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I visited Honduras in 1993 to explore the possibility of serving there as some kind of medical missionary. Many months before this trip, I and several other police officers lost our jobs to downsizing. I never thought a cop could loose their job to a layoff, but it happened and so it was time to look for something new. I was tired of working nights, weekends and holidays anyway. I had some nursing and paramedical training anyway and I was a 30-something single guy, so why not venture out into the mission field and see what I could do to help.

To make a long story short, when I was in Honduras, I personally saw the most horrific examples of extreme poverty you could never imagine was possible.

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Buzzards and children compete for scraps at the Tegucigalpa, Honduras, landfill. Boys scavenge for anything they can eat or sell. Northbound freight trains through Mexico are crowded with Hondurans fleeing poverty and in search of work or a relative in the U.S

Photo by the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner . Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times

Here we have kids competing against birds for whatever can be pulled from the trash and eaten. Many of these kids were left behind in Honduras when their parents traveled 1500 miles north to hopefully find a way into the USA where they believe a better life awaits them. The kids have no one to care for them. They live and sleep on the streets.

When I was a kid, I was a member of the Boy Scouts of America. We had a camping trip planned and we all got together at the school about 6:00 AM. We piled in our gear and off we went to a Boy Scout Camp about an hour away. As soon as our tents were pitched, the rain came down. We literally spent the weekend in our little pup tents, listening to the rain come down. The camp ground was drenched in rain and mud. There was zero chance of building a fire and cooking anything. It was basically a miserable weekend. Think for a moment about the worst possible experience you have had and that might come close to what daily life is in Honduras for the majority of the population.

In your mind, trade places for a moment with a typical person in Honduras. It would go something like this:

  • You live in a shack. This is the best way to describe the 10’ x 10’ shelter this family calls a home. Compare it to living in an old broken down shed someone might have in their back yard to store the lawn mower and garden tools in. It has a dirt floor, if this family is lucky, they may have a floor made of scrap pieces of plywood. The roof leaks when it rains. There is no electricity or plumbing. There are no glass windows, only scraps of wood they try to cover the holes (windows) with. In the winter, it get really cold in there.
  • The “bathroom” is away from the shack. It is nothing more than a hole in the ground with a seat above it.
  • In the morning, you will not have a hot shower. There are no showers, nor hot water. The only water supply might be a river, stream or pond that could be a mile or two away and the chances are the water is not safe to drink, but the people have no choice. They drink it anyway and hope the diarrhea will not be too bad when it strikes.
  • You will not brush your teeth, since you can not afford a toothbrush or toothpaste. You may have gone your entire life without ever touching a toothbrush.
  • Your wardrobe consists of the same shirt and pants you wore yesterday and the day before and the day before. They are clean because you had them on last night when you showered by pouring water over yourself and then scrubbing up with some nasty bar soap that dries up your skin, but cleans your cloths.
  • If you are the father of the house, perhaps you’ll go off to work in the banana plantation where you will work all day in the hot sun harvesting bananas. Your 12 hours of work will yield $1.50 in earnings. A pound of beans and a pound rice will exceed your earnings for the day, so you’ll have to make a choice, you can’t have both.
  • If you are the mother of the family, you’ll go off to the factory to make clothing for the USA and Europe. You’ll leave your 8 year old son or daughter in charge of the kids till you get back. You’ll work for 12 hours with a short break for lunch of tortillas and not much else. The fabric you work with is coated with pesticides so the bugs wont eat the fabric. The owners of the factory care not that it will also make you sick and you are always feeling a bit run down.
  • You’ll get home from work and dinner will be rice or beans and maybe an egg or two you might have bought on the way home. You’ll never be able to afford to buy a dozen eggs and it wouldn’t matter because you’ll never be able to own a refrigerator to keep the eggs in.
  • At the dinner table there will not be any talk about how the kids did in school today, because the kids didn’t go to school. You and your spouse can’t afford to send your kids to school, so the kids will be the next generation of adults that can’t read or write or do basic math. This means they will not have a very bright future.
  • Dinner will end quickly, because the sun is going down and you have no electricity and a candle is too expensive to light up every night, candles are for special times.
  • Mom or the oldest daughter will have to go down to the pond and bring home a couple gallons of water before day officially ends.
  • This will be your daily routine for as many as 6 days a week.
  • On Sunday, you won’t go to the park to have a picnic, you won’t go to the movies or go shopping for new cloths. You won’t sit back and watch a football game on TV because you’ll never be able to buy a TV. You wish you could have a TV, but it won’t work without electricity anyway. You wished you had electricity, because that would power the TV that could deliver government produced, distance learning educational programming so your children could get the education they currently can’t have and that would give them the opportunity to have a better life than you have.
  • This will be your life till the day it ends.

This is a typical picture of a family in Honduras. Honduras is rarely spoken of on the news. Most people in the USA don’t even know where it is on the map. The majority of the population lives in extreme poverty. For these people, life is hard and a hard life is all they have ever known.

These hard working, friendly people are not asking for a hand out, they need a jump start to get out of poverty and into prosperity. They must rise above the level of extreme poverty before they can become self sufficient. Many of the women and young girls know how to produce clothing with industrial sewing machines. They will always have to rely on an employer for a job, because the likelihood of personally owning a sewing machine and having their own sewing business is near zero.

Our goals are simple:

  • We will bring safe water where there is none
  • We will provide solar electricity so children can read after dark
  • We will assist in constructing homes. No one should have to live in a shack
  • We will train local people as midwives and basic healthcare providers
  • We will restore human dignity.
  • We will be transparent and accountable to our partners and supporters
  • We will do our part to end extreme poverty by 2015, the goal of the United Nations Millennium Project

 

We are not a Christian relief agency, although we are Christians
We are not a Buddhist relief agency, although we are Buddhists
We are not a Jewish relief agency, although we are Jewish
We are all things to all people.