Some General Updates, Including Hurricane Relief and Coffee Farms

UPDATE: This post was written before the arrival of Hurricane Iota, so it only includes hurricane information from Hurricane Eta. We will have an update once we have assessed the damage from Hurricane Iota, which is a currently developing situation. 

Russell is not one to over-dramatize things. When gearing up to tell me about the aftermath of Hurricane Eta and everything else that is going on at the homefront, he started with the following quote:

“Things in Honduras are a little bit crazy right now.”~ Russell Sowers 11/11/20

If any of you are crafty, you might want to needlepoint that on a pillow to give Russell for Christmas. While most of the update of the hurricane’s aftermath is going into a separate post, here’s some of what’s happening with Sowers4Pastors.


Welcome Home, Kelsea

Kelsea is back in Honduras for the first time since June. Between COVID-19 shutdowns, the road trip to collect backpacks, zany airport antics concerning what constituted acceptable COVID testing, and a tropical storm, her trip was a little longer than originally scheduled! You can read about her adventure in her own words. She is planning on returning home for Thanksgiving, if possible. However, her ticket is for a flight from the airport in San Pedro Sula, which is flooded.

Now that Kelsea is back, she’s enjoying all of the leisure time of someone who returned to four months worth of stacked up work. She is charged with keeping the ledgers of items the ministry purchases in Honduras. Or as Russell summed it up, “She’s working on lots of administrative stuff.”


Extending Helping Hands

Kim and Jonathan Hall with Manna 4 Lempira are down on the North coast of Honduras right now. They headed out with a load of clothing and other items to extend help to those hit hardest by Hurricane Eta. Pastor Omar’s church is connected with sister churches in that area and he joins the Halls in lending a helping hand.

Coffee Harvest

The coffee harvest started on November 9th. This isn’t one of the little “first fruits” harvests. This is the super-colossal coffee harvest. If coffee harvesting were a sport, this would be what Russell and his crew have been training for. Not to oversell it, but this is the Olympics and Super Bowl of coffee harvesting. There are currently about sixty people working in the fields.

On top of the harvest, Russell and some of his crew have been building two coffee patios for drying the coffee. The hurricane threw a wrench into the process, but they are back at it now. They are also working on building a coffee warehouse for storage.

- posted by Christi.