Nietzsche, speaking American, and other randomness

Last Friday during the daily employee worship in the hospital, the pastor was talking about clean air, as was the topic in the Sabbath school lesson. At the end of his little talk he says, "there’s a quote by a German philopsher, Fredrich Nietzsche, that I really like." At the sound of this, I immediately looked up to see if anyone else saw the irony in using an atheist’s quotes in a worship talk, but no one did. Anyways, the pastor said the quote was “one should go into a church if one wishes to breathe pure air.”  I was shocked; that sounds like a pretty tame, non-controversial quote. Did Nietzsche actually say something halfway decent about Christianity and church? The person who so infamously said that God is dead? That’s pretty much the only thing people know about him, but you should try reading the whole paragraph that contains that phrase, it’s not nearly as outrageous as you might think.  Anyways, two days later I’m still bothered by this quote, it just doesn’t seem right. So I turn to my trusty friend, Mr. Google.  Turns out I was right, the pastor totally butchered the quote, it must have gotten lost in translation or he just read it really fast and thought it was a great quote for his worship talk. It’s actually, “one should not go into a church if one wants to breathe pure air.”  I thought it was pretty funny. I wonder if anyone else even knows who Nietzche was.

   In other news, the other day I went to the hospital’s tiny gym after work and I saw these two guys. As I’m bench pressing a cool 55 lbs. (I know, you’re totally impressed with my huge biceps right now) I hear one of them speak English and I just about drop the bar on myself. But this isn’t any ol’ English, it’s American English!  I’m so happy to hear it, I want to immediately go up and introduce myself and ask them all about themselves, but I tell myself to play it cool, it’s not like I’ve never seen an American before, it’s just been 2 ½ months. So I nonchalantly keep working out, all the while listening to their conversation (it’s not eavesdropping if they’re talking really loud and you’re the only other person in the room). Finally, I casually ask them where they’re from. They’re a bit shocked to find out this stranger has understood their entire conversation, but look pleased to hear another person speaking English. It turns out both dudes are in the Peace Corp, they were in town for a capacity meeting with all the other Peace Corp volunteers in the country. It was super weird to speak English. Sure, I still think in English, but my tongue is pretty used to Spanish now. I keep stuttering, English vocabulary was slow in coming to mind and I was talking really slow like I wanted to make sure they understood me, which is what I do when I speak English to Hondurans who speak a bit of English.  But it was so good to speak American. Not English, I really do mean American. American words, American accent, American sarcasm and slang. It was the sweetest sound I’d heard in 2 ½ months! It’s also funny because I didn’t want to go to the gym that day, but whenever I don’t want to go to the gym, I tell myself that maybe I’ll make a new friend today, and surely enough, I met 2 new people!

And lastly, on the work front, we just received word that we should be prepared to present our proposal to the Vice-Minister of Health. We don’t actually know a date yet, they just said “be ready.” It’s really awesome how I found this out, I was in the midst of writing a short caveat of my experience here for my sponsoring organization back in CA. They will be giving a  presentation sometime this week about the volunteers. In my paragraph I had just finished writing this :

Sometimes change comes so slowly that you can’t really notice it until all the little pieces have fallen in place. This is what I feel is happening at our hospital here in Honduras. Since I’ve been here I have tried to help lay the groundwork for change, some changes are small and seemingly insignificant like supporting the local government run clinic in their public health events, improving the hospitals health education materials or volunteering with the church-run breakfast for needy children. Others are larger, like starting a health class in a local school or strategically coordinating the numerous international volunteers that wish to support our hospital.  But all are necessary steps that are being taken in anticipation for the biggest change of all: an agreement with the Ministry of Health that would allow us to see public patients with compensation from the government. This would greatly increase the amount of patients we serve. While we nervously await an answer to our submitted proposal on this matter, one thing is for sure, God keeps placing people in our path at just the right moment. Just when it seems that this proposal has reached a dead end, another opportunity arises.

Right as I finish writing that sentence, I kid you not,  the hospital administrator comes to my office and tells me that we are to present our proposal soon. This is great news and totally unexpected since it had been more than a month since our first presentation. We were beginning to think that the proposal was a huge failure. So, with that in mind, please keep us in your prayers, we really need this proposal to pass. 

over and out. 

and todays properly quoted quote is: 

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts." - Arnold Bennett