The Day that Changed My Life

Honduras. Day 23.

Today I walked into Hell.

Literally.

I don't think that words can ever fully explain what happened today. I am going to try my best to capture what happened in this blog, but you must know up front that words just simply cannot express the things that I experienced in the past several hours.

For the past few days I have been pretty sick. Not stomach stuff, just kind of a mini-flu (it happens in Honduras; it feels bad, but it's nothing serious, and it's usually gone in a few days). So I mostly just stayed at the house here recently. But I made the commitment to wake up this morning and get out and do stuff, no matter how much I didn't want to. So I loaded up with Marc this morning, and rode around with him to an unfinished work site in Los Pinos, a very poor suburb outside of Tegucigalpa, and one of my favorites because I've spent so much time there and made so many friends there. We got to the work site, and I saw that there were enough people there to finish it. I was still feeling very light headed and sore, so I just stayed in the truck with Marc, Felicia, and Kale to ride around and do some errands while the others finished up the house. We went to La Colonia, a supermarket, so that we could buy supplies to make sandwiches and have bags of water to distribute at the city dump this afternoon. Others had been there and said that it was really bad; they told me that there were hundreds of people that lived in the garbage, scavenging everyday alongside buzzards for food and shelter. And they said we were going to feed them today.

Sure. I was onboard for whatever today. I was just along for the ride.

Marc took us back to the church building in Los Pinos. Steve and Felicia made sandwiches for the dump inside the church building, and me and Kale stayed outside and played soccer with some of the kids in front of the church (we got to play with some of my long-time best friends in Hondo: Wilson, Linda, Oscar, Victor, and Faviola; me and Faviola even played hide and go seek that afternoon). After a trip to the pulperia to buy some Mirinda for everybody, and a few more rounds of "Keep Away" with the soccer ball, Marc showed up and said the house site was finished. We loaded up into his truck and took some people to Valle de Angeles to finish a house there; the rest of us stayed in the truck to make our way to the city dump.

Okay... This is where words start getting tough. And I'm actually choking up as I type this. Seriously, I just... I just can't even explain what happened next.

We got to the dump and were instantly hit with the smell of burning trash. There were heaps of garbage everywhere. It was no landfill; it was a drop-off point for all of the trash in Tegucigalpa. And there were, literally, mountains and mountains of garbage. And as we drove in to it all, I started noticing the vultures EVERYWHERE picking at the garbage. But as we went further in... I noticed that there were children alongside the vultures, rummaging through the garbage looking for scraps of anything they could get in their mouth.

How can i describe what these people looked like... They were all covered head to toe in dirt; most of them appeared black from the soot of the burning garbage. They were all extremely skinny, and looked as if you could touch them and they would break. There were men, women and children. Some of them had make-shift masks that they put over their mouths, whether it be ski-masks or just scarfs, to try and not breathe in so much of the pollution.

There were hundreds of them. Garbage-dwellers. Untouchables. People living in what I can call nothing short of... Hell.

We parked the truck. The girls sat in the bed of the truck with all of the water and sandwiches. Steve stayed to watch them, and Kale and Keith alternated taking turns watching the truck too. But me and Marc, and then either Kale or Keith, would take huge bags of water on our shoulder, or bags of sandwiches, and trudge out into the dump. Because some people would come to the truck to get food and water. But some were so far removed from... their own humanity... that they didn't even know what to do when they saw us.

The truck was parked underneith one of the big mountains of trash so that the people in the truck couldn't see over it. But... But I saw what was on the other side. I remember climbing the mountain of trash, fighting through the crowds of buzzards at my feet, and passing out a few bags of water to people sitting in the rubbish along the way... and then I remember standing on the top of that trash heap and looking over the other side and just dropping my jaw and saying... "Oh... My God..."

There were hundreds more people, all pilfering through the garbage, looking for SOMETHING that could offer them relief. There were a few dump trucks there, and people were gathered around them as they dropped their loads. It was as if the dump trucks were bringing Christmas presents to anxious boys and girls on the 25th of December. But it wasn't December. It was just another day in June, in a third-world country, at a dump where people LIVE and hope to find food and shelter out of what other people throw away.

Why is this aloud to happen? This is not life...

They saw us standing there, and they all looked up and just stood where they were and raised their hands in the air to faintly wave at us and just started saying, "Agua... Agua..." ("Water... Water..."). I came down to them, and tried to pass out the bags of water to as many people as I could. Some wouldn't look me in the eye. Some were afraid to touch me. It was as if they were too far removed from life to make contact with someone... And when we ran out of food and water, there were so many distraught faces. But we ran back to the truck to get more. And we kept running back over the mountain, passing out everything we could to everyone we could. The next few times we came back, they started feeling more comfortable with us, and they started coming up to us. There was one guy that came up to us and took the bag of water in one hand and kept sniffing the glue he had in the other (it's a deadly thing to do, but many people do it to kill their hunger pains).

And then we ran out of food and water.

The faces... I will never forget those faces. And as we marched back down to the truck, I told Keith that we had been to hell and back today. This was hell on earth. This was the destruction and corruption and brokenness of our world at its best; the brokenness God never intended us to deal with. And with every sandwich and bag of water, we tried our best to fix the corruption, to stop the hell on earth, and to bring some Heaven to this failing planet. But as we gathered around the truck to pray... I couldn't pray along with them. I felt like... I couldn't do enough. There was just too much here. Too much sadness. Too much loneliness. Too much brokenness. And as they were praying, a little boy came up to me and Marc (he wasn't praying either), and it took him awhile to warm up to us, but eventually he started shaking Marc's hand, and my hand, and gave Marc a hug. I asked him his name and he said Bryan.

His name was Bryan.

And as we pulled out, Marc asked me how things were. And all I could say was, "It's just so messed up, man." And I talked to Kale later and said, "You know, we're all going to be back at our house tonight: eating food, taking showers, climbing into beds, and going to sleep. And they are still going to be... there." And for some reason... I can't get past that.

I know this seems so over-dramatic. You may be wondering, "It couldn't have been that bad, right?" But it was unimaginably... unimaginable. Any poverty that any of you who have been to Honduras before have seen on the mountains of Los Pinos or Sector Ocho or wherever CANNOT COMPARE to what I saw at the dump today. Today, I saw people dwelling in other people's refuse. I saw people rejoicing over new dump trucks arriving with more... garbage. Today changed my life. Because as I sit here, in a nice house, on a computer, filled with some McDonald's chicken, and some nachos I just had in the kitchen.... There's people out there in the dark, hoping that someone doesn't come by and steal the nice potato sack they found to use as their pillow for the night; kids... kids just like Bryan... who are hoping they survive through the night, but probably wonder what the point of surviving the night is anymore.

Today was real.

And so I'm never taking for granted what I have anymore. I'm sick of materialism... and selfishness and... I don't know; I'm sick of a lot of things. But it ignites a passion within me to start storming the gates of hell, wherever they may be in this world, from the trash heaps of Tegucigalpa, to the friendless, lonely person I pass by on the way to class everyday, to the elderly person who needs someone to help him or her with the simple stuff of life, I want to seek those broken situations out so that I can show the love of Christ by trying to bring a little Heaven to the Hells on earth. Whether it be through a smile, or a kind word, or a hug... Christ died to bring Heaven to us through peace and forgiveness and mercy and love, and I'm going to further His cause by doing what I can to restore and renew this broken world any way that I can.

If this blog doesn't make much sense, I apologize. I wrote a Facebook note that might help some, but other than that... Today was so beyond words, and my heart is such a mess right now, that this might be a blog entry you have to just trust me on. I just don't know how to say it all.

But God help them...