When David's mom appeared at the Micah House door last week, I immediately knew that there was trouble.  A malnourished woman who cannot write her own name, Mercedes had never before visited her son David here at the project.   Mercedes told us that David's older brother had been assaulted on the main street of their barrio the previous evening.  The perpetrator made him and two friends lay face down and proceeded to shoot each of them in the head execution-style, gang-land style.   Amazingly, David's brother survived since the bullet did not enter his brain, but was in critical condition with the bullet still lodged in his head.

As we accompanied David back to his neighborhood to visit his brother that day, the word "misery" seemed to sum up the scene around us in that hillside slum.   David's home is built from pieces of wood that appear to have been scavenged from older dwellings.  All along the walls of the one room, dirt floor shack, David's mom Mercedes has plastered magazine pages to cover the holes in the wood.  On one of the two small mattresses, David's step-father lays, ravaged by the final stages of AIDS.  Never before have I seen a skeleton in such detail through the skin of a living person.

Whenever I visit the families of our boys, or whenever they visit us, I am always shockingly reminded of the many dimensions of life that have formed and are forming their characters.   When I see them with a far-away look in the boys' eyes, when I watch them get upset over seemingly small issues, or when I see their reactions to people who are suffering, I remember that the boys are still active members of their families and still suffer what their families suffer, even if they are not participating directly in the events of their families' impoverished existence.

 It is important to realize that their present relationships and abilities, their future goals, and even their faith in our Loving Father are somehow built upon the quaking foundation of their families' tragedy.  And these young men, who are bursting with adolescent growth and change, are not only having to deal with normal teenage issues, they are also having to figure out their place in their broken and violent families.

It seems that this month has brought these issues to the forefront in most of our boys' lives.  Cristino met his mom and dad for the first time in three years on our trip up to northern Honduras last week.  When we asked directions to his father's shack, a neighbor responded, "Oh, you mean the drunk garbage man?  Yeah, his 'champa' (shack) is farther up the hill."   On the same trip, Danilo met with his dad, who was sober for the first time in years, only to be told that his mom had abandoned the family several months back and no one knows of her whereabouts.

A few days later, in a very adult conversation with Marvin in my office, I listen to him pondering out-loud if he should be living at home rather in the Micah Project in order to help his 85 year-old grandmother support his alcoholic father and his "on-the-verge-of-becoming-alcoholic" older brothers, who come to the Micah house weekly to ask Marvin for financial help.  The very same day, one of the boys was told by an unthinking aunt that he was the product of a rape in which his mom was almost killed.  After that news, the boy walked around for several days as if in a trance before he was able to share with us this news that burdened him so greatly.

Our newest boy, eleven-year old Nelson, also feels the effects of his unstable home.  A slight, boy who is several pounds underweight (he looks more like an eight year-old), Nelson came to us from on of the most violent slums in Tegucigalpa.  When we picked him up at his home two weeks ago, he came only with the clothes on his back.  His mother let him go with little fanfare, saying only that it is better for him to live in the Micah Project, since she beats him when she is angry, and her boyfriend is even worse.   Her only regret about being separated from her little boy, who has never finished the first grade,  is that he will not be able to help her sell tortillas in the market.

How do we help these boys bridge the yawning divide between the two very different worlds of the Micah Home and their family homes?   Sometimes I think that our boys who have no contact with their families are better off than the ones who must daily wrestle with these issues.  Yet at the same time, I feel that these boys must be able to find their place and responsibility in their families in order to grow into the mature Christian men that God calls them to be.

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