Wednesday, March 11, 2009

On the Ground in Honduras Again

The smell of the air as I stepped off the plane in San Pedro Sula stirred up all kinds of good memories of Honduras. I am growing to love this place. Blaine and I drove from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba this afternoon. It was three hours of passing through palm plantations, and passing (around) palm plantation trucks creeping slowly, and often liltingly, down the road. It's good to be back.

We had a brief meeting with Sergio today. He is having a troubled year, bless his heart. He was able to repair the lightning damage to the electronics by replacing some of the circuit boards (he's handy like that). Now when they power up the diesel generator, it charges the battery banks with any surplus power generated. This allows them to run it for an hour on pure battery power, and then recharge for three hours with the generator while supplying power to the village. This is good for the battery health, and keeps diesel costs down. And it was all Sergio's idea. We have got to find a way to hire him as soon as we can. All we need is moola.

The flood-related damages have not been repaired however. That's OK, I think we are going to work on them in May when we return.

Also, we haven't paid our employees in two and a half months, so at least one of them is getting a little angry. So tomorrow we are going to pay them back pay, and pay them for two and a half months in advance - all the way through May. I hope this will give them patience with us. We're going to give some gifts too.

Blaine McCormic, my traveling companion, has been great. He is the former Associate Dean of the Business School at Baylor - such is the quality of the people God has blessed me to work with. He and I have been dialoging and "Blainestorming" about various high-level business decisions, like what should our vision statement and mission statements be like? He has also had some good ideas about fundraising and the complex questions regarding ownership of the franchises.

Do you smell the excitement in my post? I hope it comes through. More news as it develops...

1 comment:

Redlefty said...

Great news!