The three primary goals of Outreach are part of our plans for the coming year at St. Alban's. They are (1)local outreach in the form of food and shelter for the poor and homeless, (2)special projects for senior residents at SunBridge Hacienda, a care facility in Eureka, and (3) Youth Ministry.

We continue to provide one meal a month at the Endeavor on the third Tuesday of each month. The need grows though and we currently provide a meal that feeds 100-120 people so help is always welcome in preparing the main dish and helping to serve the meal.

Anyone who would like to be involved please contact the Church office at 822-4102. Thanks and God Bless!

Strange to be an American, the rich cousin, coming down to the Northern Hemisphere's 2nd poorest country, Honduras, and taking the humblest position at the mission work site. We gringos were assigned the grunt laborer positions, the shovelers, diggers, cement mixers, cement haulers (by wheelbarrow and bucket), hillside excavators, and general cleaner-uppers. We worked, and in that, we gave. Still, I wonder again and again while down there which of us, Hondurans or Americans, were the givers. To them we already had everything (materially, plus we could travel) and the labor we did they already knew how to do, and better. The truth, it seemed to me, was that the Hondurans were the givers even though we had more. Yet it was hard to put my finger on just exactly why this was so.

One afternoon we ventured up to a mountain village called Chas Negra, an ancient indian village still very much inhabited today. The contemporary descendants who farm the same hillsides and depend on the same natural benefits as their forebears (the first crop this year was devestated due to dought; will the natural disasters never end for these people?), received us with interest and enthusiasm. Our guide was Padre Leonel who lives in San Pedro Sula, but is the parish priest of this mountain church as well. In a simple ceremony we Episcopalians of vastly different cultures sang and prayed and worshipped together in the candle-lit sanctuary (no electricity) of Santa Rosa Cisneros while a ferocious thunderstorm roared outside making us all feel a little afraid and thankful for the safety of each other. God brought us together. When the idea of a sister church was offered to us visiting North Americans, I embraced the challenge and promised Padre Leonel to give the idea of this new relationship a hearing back home in Arcata.

Indeed, I arrived home from Honduras with more than I expected. We Americans have a lot of things, but we don't have everything. We have less time, for example, than probably most people on earth. The Hondurans, who work harder for less, seem in spite of this to have a lot of time. And to us who had journeyed down there they gave of their time freely, shown in a thousand little ways, the give and take at the work site while working together, the time they took to puzzle with us to untangle our bad spanish and understand what we were trying to say, or their endless willingness to tell us about themselves, and ask about ourselves. They were gracious and open, and most of all, patient. They took what we had to offer in terms of work, but the Hondurans seemed just as interested in who we were as people. They wanted us to know that they were glad that we had come. That kind of hospitality makes you feel good, makes you want to learn how to give like that.

Dan