The Miracle of Pollito

If anyone were a poster child for project transformation, it would be Pollito. You might recognize him from his picture – four and a half feet of dusty clothes worn too big, and a grimy smile that spreads from ear to ear. I had heard much about him before I first saw him. He is well known among the garbage sorters as the little boy raised in the trash. His mom is a drug addict and he has been in the garbage every day without fail since he was one year old. Now that he is eight, there has never been a harder worker. The older guys call him “Pollito,” which means “little chicken,” because they think of him as sort of a pet. You can see he takes pride in being allowed to hang around them. I suspect no one gives him attention “at home” – wherever that is.

How long, little Pollito, will you grow up in garbage? Will you ever learn to play instead of lift heavy bags twice your size? For seven years, since AFE began, Pollito has been the subject of our hopes and prayers. Every time we encounter him, he promises to come to school the next day. But for seven years, the next day found him in the trash once more. Until last week.
On Monday, and mouths dropped open when Pollito and his little sister walked through AFE’s doors, clean and ready to learn. They were not alone. Their mother, sober for the first time, brought them and enrolled them in classes immediately. Since that day, Pollito and his sister have not missed one class, have arrived promptly every day, and even came to church on Sunday! There is no other explanation than God’s timing, and we can do nothing but thank God for this miracle.

We thank God…but we still fervently pray for Pollito and his family. While he and his sister are enrolled in AFE and showing good intentions to change, it is still an uphill battle to rescue them from the forces that keep generations in the dump. In fact, Pollito has a particular challenge in education since he has never learned the motor skills to even hold a pencil. He is receiving special tutoring for this, but please continue to keep their family in your prayers. We will keep you updated as to Pollito’s progress!

Graduation 08 - Slideshow

Please keep these students in your prayers.

Josue, Milton, Carlos, Paola

Selena, Jackson, Maholy, Gerson, Edwin, Douglas

Graduation 08

On December 5, 2008 we had a graduation at AFE. Four students finished kindergarten and are moving into first grade. Six students finished elementary school and are moving into middle school. It was the first graduation for AFE I had attended. I was moved by the students who have overcome so many crippling obstacles to reach this moment. Some of the graduates live in the worst conditions imaginable. Others are dealing with serious family problems and abuse. Others have been abandoned by their parents and are being raised by aunts and grandparents. Others have had to work every afternoon in the garbage dump afterschool to provide food for their family. Yet these students have graduated and there were many people congratulating them.

In Honduras, the graduation is dedicated to a person and named after them. The graduation is usually addressed to some who gave a large donation or passed away or did something special for the school. Our graduation was named after Jeki Suge Roca. She is actually a made up person. Instead she is the acronym of all the teachers we have on staff at AFE. This graduation was dedicated to our teachers because for many years they have done all the hard work at AFE. I feel honored to work next to these heroes. For many years they donated all their time to teach our students. They paid for all their material and transportation. This year, we have been able to give them an ‘offering’ for their work. They tremendously gifted and love all our students as if they were their own. These teachers serve as proof that God has the garbage dump in his plans because he assembled an all-star staff of teachers to love and teach these students.

Shelter

I walked into the small, cardboard tent , which was created to be a refugee shelter, and pondered: how could this serve as better housing for anyone? In an hour I would find out.


We drove up to the ¨Buen Samiritano¨ community, ironically named. Rey had heard the people in the community called “invaders” because they divided up land that did not belong to them. Some of the families of AFE live in that community, some garbage workers, and some who are just desperately poor.

A man cradling a baby came up to our car. “Please give me money for a doctor, my baby is sick.” And indeed she was…with bites all over her legs, sucking feverishly on a bottle, and crying angrily into my eyes.


Of course she was sick. She lived in one of the crowded “shelters” that dotted the land. A couple of sticks precariously held up garbage bags flapping in the wind. They were the size of the closet I once had in the states. Usually around six people lived in them and received little shelter from the wind and rain which entered as it wished.


The cardboard refugee house, airtight with a tarp covering it´s solid roof, was definitely a better option for these people. Thank you, Aid Matrix, for providing the shelters for thirty families. The need is overwhelming in Honduras - over 100 people lined up for the thirty shelters - but God is at work, moving in the hearts of people like you and me.

“ "A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man's condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I'll pay you on my way back.' (Luke 10:33-25, The Message)

A Transformation of the Heart - By Kelly Glenn

Can you remember the last thing that you worried about? Are you worried about anything right now?

I’ve never been a big worrier in life. When I face stress or struggles, I’ve gotten really good at relying on God to take care of them. So far, that’s worked well for me. But recently, I’ve had a number of experiences and conversations that have shaken up ideas about God that I’d had since I was a child, and made me wonder if maybe reading the Bible from inside a safe, suburban home growing up had caused me to misunderstand a few things. Let me explain.

When I wanted to help the poor, I would go to feed the homeless, but I would make it all about me. I would go to bed feeling good about having volunteered and thinking about how much God would bless me for it. I would not lose sleep worrying about where the homeless people I had met would lay their heads that night.

Why was I so sure that God would take care of my every want, need, or desire, when I didn’t give a thought to how he took care of my homeless neighbors across town?

Somehow, I grew more comfortable with the image of God as one who would bless me for doing good works than one who desperately cared about the poor and wants us to do the same.

When I got into my first choice college, when I could afford to go to physical therapy for my knee because we had health insurance, I assumed it was God’s blessings that had allowed me do those things, as if he was rewarding me for being a faithful follower to Him. There’s just one thing wrong with this view: the unstated assumption. The assumption was that those who hadn’t been blessed like I was must not have deserved it. Most people would never admit this out loud, but it seems that the way we live confirms that we think we are more deserving than other “less fortunate” people.

It is true that God cares for me, but what about the refugees of Darfur, the starving in Haiti, or the struggling inner city student in Detroit? I have to think that God has an even greater hand of protection over them, yet their struggles continue. Does this mean that God is taking better care of me than of them? I beg to differ. Maybe I have been taking too much for granted, writing it off as God blessing me for being such a great person, when really it’s only because I’ve been fortunate enough to be born on the right side of certain political, economic, and social structures. I don’t deserve that, it’s just the way it’s happened. So we must realize that God wants to bless the struggling, oppressed people of the world as much as he wants to bless us, and if something is prohibiting them from drinking safe water or working under decent conditions, it’s probably because of our greed, even unknowingly.

I fear that we have become very complacent as a culture. We justify our comfortable lifestyles unnecessary spending by quoting verses that say that God loves us and wants the best for us. But chances are, those verses were not written to the “salaried and caloried” part of the world, as one writer put it, but to people who were poor, abused, and oppressed. It is true that I work hard and God wants me to take time for myself. But how much harder do the hundreds of scavengers in the dump work every day, looking for food? Why did I always put my needs before theirs?

It makes me sad when I realize that even though I do make a point of giving to the less fortunate, I still live at a level that is above 95% of the world. I am not, as Michael Miller put it, “giving until it hurts.” As the saying goes, there is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed. And I cannot possibly justify my greedy behavior by saying that God loves me, when there are others out there hurting who God loves just as much. It is only through reading the Bible from their perspective- on the fringes of society- that we will ever begin to wrap our mind around how much God loves and cares for the poor and hurting of the world. Let us strive to understand that, to live it out, and to never forget it.

Preventative Education

As we seek transformation, we see the importance of prevention in this process. Yet we think there must be more than prevention. In the community the AFE kids run in, a downward spiral exists, luring and enticing all of the students into its clutches. It is like a black hole whose center pulls and pulls until all hope evaporates. Most of the people have been in this situation for several generations. It seems they are destined to stay in this context of oppression and poverty. Despite all of their efforts to escape, most have been unsuccessful.

John 1:5 – The light shines through the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

Once God starts moving and shining his light, the end of darkness is inevitable. That is the ultimate reality of the garbage dump and the surrounding communities. God is moving and people are taking notice.

Part of the darkness that is being snuffed out is drugs and alcohol. Today we had a special group of police officers come to teach about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It was a great experience for our children.

However, preventive education is not enough. How many students in your fifth grade class tried drugs and alcohol after graduating from the “DARE” program? That is why Jesus aims at the heart, and we aim at the heart in our work at AFE. Most of the students attend church together faithfully on Sundays, and have great mentors in their teachers who look at their jobs as ministry.

The other day kids ran after Rey, quoting back his message at church: “Jesus is the only drink that can satisfy.” Yes, we work in preventive education here, but deeper than that, we work at heart transplants.

Teaming Tegus

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning
as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” - Romans 8:22

Tegucigalpa’s groans are louder and less subtle than those I have heard in the states. They rise to a crescendo in the streets – the blast of cars, horns, and murmuring crowds in a city teaming with an ever-growing population.

A recent conference on “Child Advocacy[1]” gave numbers to the facts that Rey and I witness every day. Over half of the 7,500,000 people in Honduras are under 20 years old. The average family has five kids and many of them spend their days working to supplement the combined family income of $77 a month.

Poverty, here, is described as not having sufficient resources for the basics: clothes, a balanced diet, school, and safe place to live. Extreme poverty occurs when people do not have enough even to eat and are starving and malnourished. In Honduras, the most recent data (2004) shows that 64.2% live in poverty while 44.6% suffer from extreme poverty. 38.4% of families in Honduras live on less than a $1 a day!

What this means for us is that as we are stopped in traffic young boys come up to our car to ask for handouts. Young girls begin wiping our windshields. Getting kids to leave the dump to come to school is getting harder and harder. And we are down on our knees in prayer every night.
[1] The conference was put on by “Alcanzar – IESH” (the social arm of the Santidad denomination here in Honduras) and Compassion International. It took place on April 25th, 2008.