Above: Sister Alegría (right) and Sister Confianza, members of the Amigas del Señor (Women Friends of the Lord) Monastery in Limón, Honduras, pray during evening compline.

Story and photos by Paul Jeffrey (UM News)

May 21, 2025 | LIMÓN, Honduras

One day in February 2006, two United Methodist laywomen climbed aboard a bus in Portland, Oregon, headed south. They traveled by bus and train, quietly singing Psalms and reading aloud from a book on the Rule of Saint Benedict, a sixth-century guide to the organization of monastic life. After two weeks on the road, Beth Blodgett and Prairie Cutting climbed off a bus on the Caribbean coast of Central America, determined to start a new spiritual community in a remote corner of Honduras.

Almost two decades later, they are still there. They long ago became Sister Alegría (which means joy) and Sister Confianza (which means confidence or trust). The monastery they founded, Amigas del Señor (Women Friends of the Lord), is tucked into the coastal mountains near the small Garifuna village of Limón and blends Methodist and Quaker traditions with a commitment to live in poverty.

The idea behind the monastery began when Alegría, a pediatrician in Portland, felt a call to contemplative life, but wasn’t impressed with the comfortable life of monasteries she visited in the U.S. She started changing her life, attending Quaker meetings, working less than full time in order to avoid paying taxes that went to military spending, and volunteering as the health care provider at United Methodist camps in Oregon. But she still wanted something more.

In 1999, she got a phone call during Lent. Another United Methodist physician invited her to join a medical team to Honduras.

“I was interested, but they were going during Holy Week. I was a trumpet player, and trumpet players can’t leave during Easter. We have important duties in the church,” she said.

Intrigued by the opportunity, however, she arranged to travel later to Honduras on her own, bringing along a bilingual niece to translate as she practiced medicine in a church-sponsored clinic. She made several trips, staying a few weeks each time. Eventually, however, she grew disenchanted with the church clinic, which was only open a few weeks during the year when a gringo doctor could be present.

“It was essentially a walk-in emergency room, but I’m a pediatrician. We’re more interested in things like immunizations and disease prevention and teaching mothers,” she said.

“So I started working with the public health clinic in the community. They welcomed me with open arms. They had medical records to track patients and their immunizations from one visit to the next. Many who come to do medical mission work don’t realize that there is a whole public health system already there. It’s vastly inadequate and nobody pretends it’s anything else, but it’s there, and needs support.”

For several years, Alegría spent spring and fall in Limón, practicing medicine in the public clinic, spending her summers keeping campers in Oregon healthy. Yet she kept dreaming of monastic life.

In Limón she rented a room from a woman who one day in 2003 asked her to hike into the mountains to visit some land that was for sale.

“I went along, and we hiked up a peak that looks over the coast. As we walked around, it was like God tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘This is it. Buy this for the monastery.’ So I did,” Alegría said.

Alegría started planting fruit trees on the property. Back in Oregon, she placed an ad in the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference email newsletter, the Connector, seeking someone to accompany her to Honduras to help found the monastery.

Sister Confianza’s mother, a clergy member of the conference, forwarded the note to her daughter, who after college had started serving in Minnesota with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Confianza spoke Spanish in her job at a food bank, and enjoyed living in community with other volunteers. She had gone to Guatemala a year earlier to study Spanish and volunteer with Habitat for Humanity.

So while traveling to Honduras appealed to her, she knew little about the country.

“It’s not one of the places you hear much about, although in ninth grade I had to write a paper about it. All I did was copy material from an encyclopedia, though, and all I remembered was its shape,” Confianza said.

“Nor did I know anything about monasteries or nuns, other than that I’d seen ‘The Sound of Music.’ She was asking for a one-year commitment, and living in Latin America interested me. I wanted the cultural immersion, the language immersion, and I wanted to deepen my spiritual life.”

The two corresponded by email and then met when Alegría flew to Minnesota for a son’s wedding. They agreed to travel to Honduras together, but put off their departure until the following year after Confianza finished her term with the Lutherans.

Then they climbed on the bus.

Once they arrived in Limón, they rented a house while they had a house built on the property Alegría had purchased. Six months later, they moved in.

The remote setting offered them the quiet they sought, and they filled it with prayer. Three times a day they sat on a bench outside to read Scripture, sing and pray together. They used traditional monastic terms for these prayer times: Lauds at sunrise, Vespers in the late afternoon, and Compline in the evening. They worshipped in Spanish, often using Mil Voces Para Celebrar, the United Methodist Spanish hymnal.

Their worship wove together many traditions, including robust Methodist singing and the silence of Quaker meetings.

“I figured that if Jesus can be wholly human and wholly divine, we can be wholly United Methodist and wholly Quaker. It’s no big deal,” Alegría said.

There was no electricity, so the natural rhythms of the mountains set their schedule.

“We knew it was time for morning Lauds when there was enough light out on the prayer bench to read the Bible,” Alegría said.

The rest of their days they filled with work and contemplation. They sewed their own blue habits on a treadle sewing machine. They captured rainwater in a cistern, and in the dry season they carried water from a nearby stream where they also bathed and washed their clothing. They gathered firewood, ate simply and supplemented their rice and beans with herbs and leaves from the trees they nurtured on a hillside now flourishing with greenery.

They also embraced the monastic tradition of reading aloud.

“A major part of our monastic life is reading aloud together. One reads while the other is cooking or washing dishes. Or in the evening, we just sit and take turns reading. We’ve often had three or four books going at once,” said Confianza.

The sisters’ bookshelf includes works by Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Spanish nun; Justo González, a Cuban-American United Methodist historian; Jared Diamond, a scientist and historian; and John Dominic Crossan, a New Testament scholar.

For many years, the women had no internet, and kept up on what was happening outside by buying a newspaper every few weeks when they would travel several hours by crowded bus to Tocoa or La Ceiba to do banking or shopping or to keep a doctor’s appointment.

Those bus trips took on extra meaning when Confianza started selling copies of "El Aposento Alto" — the Spanish version of “The Upper Room” daily devotional guide — to other passengers.

“We had been using ‘The Upper Room’ every day during Lauds, and we loved it. Then in 2012, the Spanish version became available in Honduras. We travel on buses all the time, and there are vendors who come on board to sell food or give a long spiel and sell some odd natural medicine. And we were like, you know what? We can do that with ‘The Upper Room.’ We kind of joked about it for a while, and then I said, ‘Let’s do it.’

“We ordered 10 copies, and I sold them around town. Then we ordered 40 copies and I sold them on the bus. I’m kind of timid, so it wasn’t easy, but they sold themselves,” she said.

“I would just stand up, talk about the booklet, saying it’s got people from all over the world who share their experience with God. I’d read a meditation and say a couple words, then pass them out for people to look at. If they want them, they can buy them. And they did. We started changing buses more often than necessary so we could sell more. Before the pandemic hit and we quit traveling, we were selling 100 copies of each issue.”

Alegría and Confianza regularly left their monastery in the woods, what they came to call the Motherhouse, once a week in order to work at the public clinic in Limón. Alegría saw patients while Confianza worked in the pharmacy.

It was a long walk, more than two hours each way in the tropical heat, so they usually hitched rides. Alegría said people would chide them about the danger.

“They told us not to hitch a ride from someone we didn’t know,” she said, “but how will we know anyone if we don’t accept a ride with them?

“So we met a lot of people by catching rides. I’d start a story such that I’m just at the most interesting part when they’re going to turn off, so they’d decide they would take us all the way.”

Confianza had initially agreed to accompany Alegría for one year. That became two. Eventually, she knew she was in it for the long haul. Both sisters moved through a process of becoming postulants, then novices, and then taking simple vows and finally permanent vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As part of that process, they gave away all their worldly belongings, including Alegría’s retirement savings. Which meant total dependence on God, as well as on supporters in the local community and back in the U.S.

First United Methodist Church in Hermiston, Oregon, where Confianza was confirmed and still has her membership, channels donations to them in Honduras. The United Methodist Church of Boyceville, Wisconsin, where Alegría grew up, contributes regularly to the monastery.

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Most of the money the sisters raise goes to the clinic. They bought a motorcycle for the clinic’s outreach worker. They installed solar panels on the roof and helped equip a lab inside. Before that, patients had to ride the bus to another town to get a blood test.

“We’ve often made decisions about money that seemed imprudent, like deciding we’re going to spend all the money in the bank account on medicines for the health clinic. That means there’s not enough money to live on this month. But if that’s what we're called to do, it’s really exciting. It’s like, let’s do it. Let’s see how God’s going to make this work,” Confianza said.

The sisters have also developed friendships with nearby Methodists, including pastors of the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas, which came to Honduras in the 19th century, and United Methodists, who came to Honduras in the 1990s. An MCCA pastor officiated Alegría’s vows of perpetual profession as a nun. A United Methodist district superintendent did the same for Confianza.

The women were invited to the Honduras United Methodist annual conference one year, where Alegría introduced herself and Confianza as part of a United Methodist monastic order. She says Bishop Elias Galvan, who supervised that conference session, set them straight afterward, telling them there was no such thing.

That they don’t fit into any existing category of religious organization doesn’t bother the two women. They’ve grown accustomed to the head-scratching that usually comes after they tell someone they are a “Methodist-Quaker monastery.”

“Sometimes I use the word ‘fusion’ to describe the monastery,” said Confianza. “We follow typical Catholic monastic practices like taking vows and reading the Psalms several times a day. We’re Methodists because we sing a lot. We’re Quakers because we see God in everyone. We’ve even used some Buddhist practices to help us pray. And because we’re Protestants, even though we’re contemplative nuns, we do service in the community. We can’t just hide out on a hill and pray.”

Five years after their founding, the sisters decided to open their contemplative world to visitors. In the years since, they’ve welcomed sojourners from around the world who came to experience monastic life in a poor country. The visitors have stayed for a few weeks or a few months. A few came back for a repeat visit. Although some considered it, none has ever committed to permanently joining the monastery, which Confianza said isn’t a concern.

“We’ve come to understand that our job is to make available and invite. Sure, it would be nice for others to join us. But our success doesn’t have to do with numbers. It has to do with whether we’re listening to and following God,” she said.

Visitors stopped coming when COVID arrived. So did Alegría’s work in the clinic. Because age was seen as a risk factor for acquiring the virus, the Honduran government prohibited health workers over 60 from working in public clinics. A delegation of local officials came to the Motherhouse to reluctantly inform Alegría, then over 70, that she could no longer practice medicine in the clinic.

Yet the pandemic wasn’t the most serious health issue the monastery faced. For several years, Sister Alegría had been tiring easily. As her condition worsened, a cardiologist told her she’d developed a form of heart disease that would only get worse. And it did. By 2022, her mobility seriously impaired, the nuns made the decision to leave the Motherhouse and move into Limón. The mayor sent his car to pick them up, and the community found them a simple house.

Living in Limón is dramatically different than life at the Motherhouse. There’s noise, the smell of neighbors cooking, and friendly visitors. There’s electricity, though they often leave it off. Sister Alegría is confined to her bed, though once or twice a week she spends a few minutes in a hammock on the porch. Sister Confianza cares for her, and if she has to leave for more than an hour, finds someone else to provide care.

The women say they are prepared for whatever comes. Alegría may recover, but she admits that’s unlikely. A carpenter friend, Mateo Bodden, has agreed to build her coffin. The United Methodist pastor in La Ceibita, Orlin Ochoa, will preach at her funeral. She has picked several Scripture passages to read. The women have transferred the Motherhouse property to Confianza.

Last year, Confianza finally changed her name on her U.S. passport to what she’s been using for the past 15 years. Her Honduran paperwork is in process.

Almost two decades after she got off the bus from Oregon, Confianza isn’t worried about the future. The name she chose — Confianza del Señor — translates as “trust in the Lord.” So she believes her life of prayer will go on.

Confianza regularly returns to the mountains to visit the Motherhouse, now being rebuilt. The old wooden house, ravaged by termites, has been torn down and workers are finishing a more permanent structure made of adobe. It will have six bunk beds.

Confianza will soon begin an online course in permaculture from the University of Oregon, and dreams of continuing to steward the natural environment surrounding the Motherhouse. Confianza doesn’t know if she’ll be able to move back full time, since living alone in the mountains is probably not safe. Having another nun or even a series of long-term sojourners would give her company. She doesn’t know what will happen, but like her name suggests, she trusts in God that it will be OK.

One recent morning, Sister Confianza hiked to the Motherhouse in the predawn darkness, sitting down alone on the prayer bench as the first bits of sunlight filtered through the trees. She read from the Bible and then sang a hymn in Spanish that the two sisters wrote, adapted from the Psalms:

What joy I feel when they say, let us go to the temple of the Lord.

Only one thing I have asked of you Lord, to be always in your house, to adore you,

And to contemplate your beauty all the days of my life.

Jeffrey is a photojournalist and founder of Life on Earth Pictures. He lives in Oregon.

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