|
Do you want the challenge of your life? Here's what to do: choose fifteen drugged out street kids and teens, take their drugs away from them, enclose them in a room for several hours, and try to teach them something. Now, imagine yourself doing it when you were sixteen years-old! Sound difficult? Just ask Micah boys Jarvin, Oscar, David, Noel and Cristino, who have been volunteering at a crisis center for street kids for the last five months as part of our leadership training program. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, the boys work with ten-to-twenty kids who walk into the crisis center from the streets. Most of the kids come in high on industrial glue…and most come ready for battle! Our boys come back from the crisis center each day with their clothes rumpled, their hair mussed up, and a slightly dazed look on their haggard faces. “I had to break up three fights today!” sighs one. “I had to chase Roberto for twenty minutes to get the crayons away from him,” laments another. When I asked one of our boys if he was like that when he was on the streets, he replied with an impish grin: “No, I was worse!” Many street kids in Tegucigalpa leave their homes for the streets at the age of five or six. Not only can they not write their names, they have neither learned basic life skills, such as how to bathe, how to eat a meal at a table, and how to sit still for thirty minutes to receive a lesson. What they may have learned about life skills in their homes soon becomes blurred by the new survival skills they must learn to get through each day on the streets. To rescue them from the streets is to start from the beginning, and it takes patience, dedication and imagination. According to our boys, Emerson is one of the toughest street boys to work with at the crisis center. A fair-skinned, tow-headed boy, 12 year-old Emerson looks more like he's eight. I often see him downtown clinging precariously to the bumpers of trucks and buses, enjoying the thrill of a free ride while inhaling his yellow glue. That "need-for-speed" seems to carry over to the crisis center where, in Jarvin's words: "When you need to find Emerson, just look in the places where he's not supposed to be." As with most street kids, Emerson finds it difficult to adapt to a structured environment after years of living by his own rules. But our boys have found out that if you can capture their imagination, if you can entrance them in an irresistibly interesting activity, they will begin to channel some of that creative energy they put into surviving on the streets. Emerson got excited one day by an activity that Cristino planned in which he had to cut out magazine pictures that had objects beginning with the letter "M". Two hours later, he had filled his posterboard with pictures and had written the names of each one with Cristino's help. Two hours of concentrated effort seemed like a huge victory for Emerson and for his teacher, Cristino! The pastor who runs the crisis center, after gaining confidence in our boys, has given them a lot of responsibility. For a couple hours each day, our guys are the only ones in charge. In the beginning, I thought they were going to throw in the towel. But as we encouraged them to use their creativity and leadership skills, slowly they began to gain confidence in their abilities to work with the kids. Last Friday, Jarvin burst into the Micah house saying, “Michael, I had double-duty today. I was an educator and acting- director of the center!” It appears that the two adults in charge of the crisis center had a conference to attend, leaving our boys in charge! And apart from two-or-three boys who were especially high on glue, all eighteen kids participated in the educational activity (making 3-D geometrical shapes), the Bible activity, and the science experiment (making tornadoes in Coke bottles) that our boys planned. The boys came back to the Micah House with their confidence buoyed by their success that day. While each one of the boys has developed a tremendous amount of leadership skills through this experience, sixteen-year-old Jarvin seems to be particularly impacted. He wrote in a recent journal entry: “I thank God for giving me this experience. It has helped me to grow as a leader and to serve these kids who need so much help.” Perhaps Jarvin has internalized this experience so much because of his frequent contact with his brother Darwin, whom I’ve written about in past letters. In the three years that I have known Darwin on the streets, I have never seen him without his glue. Last week, we ran across Darwin near the national Congress. Jarvin decided not to wake him as he slept on the concrete sidewalk underneath a hamburger restaurant awning. When his older brother tried to slip a bag of chips under his shirt, Darwin jumped up suddenly, with the instincts of someone who knows how to avoid street dangers. Upon recognizing his brother, Darwin slumped back down onto the concrete, put his hands over his eyes and refused to talk with him. Jarvin begged Darwin to enter one of the crisis centers in the city and to leave the drugs, but Darwin simply pretended to fall asleep again, without ever saying a word to Jarvin.
It’s hard to know exactly what these two boys feel about each other, boys who fled their home together before they were old enough to start first grade. What does Darwin think about when he sees his well-dressed older brother kneel down on the sidewalk to talk with him? And what conflicting emotions does Jarvin deal with each time he sees his brother wasting away both physically and mentally? Their relationship certainly has something to do with the reason
that Jarvin dedicates so much of himself to the kids in the crisis center.
He may not be able to rescue Darwin, but God can certainly use him mightily
in the lives of many other street kids. And it is easy to see the
impact that he is having on the kids in the center. He recently used
his acting skills to teach the boys of the crisis center a skit called
"street kids" which they performed very successfully at a local church.
The future is not something that most poor kids can afford to think about. In order to help our boys and other poor children and teens prepare for the future, the Micah Project is launching two new efforts: a community library and a college scholarship fund. Access to books is almost nil for the majority of Tegucigalpa's kids, and access to a higher education is an even more remote possibility. We have already begun the planning and design for our community library, which we will open in September in a multi-purpose space in the Micah home. We hope to develop four aspects of the community library: a children’s section, a teen and adult literature and reference section, a reference section for people in Christian ministry and outreach, and an “electronic section”, with access to internet and CD-Roms. Thanks to friends such as John and Charly Potts from Colorado, who brought two suitcases full of Spanish books with them when they came to Honduras last month, we have a small but ever-growing selection of books for the library! One of the first projects of the library will be a reading club. We will invite kids from the poor barrios around the Micah Home, and kids directly from the streets to come to the library two afternoons a week to participate in a variety of literature-and-Bible-based activities. In addition to these activities, designed to put books into their hands and turn them on to reading, we also want to establish a reading room where teen-age and adult students can come to research topics that they are studying in school. Our second investment in the future of these youth is a college scholarship fund. We will soon be announcing the creation of an endowment fund that will subsidize the Micah boys’ college education when they graduate in the next few years. In the meantime, we would like to offer scholarships to teens from other poor homes who would otherwise not be able to attend college. We have decided next year to focus on teens from the Villa Linda Miller reconstruction project, which we started in 1998 for 161 families who lost their homes during hurricane Mitch (see www.villalindamiller.thinkhost.com). We have identified our first participant in the college scholarship fund. Darwin Pavon will graduate from high school this November. I met his family two days after hurricane Mitch had destroyed their home and possessions in 1998. Since then, I have watched as he simultaneously finished his last two years of high school and built his family’s home in Villa Linda Miller. Darwin and I have talked at great length about his future. He would like to go to the National University to study medicine, but without a scholarship, he will have to get a job to support his family. Their situation was made much worse last month after the tragic death of his dad in an automobile accident, leaving a widow and seven kids between the ages of nineteen and eight months (Darwin, age 17, is the second-oldest). Since tuition fees are nominal at the National University, I believe that Darwin can buy his books, support himself, and help support his family on a scholarship for three hundred dollars a month. I will send you more information about these new efforts in our mid-year report. In the meantime, I appreciate your ongoing prayers and financial support. Please know that God uses them in powerful ways! As I finish this letter, the boys come back into the Micah House from the crisis center. I can tell from their voices that they are happy it's Friday. A frazzled-looking Cristino comes into my office and says that eight new boys showed up from the streets today and they caused so much trouble that he was ready to walk out the door and quit. "Why didn't you quit?" I ask, somewhat bemused to be hearing this complaint from a boy who was no angel himself just a couple of years ago. He thought for a minute and then replied, "If I give up on these boys, who else will be there for them?" Spoken with the persistence and dedication of a true leader. Thank you for providing a foundation for these boys' future! Sincerely,
|
