This month in Honduras we have been working with teenage
boys from a place called Sector F. Sector F is the third most dangerous
neighborhood in Honduras. The majority of our time however has been spent just
outside of the city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras on a farm that has only been lived
in for the past 8 months.
The day we arrived in
Tegucigalpa we met our contact Tony at the bus station. He gave a couple of us
the opportunity to go with him that day to the neighborhood he has been working
in. The neighborhood is known here as Sector F. The residents of Sector F were
refugees from a destructive hurricane that hit Honduras a few years ago. The refugees were dropped
off in Sector F and they have been there ever since. The people who live in
Sector F have to carry their water in buckets from the river up the mountain to
their homes. There is a lot of violence in Sector F and as Tony shared with us
not many people have hope for the people who live there; especially the younger
generation.
numb themselves from feeling hungry and to escape their problems. One of these
boys is Christopher ,he is 16 years old, and he has been struggling with an
addiction to paint thinner for a three years now. For three years he has sniffed paint thinner for up to six hours a day almost every day.
rock bottom. He was high on paint thinner when Tony found him buried in a
mountain of trash in his backyard. One of the inspirational things about Tony
is he always gives the boys a choice in everything, so Tony gave Christopher a
choice to stay in Sector F sniffing paint thinner, or to come spend a month on
the farm with us; the rule was he had to be completely clean and sober the
entire month. Christopher chose to stay
at the farm clean and sober for one month.
father and his mother is never around. Christopher has a grandmother who loves
him a lot but she isn’t around a lot either since she has to work recycling trash.
chances to give up and declare Christopher as a hopeless case. Instead he keeps
fighting for him. Yet at the same time he tells him that when he doesn’t want a
friendship with Tony anymore he just has to say he is out and Tony will honor
that choice and walk away.
Christopher came to spend the month with us here on the
farm. The seventh day is the hardest day for withdraw and we were all aware how
important and monumental that day would be. God knew that the seventh day would
hold a transformation bigger than anything we anticipated.
To be continued…
