Retrospect -God is the Main Character

We are visiting the States presently and have looked back at our first 3 months. We are simply stunned at how much God has truly done. The accomplishments are breath taking. We can hardly believe this has all really happened. We have seen substantial transformation in so many different areas. We are in the middle of God’s work and it is exciting. He is bringing together an amazing team of churches, non-profits, and individuals that will work to see this garbage dump completely transformed. We are happy to play a large part.

We are drawn to the idea of us being the heroes. It sounds great to say, “Look at all we have accomplished in 3 short months.” Sure we always begin with a ‘thank God’ but deep down inside, we take credit for the work. Yet as we have looked closer, we have come to an astounding conclusion – we are not the main character in this drama.

A closer inspection will show how wrong we really are to think we were the heroes. You see, we have not been the main characters. Neither has Jeony been the main character. Nor churches, nor non-profits, nor the families living and working in the garbage dump. If we look really close, we can clearly see that God has been the main character of Project Transformation.

Who loved the families living and working in the garbage dump? Who decided to do something about this problem? Who sent Pastor Jeony and his family? Who sent the Diaz family? Who gave us the vision of a transformed community? Who has been providing for us? Who has worked miracle after miracle on our behalf? This whole thing was God’s idea. We are just minor character. Valuable, important, vital, minor characters, but minor characters nonetheless. This perspective changes the way we look at our role. The main character of this story has always been and will always be God. It’s His plan. His goals, and His vision. He is just using us to accomplish His will. And that is just fine by us. For His name and His renown.

God is the main character. That is great news because all the success hinges on Him. He will not let us down because his heart breaks for the poor.

God is the main character, but he is not the only character. God has chosen to work through humans. God works through vessels. God looks and searches for people to work through and most of the time he comes up empty.

Not this time. Not when it comes to transforming this garbage dump with the power of His love. Project Transformation has stepped up to the plate. Here we are, God. Use us.

We are really looking forward to the next chapter. God has some great stuff up his sleeve.

Exposure

I have been sick the last few days from eating at the garbage dump with some of the children. I must have been exposed to bacteria that have invaded my intestines. Although I am feeling horrible now (especially since I have to travel14 hours tomorrow), I understood the cost in working in this type of environment. I am exposing myself to all sorts of germs, viruses, and bacteria which explains my recent bouts of sickness since moving here. All this exposure is eventually going to catch up with me. Although I am not saying one is above the other in the nature vs nurture argument, I strongly believe I am influenced and shaped by what I am exposed to. I am product of what I have been exposed to. This truth works for both good and bad.

I wonder about these hundreds of children who are exposed to all sorts of evil at the garbage dump. How is that evil affecting them? The children and young adults of who live and work in the garbage dump are exposed to things that no one should ever see. The other day I went up and saw a dead body. Without being to graphic, the person had been killed by both a machete and gun. All the kids I knew were surrounding the body. Afterwards they told me about the body as if it was the norm, with no sense of tragedy. This is their world. This is what they see all the time. But this is also the world God loves so much he sent his Son to save. Somehow, we have to get more of the children out of the garbage dump. That exposure is vexing their souls. We need to expose them to God’s love and to so many of the positive this life has to offer.

The good news is that slowly but surely this is happening. So far we have convinced 6 kids who usually work in the garbage dump, to play on a soccer team 3 afternoons a week. Those are two days they will not be exposed to evil but be surrounded by a team that encourages and challenged them. This is great news but we have so many more left.

The Need for Nursery

This week, I saw some things that I have had trouble getting out of my head. Since I spent so much time in the garbage dump, I have noticed things I had not notice when I would come up twice a year. One of the issues that stands out is the surprising number of small children who just hang out up in the garbage dump. These are newborn babies to about 4 years old. They are not old enough to work but they don’t really have any place to go. The parents just take them up to the garbage dump with them.

Last week I met David, a 3 year old boy who was with his mom and dad. Little David was sitting in a old sombrero and covered in dirt. He had young parents who were collecting paper products. They would come and check in with David every 10 to 15 minutes. Next to David was another family babysitting a 6 month old baby. It was a baby girl named Juliet. Her mother is 16 year old Carla, a girl who used to come to AFE but is no longer attending. Carla’s Grandmother is in her 30’s and was watching the 6 month old baby full time. Juliet was covered in black soot from all the smoke in the air. I asked her why she doesn’t bring her to our nursery but the baby is still breast feeding. The same is true of two other babies I met. Then I asked if once the baby had been weaned, if she would bring her to the nursery but she did not give me an answer.

Although Washington Cathedral has provided for a nursery, we still do not have the staff to run the nursery. We need the funds to pay a salary and the right worker. Then we need to persuade some of the mothers of the value of keeping their children in a safe and sanitary location. Many of the mothers do not understand why they would need to take their babies to a nursery if they could just stay with them. Please keep these issues in your prayers as we seek the right solution.

Mother's Day in the Garbage Dump

Thanks to Washington Cathedral, Orphan Outreach, and Project Transformation we were able to have a Mother’s Day celebration where we honored over 200 mothers who work in the garbage dump. It was nothing short of a miracle.

All week long, I went up to the garbage dump to invite the mother’s and let them know all the details of the celebration. Although I invited mother’s everyday, it was hard to guess how many would show up. Friday morning, we rented a bus that I took into the garbage dump to bring the woman to the school. My jaw dropped when I saw over 200 women ready to get on the bus. We squished in all the women with their small children, and then headed down to the soccer field in front of the school. We had beautiful set up for the mothers where they could sit in the shade during the children’s presentation and then eat peacefully. The mother’s ate among friends while Jeony encouraged them to keep their heads up. They were also given vouchers to pick up some clothes.

Our main agenda was to share God’s love with these mothers so that they felt honored. But we did have another agenda. Most of these mother’s do not have their children in a school but have them work alongside them. Our prayer was to use this event to showcase the children’s progress so that the mother’s would be inspired to allow their children to come to school. So far I have spoken with several mothers who plan on registering their children this week. We are so excited. I have come to realize the importance of reaching the future generation of garbage workers before their identity becomes engrained with the garbage dump culture.

A typical Honduras tradition for Mother’s Day is to present mothers with a basket that has the essentials for the home such as a rice, beans, eggs, soap, etc. These baskets cost about $15 and are nothing but a dream to the mother’s who work in the garbage dump. It would take them about 15 days to save up to buy one but that would mean not eating anything for the family during those 15 days. Clearly impossible. Yet, thanks to all you readers, we were able to sponsor 48 baskets! During the celebration 48 families received the gift of a lifetime. I wish you could have seen the faces of the mothers who would cry with joy over their baskets. It was beautiful.

Please pray for these mothers who each represent a family working and living in the garbage dump. Also pray that we could use the momentum of this amazing event to continue towards transformation.

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.

Family Reunion

I have some great news. There is a child that could be the poster child of our project. His story captures the tragic nature of this garbage dump and of the children forced to work there. His name is Ariel. He has an older brother named Sergio who no longer at our school. He has a sister named Brenda as well. In February, all three were attending the school and were making such great advances. The change was very clear and visible. Yet once the oldest brother left, the other two seemed less happy at the school. This makes sense because they probably both looked up to their brother, and once he left, they thought maybe that was the cool thing to do. Last month both Brenda and Ariel left as well. This was really hard on me because I had invested so much into Ariel.

On my visits to the garbage dump, I always look for our students. I found Brenda. We talked for a long time and with Jesse’s help, we were able to convince her to come back. She has been back at our school for two weeks. But Ariel was still nowhere to be found. Yet this week, to my surprise, Ariel showed up for school with a big smile on his face. I don’t know why he came back or who talked to him, but I am so glad he is back.

We have worked hard to make sure the students finish their education and escape from the garbage dump. Of the 170 students at AFE, about half still work in the garbage dump in the afternoons and on weekends. The others have been convinced to focus on school or to find other jobs. Ariel and Brenda are third generation garbage workers meaning their grandparents and parents both worked in the garbage dump. It is all they know. But what I know is that God has incredible and amazing plans for their lives and our goal is to help them reach those plans.

Updates – I saw Antonio at the vocational school he is at. Wow, God has really changed this young man’s life. He is a role model and leader at his school. He has dreams of returning and helping with street kids once he returns. He wants to help out the kids who never got a chance like him. Incredible.

The Gospel

Warning: The following is very sad story

Two Sunday’s ago I had the privilege of speaking at Amor y Vida, where many people who work and live in the garbage dump attend. I gave a simple message about the plot of all the stories in the Bible from Ephesians – “I was dead, but God gave me life.” I explained how God wants to bring that story into being in our lives, our families, and our futures. With all modest, it was a great message with a great response afterwards where many wanted to start following Jesus. In the crowd was a certain family going through tremendous difficulty in their lives. They heard my presentation of the gospel through words and shook my hands afterwards. I had so many people wanting to talk to me I just quickly went by them, not realizing they wanted to talk to me. I went home happy after sharing the gospel with a bunch of people. That family also went home but sad because the mother was out of options.

Let me explain. He husband had left 3 months ago to the states with another woman. She was alone with a year and half old daughter and Samir, an 8 year old boy who is in the 3rd grade at AFE. The mother has tried so hard to provide for her family. It is hard to find a job when there is no one to watch your little baby. She wakes up early and makes tortillas and other food to sell on the street with her son. She allows him to go to school in the morning and then afterwards he helps her sell. She does not want to go the garbage dump to work. That Sunday night was especially hard because her family had not eaten since their last meal at AFE (Friday at noon) and would not eat until the next day because they had no more food. That was what she would have told me if I had not simply shook her had, said ‘God Bless You’ and gone on to the next person.

I do not know what it feels like to have to respond to a son who tells me, “Daddy, I’m hungry” when I do not have any way to feed him. I don’t know what it feels like to be out of options. I don’t know what ‘desperate’ means. This mother does. And on Sunday night she reacted in a horrible way when her son asked for some food. She beat him. The boy you see on the right hand side had a black eye and dark contusions covering his back. The mother wept and wept afterwards. She apologized to him and us. I am not condoning her actions, simply saying that poverty creates such tragedies.

After hearing about these events, we decided to present the Gospel again the following Sunday, but with actions. Project Transformation bought some grocery supplies for the family to help them during this time. We found a donation of clothes for her which she can sell along with her food to make an income. We are also looking into finding her a job as a nanny. She has committed to never strike her children again and to contact us if she is in that situation again.

Almost all my studies have taught me the importance of sharing the good news with deeds and not just words, but this last week that truth became so much more clear in my life. It is very hard to hear the good news when your children are hungry and you don’t have any way to feed them. We want to commit ourselves to always present the whole Gospel with both word and deed. That is the gospel that produces transformation. Please keep this family in prayer.

1 John 3:17-18 If anyone has material possessions and sees someone in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.