Monday, June 13, 2011

Week 1 - Honduras


Wow! It's only been a week! It feels like it's been a lifetime.  To start out this trip our first flight was late and the second one was early so we missed it. After spending one night in a shady hotel we ended up staying with an awesome family that none of us had ever even met before.  We enjoyed two days of fellowship with a group from an orphanage in Haiti and people from the church the family attended.  God really blessed us with that time. We went from stuck in a shady hotel to free steak and potatoes! God is faithful!
                After one night in San Pedro Sula we finally arrived in Tegucigalpa about 3pm Wednesday and it was GREAT to see everyone again.  The people here feel like family to me.  We are staying in a home with another great family and the work we are doing preparing for the rest of the team's arrival seems to be coming along well. 
                Friday we spent most of the day at the city dump where tons of people live. The dump is on a plateau and when the trucks come up to dump more trash the crowds of people run after them.  You smell the dump long before you see it.  It's where dogs and kids run around looking for the same thing -food. If you can imagine it's an entire mountain of trash with little camps where the people live.  There are hundreds and hundreds of vultures filling the sky.  There was one little boy who threw himself onto his pile of cardboard just as if it was his couch and hundreds of thousands of flies came out of the pile, enough to make a cloud. All of the clothes the kids wore were so dirty they were hard and nobody had anything on that fit. One tiny little girl had one huge half torn boot for one shoe and her toes had poked through the end of her other shoe. There was also a mom sitting with her two little kids. She had found some old half eaten fruit and was trying to  get her baby to eat it.  We had brought pancakes with us and I have never been so happy to give someone a pancake before. Then while we were standing with a group just talking with them about Jesus a little boy came up and leaned against me, I asked him how old he was (he only looked about 8) and he said "12.". I asked how long he had lived there and he said "Years" and I asked if he had a family and he said "No."  It's hard to walk away from that.  Then as I was sitting down in the trash talking with some kids, a little girl came and sat next to me. She was only 8, she looked like she was 5 and you could tell she had seen and been through more in her life already than anyone should ever have to go through.  My friend, Ashlyn, and I started talking to her and told her she was beautiful. When we said that, she looked up at us and just stared at us, as if to say "how can you think I am worth anything?" and we told her maybe she didn't think so but that we did and we told her about Jesus and how much he loved her and even though it didn't seem like it with how her life was now that she was a daughter of The King. Then she looked back up at us and her eyes were full of tears and she didn't say anything, she just scooted a little closer to me and stared at the dirt, looking up at me every once in a while as if to ask "Is that really true? There is a King that loves me?"  Then it was time to go. I wished anything I could have stayed with those kids.  After you realize what all they have been through the smell, dirt, flies and heat don't seem to matter at all.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, I cried reading this. Honduras, here we come.

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  2. You are doing a beautiful thing - Jesus is reaching out to that little girl through you - what a blessing.

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