Within my 4 years at the Finca, I have certainly written PLENTY, PLENTY, PLENTY about our incredible community life at the Finca, including our missionary community, our entire Finca community, and our community in the pueblos surrounding the Finca. & that still very clearly remains the same… community is a gift & I am always extremely grateful for the community that we have in CST and beyond!
However, starting earlier this year when Doctor Julio invited Teddy and I to play basketball on Mondays in Santa Fe (a beach town that is about 15 minutes away from the Finca in the opposite direction from Trujillo), I was completely unaware of the amazing community that we would form with the young men and adults from Santa Fe! The 4 amigos (Teddy, Rachel, Theresa, & I), along with any other visitors or missionaries that we happen to have at the Finca at that time, have gone to play basketball on Monday nights one week every month in Santa Fe. & IT’S SO MUCH FUN!!!
We often arrive at about 5:30pm, and Rachel, Theresa, & I enjoy a nice beer together, watching the beautiful sunset at the oceanside court. While we are enjoying a beer, Teddy is often playing a game of soccer with some younger kids that are playing on the court or chatting up our newfound community of men in Santa Fe. The 3-on-3 halfcourt (& occasionally 5-on-5 full-court) games typically start at about 6pm and last until about 8pm. The winner stays on the court until they lose, and we typically have enough guys that show up to have at least 4 or 5 3-on-3 teams rotating in throughout the night.
The competition certainly isn’t elite most nights, but it has been so rewarding to get to know the guys from the Santa Fe community and joke around with them. Nowadays whenever Teddy and I show up to play on Mondays, we know almost every single guy that is there and are able to have a general conversation with them! We certainly did not expect it, but we now have a beautiful little basketball community in Santa Fe!! GOD IS GOOD!!
Whenever I received word from Doctor Julio in early July that Santa Fe was hosting a 3-on-3 basketball tournament on July 14th and July 21st with the winning team taking home 3,000 lempiras (or about $120) and the second-place team taking home 1,500 lempiras (or about $60), I was INSTANTLY down and sent Teddy a message despite him being on vacation. Teddy responded almost instantly that we MUST play, and we were pretty easily able to recruit one of our summer volunteers, Emmet, to be our 3rd guy & another summer volunteer, Tom, to be our fearless coach, qualified by his endless years of basketball experience and playing the game at almost every level imaginable.
However, we had two obstacles that we needed to overcome in order to have a shot to win the tournament:
1) The 14th and the 21st were back-to-back Mondays, which is typically our community night as a missionary community to do something intentional and fun together for an hour after dinner. Since the games were scheduled to be played from 6pm to 9pm on both weeks, that time at the court would either have to be our community night or the rest of the community would have to be okay with us 4 not being in attendance for the mandatory community nights.
2) Teddy and I had an immigration trip scheduled on Monday, July 14th that we needed to go on, which includes leaving at 5:45am for La Ceiba and typically making it back pretty late at night since there is a 4-hour drive both ways. To make matters worse, our nurse, Fatima, wanted to bring one of our Finca kids to a medical appointment in La Ceiba on the same day to take advantage of the car already going there. In my experience, NOTHING moves quickly in Honduras and I was not optimistic that we would be able to make it back for the 6pm tip-off.
Praise God that everything worked out perfectly!! Our missionary community was super excited to have community night in Santa Fe for both weeks, despite the early leave time and the late arrival time. Not only that, but they made up the world’s best cheer squad and brought the energy and motivation that Teddy, Emmet, and I desperately needed at times. The Ceiba trip went just about as I had thought, as the Finca child’s appointment kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed. We didn’t make it back to the Finca until 7:35pm, but, luckily, the event coordinator in Santa Fe changed the schedule around for us so that we were able to play the required games on the 14th without forfeiting.
Combined between July 14th and 21st, we went 3-0 in our pool play and earned a spot in the semifinals!! We then demolished a team in our semifinal game & had a rematch in the championship against a team that we BARELY beat in our very first game the previous week. In fact, Teddy hit a game-winning three-pointer the previous week to allow us to get the top seed in our pool play! The championship game was a hard-fought game between two really good (and tired) teams, but we ended up winning 30-22 and bringing home the 3,000 lempiras to use for our paseo during the first weekend of August with our entire Finca community! It was an incredible experience playing in the 3-on-3 tournament and even more rewarding spending so much quality time with our newfound community of hoopers in Santa Fe!
Please pray for all of our summer volunteers at the Finca right now, as 6 out of the 9 of them will be ending their service in the next couple of weeks and transitioning back to their normal lives in the US!
Please let me know how I can pray for you!
God Bless!