It’s 8 o’clock at night. Under most circumstances this would be a great time to wrap up the ministry and to call it a day. However, we don’t operate under most circumstances. Instead of wrapping up our day every Wednesday and Friday night we are just now beginning our ministry. Around 8pm we meet in one of the large parking lots of the Baptist Tabernacle Church. We meet with about 150 people from the church to pray for the evening. The coffee/hot chocolate containers are split up among the truck, along with trays of bread or boxes of pizza and then we pack in the back of a pick up trucks and head out.
We drive for 10 minutes. After about 5 minutes of driving the environment shifts. The streets are cluttered with vendors and garbage and people. In the pit of my stomach I can feel it; the hopelessness, the frustration, the depression, the oppression, the injustice, and most of all the pain. As we begin to reach our destination you can see people sitting in the streets, sleeping in the streets, clutching a grocery bag with all their belongings, starring into the abyss with sadness, hunger and pain in their eyes.
As we park the car, the people have already started to gather on the sidewalk. My heart breaks, there, standing right infront of me are 15 or so children lined up. They are adorable, young, dirty, and full of joy; aside from the 10 year old who is high. After we jump out of the car we have a small service for the children: sing songs, tell a story and pray. While we were talking to the children other team members were pouring the hot chocolate into Styrofoam cups and putting the bread onto trays. When we are done talking we begin to pass out the hot chocolate and two pieces of bread to the children. These aren’t just slices of bread, but sweet bread like you might buy at a bakery; the kind that actually fill your stomach. The children are the priority. Once they have received their portions then we begin to pass food out to the adults. Just like we had a small service for the children, other people have a small service with the adults. When we are passing bread out to the adults we are talking with them, intentionally engaging them in conversation (as best we can with limited spanish), and asking to pray with them.
Each time we have gone my heart aches and each time my heart breaks again. The children, they didn’t ask for this, they didn’t have the choice, they didn’t ask for this. Many of the children don’t go to school, they help their parents sell stuff to make money. Some of the children, we learned, don’t even have parents: they are either orphans or they have run away from abusive homes.
On the street corner that we visit there are about 50 people that we visit and talk with. There are at least 4 other teams that go to different areas in the down town area. While we only go on Wednesday and Fridays; the church also goes on Mondays. It kills that they are so surprised that we want to talk with them, that we will sit down next to them; that they believe they are burdens, nothing to the world, unworth a persons time, just a little charity project. But they are so much more, they are people, they are living, breathing, people, who have parents, relatives, children, and problems just like the rest of us; they just don’t have a roof over their head to go home to at the end of the day.
In case my heart wasn’t broken enough, on the way home we take some back roads, and saw the prostitutes. Never have I been in an area like this and actually saw them walking around. Women who either think so little of their self worth that they can justify selling it for money; women who don’t know how else to provide for their families; men who are cross dressing and selling themselves for sex as well.
As we pull up to the house around 10, I can hardly believe the night. Every Wednesday and Friday……
