Honduras! So much is happening here! I don’t have photos yet, so I’ll just give you an update of what we have been doing and will be doing this month.
it is really great here in Honduras–Tony and Nidia our hosts are so incredible.
**Tony has gotten involved in this community here called LOS PINOS. It is a really poor, gang filled, drug filled, dangerous area of town. He just made his presence there, being loving to the street kids. I think he started getting involved with them about 5 yrs ago or less and right now he has 5-6 street kids that now live with him and many others that just come to the property to hang out. They still have their problems, but he doesn't care. They are making progress and he is loving them and sharing Jesus with them by loving them and that is what matters. These are the kids we interact with daily. Some are super loving, others are crazy and hyper, others are quiet, others are a little violent. One boy, Fernando, who has some anger issues, just had a bake sale for us on Monday! So freaking adorable! Tony is helping him start a baking business. He is 11 or 12 years old. We were his first paying customers!!:) And I will add that the cookies were AMAZING!!
**Our ministry will be different every week. The property where Tony and Nidia live and where we are staying needs a lot of work. This week in the mornings, we have been doing landscaping and digging a trench for a pipe on the property –right up my ally
–I am kind of in charge of the landscaping part. We are hoping to have a little flower bed in by the time we leave so that it will give a vision for what the rest of the property could look like. It has been fun!
**In the afternoons, some of us have been going with a different pastor to help sort soccer jerseys. His outreach is to kids in poor, drug filled, dangerous communities. He lets them play in the soccer league if they are part of a Bible Study. This is a great way to share Jesus with these people. It is a huge program here in Honduras and in other countries as well. We have been sorting the jerseys to give out to the players. They have a billon-ish jerseys in their church office that a company in the US donated to them.
**Next week we will still be doing some work on the property and we will also be going into the LOS PINOS community. We are going to fix up the mothe’rs house of one of the boys, Herman, that lives with Tony. We are building support beams, painting, and building an outhouse. I am so excited to do this project. Herman has shared a little of his story with us and it is SO amazing what God is in the process of bringing him out of.
**The final week we are here, the plan is to visit people in hospitals and orphanages, but plans could change, so we will see!
**Fridays are pretty awesome here. We go to this place called INFA. INFA is sort of like jail. The police go around in communities and take street kids and bring them here for anywhere from 1-6 months. There are kids there anywhere from 2 months old to teenagers. The government has invited Tony to come in every Friday and hang out with these kids. This past Friday was the first time he was invited to go and we got to go too. We sang, danced, played games, made bracelets, colored, shared Jesus, and just hung out with them all afternoon. It is so sad. Some kids just got picked up by the police and others, their parents turned them in. We had no idea what they were going to be like but they all seemed pretty glad for us to be there. I spent most of my time playing with a 2 yr old boy and holding a 2 month old baby. Also spent a little bit of time trying to break up some fights, sometimes successful, sometimes not.
Well, that is a bit about life in Honduras. Hope to have some pictures next time! Thank-you for your continuous prayer!!
