Photo of the Week-10/15-10/22

we drive through busy streets and bushels of plantains. we pass by a public hospital and a run-down baseball field. we enter the barrio on a dirt road that was made more for a four-wheeler than a fifteen passenger van. the terrain is completely different. what once was a vacant lot now has tin and wood shacks everywhere. naked children chasing homemade kites. goats grazing on small mounds of trash.

Santa Lucia.

i've never liked its unofficial name. la mosca, the fly. i mean, i get it. the name makes sense. its just that the name is almost a stamp of doom for the people living there. it doesn't boast of education and prosperity and hopefulness. it screams of desperation and poverty and despair.

the trash was burning again. the dump must have a new owner. it was so nice when there wasn't a mountain-size pile of trash burning and blowing smoke and stench into the streets. the smoke meant one thing. flies. flies everywhere. i was afraid to breathe with my mouth open and walk too briskly for fear that one might enter in.

the kids weren't healthy because of it. they were being fed by the nutrition center so they were a healthy weight but their skin had sores and infections. those pesky flies. can't they just leave the kids alone?

it caught me. right in the middle of feeling like i was in my groove. like i was right where God wanted me. like i was making a difference. right when i felt like hope was being restored in The Hole and i was doing something tangible. it caught me. there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of places just like The Hole. and a lot of them are worse. places like Santa Lucia.

i wasn't prepared for this flood of emotion. and just when i thought it couldn't get any worse, a little boy about landon's age walked by with a limp. nothing more than a limp. for all i knew, he could have stubbed his toe and didn't want to put his weight on it. but in my mind his twelve year old mother contracted a virus from the flies during her pregnancy and it caused a malformation in his hip joint causing it to develop unnaturally. this four year old boy doomed to life with a limp and ridicule and laughing and unemployment and loneliness. i cried.

when my own despair sank in the Soft Whisper, whispered, "one day at a time. we win in the end." that's all it took. i wiped the now streaming tears from my eyes and remembered He gets the victory. even in places like La Mosca. especially in places like La Mosca.

Photo of the Week-10/11-10/18

i used to think he was too strict with the kids. he needed to love them more and hug them more. he needed to greet them with a smile and a "Jesus loves you," as they entered the nutrition center.

i was naive.

felix loves these kids more than any of us could ever imagine. he loves them better than any of us ever could. yes, these kids need love and hugs and "Jesus loves you's" but more than any of that they need to learn respect and responsibility and discipline from someone who spends day-in and day-out with them. he shows them love, not just by offering them a passing hug or twenty minutes of holding their hand; but being in the trenches with them. going to hospital visits with them and sympathetically patting them on their head when their father was, yet again, dragged out of their home and arrested for drug possession.

the more time that i spend in The Hole the more i realize what kind of "job" Felix has. he told a group this week that out of the 600 or so families that live in The Hole about 90% of them are, in some way, involved in the drug business. whether it be selling or using or storing or guarding money or being the "debt collector." he is not just trying to win souls for christ. strangely, that could be the easy part. but what happens if they do want to accept christ and change their lives? the next step is saying to these already starving families that they need to leave their only source of income as well. do you want to tell them that?

eleven years of working in the trenches. eleven years of offering hope to people who's only hope lies in white powder and their next fix. eleven years of loving children born unjustly into households enslaved by darkness.

i think twice before i say to myself, "come on, felix, it's ok if he doesn't wear his sandals into the nutrition center." because if felix doesn't expect more from these kids, who will?