We’d been driving for more than three hours. The truck had survived the kamikaze driving in Tegucigalpa but now seemed to be in danger of succumbing to this last, dusty mountain road. The engine was tiredly whining, wheezing like I would have been if I’d been walking. Judging by the bruises on my bottom, the shock absorbers had been dead and buried before we’d even left, and I was pretty sure I had a knot forming on the side of my head where I’d slammed it into the window when we hit a boulder in the middle of a stream we had crossed. While driving in the city, there hadn’t been much to look at but shacks and garbage, but now we were in the midst of coffee country and the coffee trees were smothered with blooms. The mountainsides were full of row after row of squat trees, dark green leaves dusted generously with pearl white blossoms and road dust. I wondered if the coffee blossoms smelled, but the dust from the road would have suffocated us if we’d put down the windows to find out. Occasionally, I recognized a banana tree, but the rest of the thick green foliage was lush and unidentifiable.

At this point, I realized that I had more of my body weight on my back than I did on my bottom, and I was shocked to see nothing but blue sky out the windshield. We were pointed almost straight up and the road had disappeared. My travel companions had their eyes closed and both were clutching the “hang-on” handles. I guess that’s what they were called because every time the driver told us to hang on, we griped those things till our knuckles hurt. I felt like I was in the last car on a roller coaster, and as we crested that hill, I laughed. I was thrilled to be so alive, so lucky, and so stinking happy.

It may be a few steps beyond normal, but I loved being there and I loved what we were doing. I knew that providing safe, drinkable water to these mountain people in Honduras would make a difference to them but I also knew that the bigger blessing would be mine.