla.

Now, this town, La Ceiba, is best known as the gateway to the premier showcase of biodiversity in Honduras, and that is this, Pico Bonito National Park.

It's named after the triangular-shaped peak at its heart, Pico Bonito, home to toucans, jaguars, monkeys.

Now, you were going to build a church, but you felt impressed by the Lord saying, "People may not enter the doorway of a church, but they will come into a coffee shop."

Well, we, we lived in La Ceiba, which is the city, uh, right, uh, 18 miles, uh, from Utila on the-

Mm-hmm

... mainland.

And there's very high, uh, 8,000-foot mountains behind La Ceiba.

La Ceiba was the closest city to our school project, which was out on the Rio Coco, uh, which is the border between Honduras and Nicaragua.

It was a two and a half hour flight in our, um, little airplane.

But Ceiba was the nearest city that we could actually change money and make a phone call and, um, buy groceries at the time.

Plus, you can't fly directly there internationally.

You have to endure that notoriously rough one-hour, 35 US dollar ferry ride from the mainland city of La Ceiba.

Unless you're flying private.

Yeah, unless you're willing to drop serious cash on a tiny charter flight.

Exactly.

The baseline logistical costs are completely locked in right now.

Like I said, that ferry from La Ceiba is $35 each way.

Dorms are hovering at 10 to $15.

Mmm.

Y en ese entonces ella estaba estudiando en la univers-- pues estaba trabajando y estudiando en la, la Universidad Autónoma de, am, La Ceiba, en Honduras.

Entonces, am, esta-estaba estudiando el lenguaje maya.

Y cuando vio la palabra ix, que significa mujer, pero es el-- ix es como el ja-- el... también como símbolo para jaguar.

Claro, claro, porque es que como, sí, mis primeros años en Honduras y uno chiquitico, pues uno...

Yo crecí en un entorno muy, muy natural.

La Ceiba es un espacio que es mágico.

So, la Ceiba viene del nombre de un árbol que se parece li-literalmente como un dinosaurio, porque es gigante y tiene unas raíces que se ven como que, no sé, como sábanas grandes y la raíz en sí es del tamaño de uno, pero es como que bien delgadita y se mete a la tierra y el árbol así gigante, gigante.

Yeah, off the north coast of Honduras.

We lived in La Ceiba.

which is the main city on the coast there on the mainland of Honduras.

And Utila is a place where people come for scuba diving, and they come from all over the world because it's part of the second largest barrier reef in the world.

It's very organic.

You were going to have a church, weren't you, thinking about having a church?

Initially, when we were living in La Ceiba from 86 to 2000, we were flying our airplane out to Utila, and we saw the travelers, and we're from a very relational church in Maui, Hope Chapel, and We thought, wow, nobody is reaching out to these travelers.

They're coming from Australia, Argentina, Israel, Canada, Great Britain, all the European countries.