Today is the day.
Preparing to go into a place that you know next to nothing about isn’t easy. Myself and 10 of my squad-mates have spent the last two days praying for, and trying to plan activities and set up for INFA. This will be our ministry the next four Fridays while we are in Honduras. This afternoon we will be going in for the first time. The only thing is, we don’t actually know what we are walking into.
What we know:
-INFA is a government institution that pulls “street kids” against their will and holds them there in an attempt to keep the streets safe. Kids can be held here anywhere between 1 and 6 months. These are not just kids living on the street, they are kids that have been deemed a threat to Tegucigalpa, the city with the highest murder statistics in the entire world.
-No other group has ever been allowed to enter INFA to teach, entertain or minister to these kids.
-It is mostly, if not all, boys. And they do not want to be there.
What we don’t know:
-How many kids are currently in the program.
-What the building/facilities that we will be working in are like. (Space, size, number of rooms, inside/outside, together or split up)
-Whether or not they know we are coming.
-The ages of the kids we will be working with.
-How long the kids have been in there, or how many times they have been in there.
-Why they were each deemed as a “threat” and pulled off the streets into INFA.
And more.
The more we plan, the more questions we have, the more answers we realize we don’t have.
So how scary is it to walk into a building filled with the roughest kids, from the roughest city in the world with a squad of 40 people looking at you as the point person for the ministry?
I’ll let you know.
