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One thing we do well at the Micah Project is celebrate the big turning points in the lives of our young men. The reason for this is one of balance: for most of their young lives they were told that they were street trash, no more worthy of love and support than the dogs and rats that scavenge through Tegucigalpa’s refuse. To counteract that mentality, we loudly trumpet their achievements and milestones, teaching these beloved children of God that their lives are worth celebrating. Lately, we have had a lot to celebrate! On one magical weekend in mid-November, five of our young men graduated from the sixth grade and four became our second group to graduate from high school! This occasion of double blessing called for double celebration. Fortunately, we weren’t the only celebrators around! Many of our friends from the U.S. as well as members of our board of directors made the trek from Houston, Washington and St. Louis to join us in this special weekend. Thankfully, those who came are expert partiers! Can you imagine what must have been running through the heads of our graduates? “Wow, these people came from another country just to celebrate my graduation!” Certainly, these beloved friends helped our guys to feel loved and highly esteemed! To put the magnitude of these events in perspective, allow me to give you an illustration from both graduations. Darwin Matute was one of our sixth grade graduates. For those of you who have looked at the “street kid” page on our website, you’ve seen pictures of Darwin’s previous life. He spent seven years completely immersed in street life, getting high on yellow glue on a daily basis and living his life completely outside the parameters of society. It seemed that, when we first began to have contact with him on the streets in 2001, his humanity had receded so far in into the interior of himself that it had become entirely irretrievable. For the first few months after entering the Micah House, Darwin was coming down off his drugs so hard that he could barely open his eyes. The few times he did open them, we wondered what was really going on behind them. Fast forward to November 12, 2005. Darwin stood up before our crowd of partiers, not as someone who was able to squeak by in his education, but as the best student of his sixth grade class! This young man, who didn’t even know how to hold a pencil in 2001, held an average of ninety-five percent or higher in every single one of his classes this year. Those previously dead eyes now held the pride of accomplishment in them. As the sixth grade graduation ceremony wound down, Erick’s sister rose to sing a song in their honor. The song she chose was called “Hombres de Valor.” The chorus went, “Men of honor are men who need God, men who keep their promises, who open paths for God’s love. They are men of commitment, faithful to their calling for the Lord’s cause.” Who would have thought that these words could have applied to Darwin Matute, the street waif? Yet as Darwin rose to receive his diploma and as he stood before the crowd and shared words of gratitude to them, we realized that these words are especially powerful when applied to this young man that God rescued from the pit. The night after our sixth grade graduation, Danilo, Edwin, Miguel and Oscar celebrated their high school graduation. As one of the biggest landmarks in these young lives, this particular celebration required more planning! Renting a hall in a hotel for the service, purchasing new suits, choosing a cake for a hundred people, arranging for flowers…all of the details spoke of a GRAND EVENT. Yet the import of this night was not in the details, but in the lives that were celebrated. The significance of this event can best be expressed in Miguel’s own words. In accordance with our tradition of celebrating lives, we consider all of our guys to be valedictorians. Thus, they all give a valedictory address at their graduation! When Miguel got up to the microphone, I think many people wondered what was going to come out of his mouth. Of all of our guys, Miguel is the one most likely to hold his own counsel. When groups come to work with us throughout the year, he tends to stay in the shadows a bit. He has not been one to open his heart to others until he can be sure of their trustworthiness. That is why many people were taken by surprise when Miguel stood behind the microphone in that hall and spoke for twenty minutes (in perfect English) of his greatest sorrows and greatest hopes! He started by saying “I really wanted my dad to be here tonight, but it’s not possible. He’s an alcoholic, and I never lived with him; didn’t even ever talk with him. I feel sad for him.” Miguel went on to talk about how he was raised by his grandmother, but ended up on the streets when she died in 1998. He explained that when he was on the street, he did not think he would have a future. The question he would ask himself was: “Am I going to live like this forever?” At the end of his speech, Miguel said, “Here I am in my graduation, thanks to God and to all the people that have been used by God. Now I have goals for my future. I just want to finish my race full of happiness, so that other people can feel the same way that I do through what I do, through my actions.” Little does Miguel know, for those of us who have prayed for him and invested in his life for the past six years, just hearing him open his heart in public thanksgiving to God brought us tremendous joy and happiness. May he continue to be a bearer of God’s joy far into the future! As Miguel spoke the night of his graduation, a few children from the city dump sat in the audience. These are kids who have been a part of our educational program at the city dump for the last two years. Though they are just beginning the same process that Darwin and Miguel went through, our ministry coordinator Jeony wanted to bring them to the graduation to begin to plant the seeds for their future. Five years from now, we may be gathering to celebrate the graduation of twenty or thirty young people whose lives seemed destined to be lived out among the trash of the city dump! And perhaps that’s another purpose of our extravagant celebrations. It’s not just to celebrate achievements of the recent past, it’s really to spur on hope for a coming future. As more and more of our young men graduate, we hope that it will begin to seem almost routine. “Sure, street kids and children of the dump are graduating from high school! Why not? It happens all the time at the Micah Project!” That’s the attitude that we would love to create. Although it will never be anything short of a miracle, we hope that it’s a miracle that becomes overwhelmingly redundant in the years to come! Even now, just a couple of weeks after their graduation, we are already busily helping our young men to plan for their future. Just as our first group of graduates ended up in universities in Honduras, Missouri, and (soon to be) Costa Rica, this current group is also looking at various options. Please pray for discernment for them! As we work with them in this great time of transition, we pray that you would also consider supporting our college scholarship fund to help make their big goals a reality. At the same time, we ask that you would continue to support our operational budget as we continue to bring the light of God’s hope to young lives here in Honduras! Even as we speak of the miracles that God is working in the lives of our young men, we also consider each one of you to be miracles! God has used your prayers and support in remarkable ways to do the (humanly) impossible in these young lives. I hope that the testimony of their lives will be cause for you to celebrate as well! Just as we celebrate these incredible lives in the here and now, we know that there is even a bigger party going on in heaven because of what God is doing in each of them! Your fellow party-goer, Michael Miller Click here to see a short video of Miguel’s graduation speech!
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