Visiting a Different Hogar

Sorry it's been  awhile since my last post. I sprained an ankle last weekend and it's really thrown me off. I'm still hobbling around like a viejita as the kids say but getting better!

This is a post I wrote several weeks ago. It's a sort of retrospective part 2 to the post "The Prodigal," and I have to warn from the beginning that's it's pretty depressing. I want to take a few steps back and tell a little bit about what it was like to pick up the three new boys from the state-run children's home. The experience has definitely been one of the most impactful of my time here so far, and I know I'll be feeling it's repercussions for a long time. By this time, this is an old story, but it's amazing how vividly and how often my experiences there recur in my memory.

The home is part a network of state-run institutions throughout Honduras. It's meant to be an impermanent home for children who have been removed from their families or picked up from the streets until they can go to more permanent homes like Amigos. Of course, this doesn't always happen and children can end up staying in one of these institutions for much longer. One of the boys we picked up had been there for three years.

Driving up to the home was exactly like driving up to a prison. That's not an exaggeration; it's located right next door to a prison and they share the same high solid concrete wall. At first we actually drove up to the wrong door, a massive solid metal entrance that could open to let a car through. Through a small square window (the Wizard of Oz absurdly comes to mind) a guard told us that this was the prison entrance and directed us to an identical doorway a bit further down the wall. 

We drove into the compound toward a large concrete building sitting in a field of dust and pale grass. It was about three-stories high and structured around a courtyard in the center. The prison feel didn't completely go away (especially since with it's stairways to the upper levels and concrete flooring, the courtyard looked a lot like a recreation area you might see in a jail), but the inside was painted with pale greens and purples and yellows which broke up the tedium a bit and reminded me that this was a home for children. As we entered, children stared down at us from the upper levels surrounding the courtyard and called out to us. Here, the children address each other as well as adults as tío and tía so that's what we heard: a chorus of high voices shouting sharply "tía! tía!" for our attention.

A Prayer for Peace

To walk in to the Amigos de Jesús chapel yesterday between 11 and 12, it would have been difficult to believe it was full of some 25 teenaged boys and two girls, anywhere from 13 to 22 years old. You would have found the capilla in reverent silence, save for the church music serving as a background to the kids' meditations. The Amigos de Jesús family was answering Pope Francis' request for prayers for peace.

The capilla at Amigos is the second floor of the office building and it is open air. All four sides have a concrete rail and through it you can see the mountains in the distance and overlook the rest of the Amigos campus. The service began with Amy, our co-director, explaining what was happening in Syria; that it is locked in a civil war, that there is destruction everywhere, that the government used chemical weapons against its own people, that those who suffer the most are the children. She showed a short news clip with some images of the fighting in the streets. All the kids were rapt with attention.

Then two of the boys took turns reading the text of the Pope's message delivered last Sunday calling for peace (you can find the text in English here). It was a profound moment. As I listened to the words in Spanish, sitting in this open-air chapel overlooking the beauty of the Honduran countryside, I felt the force of the Church's universality in a way I never had before. Those words redounded around the world in every type of setting, in every language.

Before the time for prayer, Amy called attention to the Pope's call for peace not only in Syria, but also around the world. Honduras, though not at war, is also not at peace, she said. We must pray for the people of Syria, and for peace in our own nation, and in our own hearts.