OnFire
Encouragement Letter
OnFire #224
Hi Folks:
I’m back from our
short-term mission trip to
Here are a few highlights. We moved 25 tonnes of rock, more than 20 tonnes of fill, several tonnes of sand, mixed 14 bags of concrete, and sanded pews. We worshipped in Spanish and jumped off a cliff into a local swimming hole. Two of us got sick (yes, that includes me) and I came back with a nasty infection on my ankle from a scratch at the beach. I almost left my finger on the back of a rock truck. We stayed with families and enjoyed wonderful hospitality and friendliness. We had some wonderful times of study, worship and prayer together. And those are just the highlights.
This OnFire is an extended one because I wanted to explore with you a question which has deeply troubled me since my time there. Some of you may have had similar experiences on mission trips and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. There is so much I could have written about, but from this I think you will get some sense of our experience there, along with the spiritual issues I experienced.
By later tonight I will have a powerpoint on my website www.onfireletter.com so that you can see some pictures. Thanks to those who sent kind and encouraging words after I accidentally sent you some of the pics.
Finally, thanks to so many
who wrote and told me they were pledging to pray for me daily. In total I had
more than 20 people respond, and I am grateful. I certainly felt the power of
God’s strength and protection while I was away. While you were praying for me,
I was also praying for you from
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My first glimpse of life in
Over the next 11 days, the biggest lesson I would learn was to see past appearances and differences in living conditions to see the people and spiritual need. While life was difficult, it was not unbearable and my pity was not helpful. I would learn this lesson by staying with a family from the church we went down to help. In the past mission teams had stayed at a nearby mission compound, but we wanted as much as possible to live and eat as Hondurans in order to establish relationships with people from the church.
As we arrived in our
village just outside the city of
Concrete, brick and steel
are typical in
There are three bedrooms with a common sitting area and a kitchen / dining area. There is electricity; in fact most people in our village have electricity. Water comes from the city and is turned on several times a week on a schedule which the locals know, but I failed to discern. It is stored in a pila, a large open concrete holding tank. Our home has one outside for washing and flushing the toilet, and a smaller one inside for the kitchen. More prosperous homes have a plastic tank mounted on the roof to provide gravity flow into the house.
My room has a double bed with a sheet and a light blanket. I’ve been given the room belonging to Alfredo, an eleven-year-old boy. A treadle-powered sewing machine sits in one corner and night stand in another. It is bare, but comfortable; the bed has a box spring and mattress.
I can only speak a few words of Spanish, but Alfredo attends an English school and so he shows me around the house. “You like?” he asks as Spanish language Disney Channel appears on a TV I hadn’t noticed before. Leading me outside, he opens the door to what appears to be an outhouse. A low toilet sits on the floor and he demonstrates how to wrap my hand in toilet paper and then fold it so that I can deposit it into a waste paper can after use. Later I learn that the sewer pipes are small and will not handle the paper. A small basin sits on the edge of the pila for scooping water in the toilet when I’m done. I feel like a child because someone has to explain these things to me, but I’m grateful for this boy to show me the basics of living here.
Standing beside the pila, Alfredo mimes pouring water over himself with the basin. “You chower here,” he says. Our “sh” sound is difficult in Spanish and so I get the idea that this is where I will clean up. I wonder about undressing in the open since there is another house not far away. Almost reading my thoughts, he points to the toilet and indicates I could “chower” there.
On top of the pila there is a scrub board with some clothes waiting to be washed. Over time I will notice that everyone here seems clean, even the men who work with us to build a rock wall. Despite the fact that the rainy season has begun, washing clothes is a daily ritual. I’m not sure how clothing dries since it takes several days for my sweaty t-shirts to dry in my room. One day I watch Alfredo wash his white school t-shirt and put it on a half-hour later, still wet.
Pastor Mario explained that we would be eating at the church and that the menu would be typical Honduran foods. Beans, rice and bananas became our staple items and we ate them in many different ways. At least one meal per day had beans - whole, mashed, crushed, or as a paste - sometimes served on a soft tortilla flatbread. Very green bananas were boiled or deep fried like potatoes. Several nights I arrived home to see the same foods we had eaten at the church being prepared by my family. This was reassuring and helped me understand that we really were eating as regular Hondurans.
We had two goals as we left
In total we mixed fourteen 40kg bags of concrete and moved about 25 tonnes of rock, along with the same amount of fill. It was hard work in the heat and humidity. We had a wheelbarrow to move the fill, but we moved the rocks mainly by hand. The truck delivering these materials had no dump, and so we also helped unload everything. On a side note, I almost lost a finger on the first day of work when I jumped down from the truck after unloading rock. My wedding ring caught, but thankfully I hit the ground before much damage could be done. In twenty years this has never happened before. I walked away bleeding but intact.
We found the Hondurans to be hard-working people. We worked alongside several men over the course of the week and admired their strength and stamina. We thought we were doing OK mixing cement until they mixed a bag in about half the time it took us. That was humbling but we took the lessons from it to make our work easier.
The other job we did was to
sand the pews in the church. These were really wooden benches which the church
had purchased second-hand from a school. Just as in
The first days were a shock for all of us. The living conditions were not what we were used to and we did not want to do anything to make it harder for our hosts. What was unusual for us was normal for them, and our simple mistakes (like flushing toilet paper or leaving lights on) had the potential to cause great inconvenience or expense. They had their routines and we must have seemed out of place. I wonder how many times they shook their heads at us “Gringos” and wondered if we would survive.
Plus, there were so many contradictions in the country. We travelled to our village on a modern, well-engineered concrete highway. Along the way we passed American tractor-trailers and signs for cell phones and Coca Cola, but off the highway it was like stepping back fifty years, only with electricity and customized ring tones. Children walked cattle down the road to the pasture below the church. Roosters crowed all night and chickens clucked in back yards. And yet, on a trip into the city we passed a fancy new French restaurant and saw mansions surrounded by walls with more blocks than would be in our entire village.
After four or five days of living there, we began to settle into things. The newness of the situation wore off, and I began to see that while life was difficult and people were definitely poor, they lived with a certain amount of daily comfort. The food was simple but adequate even in hard work. Our home was dry and the beds comfortable. Reliable electricity made food storage possible for those with a refrigerator.
Don’t misunderstand me -
any comfort they had was held in tension by a
lot of uncertainty about the future. Food prices keep rising and the cost of
living was very high in relation to their wages of only
$7-10 US per day. Furthermore, unemployment and under-employment were
chronic problems. One man from the church, a brick layer, had not worked in
several months. I’m not sure how he managed to feed and clothe his family, but
he seemed to have a peace about his situation and faith in God for the future.
Another man from the church took unpaid vacation from his job to help with our
construction. Work was slow and there may not have been enough work for him
anyway. We take cash flow for granted (even if we feel its
not enough), but life in
I came to see that life was
difficult and uncertain, but it was bearable (at
least for many in our village - we certainly saw areas of extreme poverty), and
so my sense of pity upon first seeing
As Mario explained all of
these things, I also saw some other needs. American culture was all over
Spanish TV and I think it contributed to a feeling of poverty among the people.
Sociologists observe that we no longer try to “keep up with the Jones” next
door, but the “Jones” we see on the television, and I think it also happened
there. In addition, many families had relatives living in the
In addition to seeing need
in
And so I reflected on life
in
This is a troubling question for me, and I’m not sure it won’t be for you also. But even still, I hope it helps. Be on fire.
OnFire is a weekly letter on faith and
character written by Troy Dennis.