By Members of the North/West Lower Michigan Synod’s Honduras Team
Recently, the Synod Honduras Team hosted a different kind of workshop for our friends in the Lutheran Church of Honduras (ICLH). Since we have not been able to send a team to Honduras we had to find a new way of accompanying our dear friends. Working with the leadership of our project in Honduras, Salud Para la Vida or Health for Life, we decided to offer a workshop over Zoom. The requested topic was COVID. On a cold January day in Michigan we reached out to our beautiful Honduran friends with Living with COVID: a Mind, Body, and Spirit Perspective.
Twenty-seven Honduran volunteers, some individually and some in groups, joined the Zoom workshop, and the questions and discussion that ensued indicated how desperately information was needed. Nidia, the coordinator of the project, said that everyone she invited participated and stayed with the group even though it lasted much longer than anticipated.
The Synod Honduras Team is fortunate to have a native Spanish speaker involved with our work. Max Quero of Caledonia was kept busy during the entire workshop translating for the group both English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Others involved in planning the workshop were Linda Stark of Sparta, Julie Hyatt of Midland and Connie Lenkowski from Williamston.
Our relationship with ICLH is one of accompaniment. All of our support is driven by needs that are acknowledged by the workers in Honduras. The coordinator of the program in Honduras sent us a list of misinformation about COVID that is common in their communities. These concerns were the basis of material presented. Now these 27 volunteers will use the information presented and go out into their communities and educate and assist their neighbors on issues related to COVID.
While we learned so much from this first attempt of a workshop on Zoom, it was a total success, and we are excited to plan our next visit with ICLH volunteers. We now know that our visits to Honduras can happen more than once a year!