Cinderella story?

I remember studying in my cross-cultural communication class that a typical American´s mindset is very positive. We say and believe "You can do anything you put your mind to." We read books to our children where a train trying to climb an impossible hill says, "I think I can, I think I can," and he does. And, we sing and love songs like, "I believe I can fly/I believe I can touch the sky." We hold fast to the American dream, that anyone, through perseverance and education, can "make something of themselves".

I remember discussing that, amidst American prosperity, it is easy to have a positive view of life. However, when you transition to look at the rest of the world, that kind of idealism is difficult to find. Poverty, war, sickness, and other difficulties have their effect on the personality of a society. It has been my observation here in Honduras that, even among the wealthier people, education is not necessarily considered to be of great value. I have been in situations where an adult will encourage a child to copy off the Internet, copy from a classmate, or, the adult will simply do the work for the child, instead of "setting high expectations". You don´t hear a lot of Cinderella stories, where someone through education was able to rise above the poverty. In fact, most of the stories that even come close typically end with, "And then they left and went to the United States."

But here is a good Cinderella story...

On March 23rd we celebrated the graduations of two university students from the Hogar--the Hogar´s first two graduates ever. The university program has been around for about six years now, so it is safe to say that this was a long awaited day.

Many of the university students have not done well in college: they struggle to make good grades, struggle with the social pressures of university and of that stage of life in general, and have had to drop out of the program for one reason or another. Others get to university, realize the difficulty level, and decide not to continue on in their education. The perseverance and desire to keep moving forward, which are necessary to continuing in education, have not commonly been displayed.

These two students overcame many obstacles, some too painful to mention, in order to get to graduation day. No doubt their lives would have looked very different if it were not for God´s grace and his work in some very key people. Before these graduates were even born, God was working in Mami Carmen´s life (the woman who started the orphanage), Linda and Chema´s lives (the parents where the boys live), and the lives of countless others--staff memebers, board members, donors, padrinos, friends, family members, etc. -- so that this day could be possible.

My favorite part of the story is why these graduates say they were able to do what they did. I have been to my share of graduations in the United States, experienced my share of graduation parties, and read my share of graduation cards, all of which point to the graduate as the person to be praised and celebrated. But this graduation was not about "I did it, I did it, I made this great accomplishment." These students, when asked to speak at a small graduation party we had afterwards, were quick to recognize the work of God in their lives and the blessings he had given to them through others. It was encouraging and eye opening all at once, to realize that these students were not graduating because they had embraced the American dream and American value of education more quickly than their peers. They were graduating because God had made it possible, God had given them an opportunity, and God had given them the strength to acheive their goals. They thanked God, and with tears in their eyes, thanked the people that had surrounded them and helped them move forward. They talked about wanting to be an example for the other young people and children in the Hogar, and how they want to give back to what has been their family all their lives.

My prayer is that I would let this sink in and change the way I live my life here. For example, with my own students and with the students at the Hogar, that I would not be pushing education or perseverance on their own, but that I would be teaching about God and about how he makes all things possible.

Thoughts on Luke 8:26-38

A link to the passage... http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%208&version=ESV

In this passage, Jesus cures a man who was demon-possessed. Scripture says that the demons, with Jesus' permission, come out of the man and enter into a herd of pigs, who proceed to run off a cliff and drown in the sea. When they realize what has happened, the people of the city beg Jesus to leave them, because they are afraid. The cured man, however, begs Jesus to allow him to go with him. Jesus says, instead,

"Return home and tell how much God has done for you."

I find two things odd about this story. (That isn't true. I find MANY things odd i.e. a herd of pigs running off a cliff...) But, there are two things that have had me thinking. Jesus is met with two requests from the human characters in the story. The people of the town ask Jesus to leave, and the healed man asks if he can go with. Now, if I am Jesus, I am going to say "No" to the townspeople (because they need me), and "Yes" to the man (because he knows I am the truth and can learn a lot from me). The real Jesus has another plan: missions.

Jesus does not force himself upon the townspeople, the 'non-Christians'. He does not fight his way into their city. He humbly steps back. But note that he doesn't abandon them. He sends into their midst one of their own, a Gerasene (what a name!) who has felt the healing power of God. This man, who wants to leave and go away with Jesus, is given the command to go and tell what God has done. Although it would be good for the man to be with Jesus, what is great is that he go and proclaim the good news.

This is missions. God uses his people to go into dark places, to tell all that he has done for us, that others might also believe on His Name. It would be much easier if we could accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, and go directly to heaven to be with him and skip the suffering of this world. But that is not God's calling... if it were, everyone else in the world would be left to suffer on their own, without the hope of Christ. Jesus sends this man away with a command... to return home and tell how much God has done for him. Jesus left us with a command, too. "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."

Catch up...

Favorite Moment of the Week: Today Ashley and I were at the Hogar helping the kindergarten kids learn how to read (which can be frustrating no matter where you are!). So, it is hot and we are tired and we are trying to figure out what each group of kids needs to practice, when we hear a loud "Haappy BEARTHDAY to joooo!" We both turn to see 3-year old Roberto sitting in a desk, wearing some crazy-big zebra print sunglasses, "reading" a book with a birthday party picture on the page. Precious.



I am not really sure what to write about today... so much has happened since the last time I wrote! October, seriously? But, I made a New Year's Resolution to "blog" more often, and considering as it is January 21 and I am just now writing my first blog post of the year, we all see how well that is going!

Thanksgiving was great...a Honduras classic, if you will. Just as we started to serve the meal to a room full of 35 people, the electricity went off! I will forever remember Thanksgiving 2010 as the year I ate my turkey and potatoes in the dark, with a spoon (ran out of forks), from a bowl (ran out of plates), sweating like crazy (no lights=no fans), holding a crying baby (she didn't like the dark). BUT, it was an awesome time... we shared about the history of Thanksgiving, why we celebrate it, and everyone went around and said what they were thankful for. That tradition became more meaningful to me this year... I feel like when I said "I am thankful for my family, for my job, for the opportunity to be here", I really meant it.

Christmas and New Years were really fun, too. The BCM group from Western Kentucky University was here for New Years, and we all enjoyed the "midnight" fireworks (midnight is in quotes because it is really like 24 hours of fireworks!). We went back to school on January 3rd, and God has blessed me with new patience and endurance. I am really enjoying teaching, and I feel like I am starting to get a hang of it.

Favorite Bible verse at the moment is Psalm 121:1-2... (In Spanish, because it says mountains... in English it just says hills, but here we have mountains, so I like the mountain part...)

A las montanas levanto mis ojos.
De donde ha de venir mi ayuda?
Mi ayuda vendra del Senor,
Creador del cielo y la tierra.

When I get up in the morning and look out my window, the mountains in the distance are just beautiful. I love thinking of this verse because I remember that God will help me, sustain me, through each day. I give thanks knowing that He will walk with me in each step, in each class, in each difficult situation that presents itself.

One more thing... we have started a Bible study with the older girls at the Hogar. Our theme is "Why?" We had each girl ask a why question about life, about God, about the Bible; and we are going through each week trying to answer them with scripture. We have met twice so far. Pray that is would go well and that the girls would gain a thirst for scripture.

Tidbits, to suffice for my lack of blogging=)

As I type this, Ashley and I are sitting at Dunkin Donuts working on school stuff. It is eerily similar to evenings at Panera or Barnes & Noble or Spencer’s during university, except this time I am grading and not studying. Things are very different on this end of the education world—my respect for teachers has increased exponentially in the last two months. Planning lessons, writing quizzes, determining how to grade those quizzes, wanting so bad for all of your students to understand everything, but having to accept that not all students are willing to do their share in order to do well… it’s a tough job! But teaching vale la pena (meaning, it’s worth it!).

It has been entirely too long since my last blog post. Here we are. I thought I would share a few tidbits of life here. Some are entertaining, others are more like prayer requests.

~Tidbit Number One~ I teach a dance class at the Hogar on Wednesdays, and I have now taught absolutely every dance that I know to these girls. They keep asking me for a new one, so, on our day-off from school last week, I spent about three hours in my room watching “High School Musical Dance Along” on YouTube in order to learn the dance to We’re All in This Together! (Unfortunately I don’t remember all of it from my BCM days, haha).

~Tidbit Number Two~ Last night we went to a wedding reception, and Vanessa, one of the girls from Misericordia, who has Down’s Syndrome, was a bridesmaid. She looked like a princess! Half-way through the reception, I saw her standing outside, arms crossed, looking very angry. I asked her what was wrong and she just shook her head. One of the staff from the Hogar told me, “Emily, she is jealous.” I said, “Jealous? Why?” The staff member motioned her head towards the window, and inside the reception, Vanessa’s groomsman partner (a teenage boy who also has a mental disability) was dancing with another girl. I looked at Vanessa and asked her if she wanted to dance with me. She grinned and nodded her head yes, so we went inside. Within two minutes Vanessa had left me, cut in on the other couple, and was dancing happily with her groomsman. PRECIOUS.

~Tidbit Number Three~ (Necessary background information: the mascot of Comayagua is the Burro, or Donkey. People from Comayagua are sometimes called “Little Donkeys”. YES.) At school on Thursday we had a Honduran Culture Night. All day at school, the students had been preparing and decorating and practicing. The last period of the day, as I was monitoring the chaos, the gate opened and a donkey was brought in and tied to a post in the courtyard. Random, I thought, but I was assured that it was part of the culture night. In the evening, the students came dressed in traditional clothing and each grade performed a traditional dance. We ate traditional food from all the different departments (or states) in Honduras. Unfortunately, we had quite the rain storm in the middle of the fiesta, and everything had to be moved inside. In between some of the dances, Ashley and I walked outside and the donkey was still there, this time tied to a soccer goal. Reading this it does not sound that funny… but it was a donkey, inside our school, supposed to be a representation of Honduran, and specifically, Comayaguan culture. And all it did was stand there tied to a soccer goal in the middle of a rainstorm. It was funny to me. And then I found five lempira.

~Tidbit Number Four~ (The serious one) Things have been … complex … lately. I have found myself really questioning what missions are supposed to be. What does it really mean to care for orphans and widows, or the poor? What if someone doesn’t want help? Or doesn’t believe that they need help, but we know they need help? Or what if they want so much help that they don’t want to do their part? Do we “give to all who ask of [us]” if it is just crippling that person? Is it mine to decide what is crippling someone and what is helping them? Should I believe any and every story of need? Where does our giving intersect with being good stewards? Another subject… How do we determine God’s will? I knew, my parents knew, Ashley knew, that we were supposed to “go”; that we were supposed to be here in Honduras. But what now? If I was “called” here for one thing, is it possible that God would change that thing now that I am here? How does His will for us progress? Or is it more that we are slow to understand His will and that he is gradually opening our eyes to see? Complex, right? Basically, how do we obey God in the gray areas of life?

I wish I had the answers to that mess of questions. All I have is this (the passage from church this morning): Habakkuk 3:17-19.

Though the fig tree does not budand there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop failsand the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to go on the heights.

I praise God for his word and how he speaks to us. For Habbakuk, (which, fun fact, in Spanish is pronounced "a-ba-COOOK"), everything was failing. When things are failing, when we are failing, it is easy to question our purpose. A farmer with no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls probably wonders why on earth God called him to be a farmer. And YET we rejoice in the Lord. He is still our Savior, he is still sovereign, and he is still our strength. =) =) =)

Our strength is not our own...

"He guards the steps of His faithful ones, but the wicked are silenced in darkness,

for a man does not prevail by his own strength."

- 1 Samuel 2:9

"God is our refuge and strength, a helper who is always found in times of trouble.

Therefore we will not be afraid,

though the earth trembles and the mountains topple into the depths of the seas."

- Psalm 46:1-2

"Consider it a great joy, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance."

- James 1:2-3

I thank God that the unforseen struggles in life are already seen by Him. When things turn out to be harder than we anticipate, we can trust that God saw it coming, and that He still decided to lead us down that path. All along the way, He is guiding our steps, producing in us an endurance that is not of ourselves. When we are at our weakest, God reminds us that his grace is sufficient, because His power is perfected in our weakest. "Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly in my weakness, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and pressures. For when I am weak then I am strong." (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

Things I never thought to be thankful for...

I have been processing through a lot of situations lately... life situations that are somewhat normal down here. Sometimes when I try to put myself in someone else´s situation, it gets overwhelming. The best way to put it, I guess, is that I never thought to be thankful for things that I thought were a given in life. For example...

I never thought to be thankful that I didn´t have to raise my own siblings. I never thought to be thankful that I didn´t have to root through garbage (in fact, I was strongly discouraged from rooting through the garbage=). I never thought to be thankful that someone took care of me when I was sick.

The background to these situations? Well,

Last week INFAH told my parents about a 16-year old girl. She and her 1-year old brother had been abandoned by their mother. So, the girl found a man to live with, to take care of her and her brother. When INFAH called, the man had abandoned them as well, and the girl is pregnant and caring for her little brother. INFAH wanted to know if there was room for them to live in Buen Pastor. Her story hit me hard, because I don´t think I would ever imagine such a story. It never occurred to me, when I was 16, that I should be thankful that my parents raised us--it seemed like a given.

We have a woman here in Misericordia named Maita, and she is often a highlight to my day. I am not sure what her "diagnosis" is, but she always asks the same questions... "Will you play jacks with me?" and "When are we going to my house?" She also laughs very hard every time she sees me, which makes me laugh (I try not to get offended;). Anyway, if Maita gets outside the gate, she immediately starts looking through trash. It is her instinct. Tonight we took the Misericordia and Buen Pastor girls to dinner, and Maita made a comment about how "pretty" her empty soda bottle was (for trash, plastic bottles are a good find). I just think, really? In the U.S., we even train our pets not to get into the trash, and yet here, this precious woman, who can´t remember one conversation to the next without repetition, instinctively goes to trash to look for plastic bottles. I never thought to be thankful that I was someone throwing trash out, instead of being someone bringing it in to find my family´s next meal.

The reason we took everyone to dinner tonight is because Yoly (age 18) passed her 6th grade final exam. In Honduras, this is a big deal because now she is eligible to get a job and she can go into high school. So we celebrated, hoping to also encourage the other girls to keep working hard. Unfortunately, Yoly has been having some health issues lately, and the food didn´t go well with her. When my parents and I got back later, Javier (the four-year old) came to our door telling us to come help Yoly. I went down to her room, and she was on the floor of the bathroom throwing up. I squeezed in (she was kinda blocking the door) and, because I am no nurse, held her hair out of her face and rubbed her back. That is what my mom always did for me whenever I was sick. Standing there, I thought how lonely it must have been to be there on the floor, hurting, and unable to control your body. I think I always assumed that it was my parents´responsibility, their job, to be there with me when I was sick. I don´t think I was ever thankful for the comfort of knowing that someone cared that I was hurting, and that someone wanted me to get better.

Needless to say, I was thanking and praising God as I cleaned up that bathroom, washed the mop, and told the girls "Good night" tonight.

I was thinking about the verse in Matthew, where Jesus says to the righteous, "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." I have heard this verse plenty of times, even read entire books based on this verse, but still, I think I always took it figuratively. You know, I thought we were just supposed to do nice things for other people. But lately I have been thinking, No, there really are Hungry people, and Thirsty people, and Sick people. There really are people who need clothes, who need to be welcomed in, and who need someone to visit them, even if it means visiting them in prison. Jesus is not using figurative language to speak about abstract needs, but rather these are real conditions, and in much of the world, normal conditions. Jesus said, "And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’" I pray that God will constantly remind me that these people are His, and no matter how humbling the task, I am working for Him.

Most of all, I pray that the 16-year old girl would know that she has a Heavenly Father who will never abandon her. That Maita, every time she is given food, will know that God is her Provider. And that Yoly, though she may be sick and suffering some tough things, would know God as her Great Healer and Refuge.

"Normal" day

What is a typical day like in Honduras? Today has been pretty "normal", so I thought I could share its events on here...

• 7am (ish) - Get up, go out to wash clothes. I love doing the laundry in the morning, because it iscool out and washing by hand is a very mindless task. It helps me wake up and get my mindgoing. Usually some of the girls from Buen Pastor will come out and chat, too, so that is alwaysnice.
• 7:30 (ish) - Come back in, have some quiet time. I am going through My Utmost for His Highestright now, so I usually read the devotion, read the context of the corresponding scripture, andcopy it in Spanish (I am trying to get used to scripture in Spanish!!).
• I eat breakfast, and get ready for the day... no particular time...
• This morning I did some sewing. I am fixing some shirts for a friend, and also my mom and I have been making bed sheets for the girls in Misericordia. In any down time, there is usuallysome sewing to be done.
• We needed more thread, so my mom and I walked into town and bought some. Two spools ofwhite thread for the machine, and three zippers for purses that one of the girls is making... 12 limpira (which is about 75 cents). Crazy!
• We got back, I sewed a little more, then we ate lunch. Today we had turkey sandwiches, grapes, chips and a really good salsa that my mom made.
• This afternoon some of the Buen Pastor girls had an activity at school, so their babies are herewith the tia. I have been playing with some of the Misericordia girls and Javier and Gloria. Ourfriend Krista from home teaches students with special needs, so she gave us lots of ideas forthings to do with the girls. Today we took paintbrushes and water and painted the concrete. Itwas so sunny that the water would dry in about 15sec, so we kept busy for a while. We playedwith hula hoops and a punch balloon, then some of the girls colored.
• Right now Javier is sitting in the office with me working on an ABC puzzle. He will startpre-school in August at the same school where I will be teaching!!
• Not too sure what the exact plan for the evening is, but the girls get picked up at 4pm and atsome point we will eat dinner, and we will have devotions at 7:15pm tonight.

Today is a Tuesday... On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings my mom and I go to the Hogar to teach English with the kids. On Wednesday afternoons I do dance class with the girls at the Hogar, too.

So... a this is a typical, calm day. Some days are not so calm, but that is another post in itself=)