Memory Lane

If you have seen my “presentation”, where I share about what I’ll be doing in Honduras through pictures and a power point, then you’ve no doubt heard about Ronald.  He’s the kid who successfully completed the program in Iquitos, Peru and is now well on his way to adulthood.  He’s such a stand-up kid.  I am so proud of him!  My prayer for him is that he will become a man after God’s own heart, as he seeks to make the faith he’s been taught his own.  Anyway, I was watching some of my old videos and came across this one.   I thought it deserved reposting.

PS–Wait until the end and you’ll hear the ever-famous line from the Titanic, “I’ll never let go, Jack.”  Spoken with a Peruvian accent, of course.

Extra-curricular

This video makes me happy.

Here in the US, we find extra-curricular activities for our kids.  What is my child good at?  Oh, honey, you’re not good at this.  Well, let’s try that.

We may try softball, baseball, karate…whatever we have to do so our children feel that they have something to identify themselves with.  In the third world, this concept is completely unfamiliar, especially when many of the children in the third world are not even in school.  Life is about survival.

So I found this video on this guy’s blog who works with children in a garbage dump community in San Jose, Costa Rica.  He has found ways for these kids to have fun and just be kids.  This is a video of some of them doing some breakdancing. (It reminds me of the goosebumps I get whenever my boys in Peru do their “choreographies”)  Enjoy!

And of course, I felt the need to post this video of our boys in Peru doing some of their dances.  It’s a long one, but if you watch the first few minutes, you’ll get to see some of their impromptu dancing.

9:11 pm, Thursday night

I wasn’t there when this picture was taken.  But I imagine it to be at about 5:00 am, while all the other street boys are asleep.  On the floor, on benches, on each other.  That’s what usually happens on Friday nights when Gene goes into Iquitos (from the boys’ home in Puerto Alegria).  They play soccer, have a meal, play more soccer, watch movies, more soccer, and then fall asleep.  I imagine Angelo waking up for just a few more dribbles of his soccer ball, just a few more hours awake before he goes out onto the street, his home.

God has placed Angelo on my heart.  Just click on Angelo on my sidebar and you’ll see several posts where he shows up.  At first, I didn’t know his name, but his face was pressed into my heart. Then I learned his name, and now my heart is beginning to wrap itself around his little heart, even from this far away.  I wonder what he’s doing at this moment, 9:11 pm on a Thursday night.  Is he safe?  Is he sleeping, playing soccer on the street somewhere, begging for money, stealing money?  What is he doing now?  I can only pray that God will protect him and, most of all, bring him to an understanding of the sufficiency of Christ.

Angelo. 13 years old. Loves soccer.

Loneliness

Me and Rene

Rene is beautiful.  Big brown eyes with long eyelashes.  10 years old and can dance like you wouldn’t believe.  He and his brother, Marcelo, came to Puerto Alegria after a neighbor kept finding them unsupervised in their house for weeks at a time.

It was close to the time that we (the team) would be leaving Puerto Alegria.  I was giving my last Bible lesson and the boys were absolutely horrible.  Teaching former street children is hard enough in itself.  But this day was especially hard.  And Rene’s behavior was one of the worst.  By the end of the class, he was laying on the floor in defiance.

I pulled him up off of the floor.  He wouldn’t look at me, his body limp in defiance and defeat.  I sat him next to me on the bench and put my arms around him.  I told him that I loved him and that there was nothing that he could do that would make me not love him.  I told him that God loved him in the same way, but so much more.  Still not looking at me, he put his arms around me and laid in my lap.  He stayed there for a good while.

These boys experience loneliness that is beyond what I or most people can imagine.  As Willy (the in-house disciplinarian) shared with me, the nights are the worst.  They go to sleep with no one to tuck them in.  No one to remind them to brush their teeth.  No one to make sure they have clean pajamas and a teddy bear.  They go to sleep lonely and wake up lonely.  There are days that the loneliness turns into an anger that they carry with them throughout the day.  I think this day was one of those, perhaps exasperated by the knowledge that we were soon to be leaving.

When I try to imagine the loneliness they feel, I become thankful for my own times of loneliness.  Not only does it give me a bit of an understanding of what they feel, but it is also a vehicle for God to communicate his ever-present message: I am enough for you, Kate.  And the more I learn this, the more I am able to believe it for them.  I am not there to wrap my arms around them and to tell them that they are loved.  But God is.  And He is enough.

PS–He wears that thing on his head because he INSISTED that I give him a haircut instead of the worker there who usually cuts their hair.  He regretted it for the rest of the week.  

  

…but I wanted shoes.

So I’ve been thinking about the lessons I learned from this trip.  It seems that every trip has a spiritual theme (or themes) that resonates in my heart.  Let me first tell you about Angelo.  

Do you remember him?  He’s a 13 year old boy who lives on the streets of Iquitos.  He’s not part of Puerto Alegria because he doesn’t want to be.  He prefers the “freedom” of the streets rather than the “confines” of Puerto Alegria.  Gene is building a relationship with him in hopes that he’ll eventually agree to come.  

I brought Angelo a gift.  A sketch pad and colored pencils.  I wanted to give him something that might perhaps be an outlet for him to express himself.  

So we arrive for our Friday night event (Gene plays soccer with them and feeds them every Friday night, from 12:00 am–5:00 am).  I am so excited to hear him shout my name as soon as he walks in.  After our greetings and hugs, I pull him into the room where my backpack is.  I pull out the gift that I had so thoughtfully bought for him.  I wait anxiously to see his reaction.  He looks at the gift and says, “Pero yo queria zapatillas.”  He wanted shoes.  He doesn’t even read (or let me read) the note I had written for him on the inside of the notebook.  He eventually leaves for the night without even taking the gift with him.

Rejection was a bit of a more constant companion on this trip.  Bring a gift and they don’t want it.  Reach out for a hug and they jerk their shoulder away.  Teach them English and they misbehave.  

The theme?  LOVE THEM.  Bring them more gifts.  Reach out for more hugs.  Teach more English.  LOVE THEM.  Even at the expense of your own heart.