Strike/Huelga

Hola a todos!
After a very busy and scary day I am in my bedroom typing a blog post to tell everyone that I am safe :) My family is still crazy, but in a good way, and I visited my friend's family today and I like mine better. :) Today at the university we were going to have a tour at the hospital, so we left our bags (and everything else, money, cell phones) at the university and started walking. We began walking down the main street which was full of people because of the strike going on in Honduras if you havn't heard already by watching the news about Honduras. All of the teachers are on strike because they are not getting paid (there were 1,000s of people protesting on the streets), and the teachers began to throw rocks at the police. The police then threw tear gas and thousands of people began to run away to avoid burning their eyes, nose, and throat. The Calvin students got caught in the run and we all started running away from the gas, but I couldn't find Elena (another Calvin student) so I went back into the crowd to look for her.

I couldn't find her but by this time the tear gas was all around me. It felt like acid and needles in my eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. I kept trying to run/crawl and found the rest of the students among many Hondurans all yelling and running. I found the rest of the group but I couldn't see or breath. We continued to walk/run away from the crowds of people as more and more tear gas "bomb" were thrown at the people. The pain only lasted about 45 minutes, and we were able to find out that Elena was with other Calvin students and they ran into the mall and were safe. I had the most tear gas out of everyone but we are all fine. Many of the students are very afraid and many of them had panic attacks, so Phanie and I had to be "RA"s again and help everyone out.....we had all left our cellphones and bags at the university so my host mom was trying to call me and couldnt get ahold of me and was crying all day because she was so worried.

We were brought home by another host mom and I found my worried host mother waiting for me at my house. Needless to say, we are all fine, but not sure if we can go to school tomorrow or not and we will get a phone call in the morning from our professor about what the plans are. My host mom already told me to sleep in because she is not going to let me go to school anyways :) It may be possible that we have to come back to the US because the university has not had classes for a long time and if the strike continues it may become more dangerous....which is not what I want to do. Please pray for all of us, especially the students who are so afraid of almost everything. It was scarey for me because I couldn't see or breath for a while, but after a while I felt like one of the strongest people because it didn't seem like a life or death situation to me....compared to one girl who told me that she now understands what Rwanda was like (when in reality it wasn't even close). One of the girls on the trip has never left the state of Michigan in her life and the pobrecita was shaking all day long. Another girl is very sick right now and was crying and panicking, and 2 other girls had an asthma attack and panic attacks.

Tonight I met my host cousins and we played soccer in the house (in a room that is like a garage, but not really) and we at icecream with coffee. My little sister Andrea told me that she was jealous that I wasn't playing with ONLY her. I promised that I would play the Memory game with her later :)

It has rained every night here which means it gets "cold" at night....good for sleeping for me :) It is hot during the days but when it rains it cools down and so I have learned to pray for rain. The photo here is the view from the second floor of my house today while it was raining. Every night so far I have watched a TV show called "Las munecas de la mafia" or "The dolls of the mafia" which turns out to be a show about mafia men killing people and having sex with women who never wear any clothes. My host mom and her amiga seem to love it...I decided to just watch it with them to better my spanish and for nothing else....
I hope that after the chaos calms down I can keep my promise to write in spanish and english, but for now it's only english.
Hasta luego!