5 am wake-up calls by hail marys?????

Ok, it happened again and now it’s happened enough that it’s blog worthy. Truthfully, the first time it happened it was blog worthy because it was odd that it happened once…now that it’s happened around 10 times, it’s just plain outrageous!

Here in Danlí (in our neighborhood) there are several things that could wake you up before you’re ready to get up:

1. Fighting dogs
2. Loud roosters
3. Honking taxis
4. A neighbor playing really bad 80s music
5. Cohetes (loud “boom” firecrackers)
6. Someone driving a truck around with a speaker or two in the bed doing some sort of advertisement (this has happened both really early in the morning at 4:30 am and really late at night around midnight)

Fortunately, of the six things listed above, Luke and I are now able to sleep through numbers 1-5 quite consistently. However, about three weeks ago we had to add a number 7 to the list. Before I explain to you what number 7 is, I have to explain something about churches here in Honduras and more specifically, in Danlí.

I think Luke mentioned in another blog that Hondurans are evangelical, Mormon, or catholic. Churches here seem to have the attitude that louder is better and almost all church services (evangelical anyway) employ the use of speakers, microphones, and a synthesizer (you can imagine how this sounds). For some reason, the catholic church here in town must have felt that they were getting “out-sung” by their fellow evangelicals and decided to purchase a few speakers and start parading around at 5 am singing, praying and doing “hail-Mary’s” with a loudspeaker. This is also usually accompanied with or prefaced by ringing church bells. We have told recent visitors about number 7 when they stay here and they laugh and think it’s funny but the next morning once they’ve been woken up by it are angry and amazed that this actually takes place.

It’s 5:30 am right now on a Friday morning and I was, once again, woken up by a hail-Mary this morning. Luke opened the portón one time to get a look at what exactly was going on and described it as something you’d see in a parade…a guy driving a truck super slow with a speaker followed by a guy with a microphone and then a bunch of people following the truck singing along. You’d think they’d hit different areas of Danlí to assure that everyone hears their good news but unfortunately they pass back and forth on our street at least 4 times a week now anywhere between 4:45 and 5:45 am. I’m looking forward to our upcoming trip to get out of Danlí for a week! :)