This Sunday started like any other here at Emmanuel, the day beautiful as the children with their best clothes and ready to praise the Lord. A new team from Macon, Ga. arrived as the team from San Antonio, Tx. left. A good sermon by their pastor and wonderful music started the day right! Time with the kids is always welcomed. We had planned to take our 2 favorite girls, Daniella and Vanessa to lunch at the tienda at Emmanuel, along with Vanessa's younger brother and Sinia, our new sponsor child and her little sister Brenda. We wanted to take Daniella's sisters but I was afraid that would be too many kids to handle, so I said we would make another trip later with just them. We began to round up the kids with the last stop at the little girls. I went to tell the big girl supervising the yard that we were taking them and coming back to the group saw Daniella holding Sinia and Brenda, hugging and kissing them, which is not unusual here because the children do love one another and care for each other but this was somehow different. Daniella was crying and the little girls were so happy. Daniella said she thought we couldn't take her sisters! I had no idea that Sinia and Brenda were her sisters. Family here at Emmanuel is so important and keeping a sense of it is something for which the children here cling. Being able to spend the day with these two families to combine with ours to make one big family was really wonderful.
Each one of the children here have a story. While Emmanuel is an orphanage, all the children are not orphans. Some are, having lost parents to drugs and alcohol, murder, gang warfare, the slow starvation and related diseases we know collectively as extreme poverty. But some of these children have a parent. Some families couldn't afford another mouth to feed so they sent them here. Some wanted an education for their child not available in all parts of Honduras so they sent them here. Some were failures as parents for a multitude of reasons so the children were removed from the homes and sent here. Their may be some, but I have never heard of any child being turned away from here. The folks here at Emmanuel love and nurture these children as if they were their own. I have never seen a more dedicated staff at work anywhere.
Since my first trip here, I have always been in awe of what is done here. How can so few people manage to care for so many children? Every child here feels love from the first minute of their arrival. Each staff member, no matter what their jobs are, go about them with love, caring and kindness. And that is not a typo, I mean jobs because they each have 3 to 4 jobs plus they have their own families. Every thing they do is done with Christian love and it shows whenever you interact with the children. The children tell you that they don't want what you have, they want you to have what they have! They want and pray for you to have the same relationship with the Lord that they have. They love to write you letters and in them they say that they are praying for you and that our Lord has a plan for us and we must open our hearts to the Lord. I spent a life time listening to some of the great preachers and they never were able to connect me to the Holy Spirit like these tiny Evangelists here. I know of no one who has come to Emmanuel and left untouched by these children. You are forever changed and in very positive ways. All of your priorities are reset.
This is not to say that all are happy endings here. Some children rebel against the rigid structure that must exist here to make it work. Some run away. Many who age out of here and leave don't face a rosy future. Honduras is one of our hemisphere's poorest countries. They are few natural resources, decades of corrupt government policies, high unemployment and gang warfare. Drugs are becoming more of a problem. David and Lydia's goal has always been to bring these children up with the Lord and to to send them out to spread his good news. I believe in that they have been extremely successful.
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