But first, meet Bessy and Carlos. Bessie is one of the girls that has grown up with the family of Nelly and Alvin.
She is married to Carlos and they take care of Bessie's younger siblings, one of which is Brittany (the SWEETEST little girl that Erin and I absolutely fell in love with...when I bring the girls back to Honduras M & L are going to have such a blast with her!!!)
This is sweet Brittany.
Anyway, Bessie buys food on Wednesdays and she spends Thursday's preparing all of the food and packaging it. For this week, she prepared 186 plates of tortillas filled with beans, cheese, basically like an enchilada. 186 of them.
After we finished our dinner as a team, we piled in our van and headed toward downtown around 730. Alvin said there were about 9 stops he COULD make but we would just have to see. We stopped at the first place along the river and some children came out. They all knew Alvin and they were grateful for the food then they went away. While we drove to the next spot, there were a few homeless folks sleeping on the streets that we would stop and hand food to then be on our way. The next stop was a little difficult, because we saw several young people with bottles and cups with glue...they were drinking that. They were certainly not in their right mind. But they were grateful for the food as well as the visit from Alvin and the American people he had brought to give them food. One of the men there, 22 years old, told us he had been seeing Alvin on the streets since he as 7 years old. (Alvin has been doing this ministry for about 19 years.) we piled in the van and what we were about to see I could never have prepared myself for nor will I ever be able to erase the images from my memory.
We traveled to an intersection from the downtown area where at the top of a hill where two roads met was a dumpster. Here, the Wendy's, Little Ceasars, and the fast food chicken joint sent their garbage. And in the garbage, were little kids, digging, as if they were flies swarmming, and filling bags. It was here that we actually ran out of food. And we were unable to feed anymore people. 186 people were given food this night....and yet in just 45 minutes there were many many many more who remained without. We saw one girl who crawled in after the pizza place dumped their stuff and she found a whole pizza. I'm not sure sure if she cried tears of joy or what, but she sobbed. There were other children who walked up to you, and looked into your eyes, and you could look deep into theirs and see the hurt and the need.
For a moment we took a minute to chat about what we were looking at and some of the children ran up to us. The poverty was striking. The need was large. And we had basically done all we could do to help for the time being. While talking I starred at a little boy who meticulously gathered chicken bones and put them in a plastic bag that would be his meals for the week while another boy gathered breadsticks from one bag to another and carry them away. This, friends, began the water works of my tears that I have yet began to control.
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