After seven hours of driving, one ice cream sandwich, a big bottle of Salva Cola, and two trips to the bathroom, I arrived at Zion’s Gate on Saturday. Our whole squad is hunkered down alongside a mountainside road with eighteen wheelers whizzing past so loud, you can hardly hear your own breathing. The nights get cold. Any warm temperatures are tempered by a constant mountain breeze that cools the air. I knew my fleece hoodie would come in handy somewhere along the way.
All forty three of us are encamped on a twenty acre property just outside Tegucigalpa, the world’s murder capital. The ministry, Zion’s Gate, serves street kids from some of the toughest neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa. The kids have survived difficult circumstances full of gangs and paint thinner and absentee parents. It’s the desire for change or just the promise of free satellite TV that draws them here, but they’re present and that’s the important part. Transformation is a process. The boys are a bit unruly and they like to ride their bikes indoors, speeding past all our computers as close as humanly possible. Take a normal North American boy, feed him five Red Bulls and you probably have a close approximation of one of these kids. They have boundless energy with a dash of boyish violence. Yesterday, one of them invaded the shower while I was getting dressed. I guess you get used to it. They’re starved for attention.
So far things have been laid back. As in El Salvador, nothing happens on time. You have to hold to the schedule loosely. We’ve been doing manual labor around the property. Next week we’ll start moving about, exploring different areas of the city and working in some of the poorer areas. Our goal is to infect these areas like a plague, bringing living hope to people who are probably just curious to see what forty Americans are doing there.
