Friday we went to Hogar Bencaleth, which is a special needs orphanage. This is also one of those places that is hard to visit...JT, Donna, and I went there two years ago and JT and I played with a little boy and held a little girl the whole time we were there, and when we went back on Friday they were still there. They had grown a little, and it was nice to see them again. The little girl is ten now, though she looks a lot younger than that, and it looks like she might have cerebral palsy. But she is absolutely adorable.
Then we went to the dump. And I know that I have said many times that there are some places here that are hard for me to go to...but this one is without a doubt the hardest. The dump is in Tegucigalpa, and 1,200 people live there. The place that they call home is where everyone else's trash is dumped. They fight vultures and dogs for the scraps of food that are buried in the mounds of trash. When the dump trucks come, the people come running, jumping of the truck , fighting other people, and vultures for the best food. This place smells horrible. It is a smell that words cannot even begin to describe. The sweet people that live in this dump have ripped and dirty clothes, some of them have shoes, and dirt is literally caked on their hands. When we got there they made 3 lines, one for children, one for women, and one for men. They would then walk through the line and get a bag of food and a bag of clothes, and then they would go to the end of the line and lick the sharpie mark off their dirty hand that we put on there so that everyone could get some stuff before people came through a second time, so that they could get more stuff. They don't do that to be selfish, they are literally in survival mode. They will do whatever it takes to get what they need, even when that means licking sharpie off their hands that are covered in dirt. The people that live there build 'houses' that are pieces of cardboard only high enough to sit in, and other scraps of things that provide some sort of shelter. As we drove away in our bus we had to put all the windows down to get the hundreds of flies out that had invaded our bus in the half hour that we were there. Our clothes reeked of trash and our eyes stung with tears as we watched faces of true desperation watch us pull away to go sleep in our nice warm beds, take a hot shower to wash the dirt off our hands, and pillow our heads with full bellies knowing that we would be taken care of and we would have plenty of food to eat the next day.
That afternoon we went out to Didasko children's home and played with their kids for a while. Then we went to Valley of the Angels to shop. We ate dinner at Las Tejas and had our devo in Santa Lucia at the oldest still standing cathedral in the Western Hemisphere. It was a nice way to end our evening- singing praises to a faithful God. We were reminded at the dump that though these people are desperate in every sense of the word, God is faithful. In some small way, we were an answered prayer to those people. God is always faithful.
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