Contradictions

I meant to blog on Wednesday but time got away from me and all of a sudden it’s Sunday! Not only that, it’s also Valentine’s Day! Here they call it El Día de Amistad, which means Day of Friendship. It’s kind of a big deal, like seriously everybody celebrates it, but it’s more common to do special stuff w your friends instead of w your significant other. Let’s just say that Hallmark would not make a killing in Honduras like they do in the States. I personally like it better this way : )

We’ve been hanging out a lot with the two couples from VCOM who are here working in the clinic, and this weekend we all went to the island of Amapala for a little R&R. It was such a great weekend, we swam in the ocean and got stung by baby jellyfish and got really interesting sunburns and a ton of mosquito bites and played with a bunch of really fun Honduran kids who live on the beach and ate incredible food for dirt cheap prices. It felt like a legit exotic island…well I guess it kind of was! I didn’t have my computer with me, so I was able to block out all school and other obligations and it was so relaxing. I couldn’t have asked for anything better!

This vacation came after a week full of some interesting events. Like I mentioned in my last post, we went to feed lunch at the dump on Wednesday. You could smell the place before you even got to it, and it was awful, like sour milk and nasty trash (pretty typical for a dump, I would think). We drove up the hill to where we were going to be feeding, past mountains and mountains of trash and debris. It seemed like the mountain itself was made out of trash. When we got to the top, it was an intense sight. We were basically on a massive plateau of garbage and there were four groups present: dogs, buzzards, cows, and people. The guy who we were there to help feed, Mike, told us that when the garbage trucks come to dump trash, all of the people and animals flock to the trucks. There is no apparent difference between the animals and people. Randomly around us there were scattered piles of random garbage that turned out to be people’s homes. What a degrading way to live, living among piles of trash and demoted to the level of animals. The feeding itself was pretty similar to what we do at the stadium, but the location on Wednesday made it more difficult for me to stomach.

The title of this post is Contradictions, and that comes into play for me in two aspects. First of all, as you’re standing on top of this mountain of garbage, you look around and realize that you also have an incredible view of God’s creation, the surrounding mountains and valleys that make up the Honduran landscape. People in the States would pay millions of dollars for a view like it, but these people get it for free and if I were in their shoes I would pay millions of dollars to be anywhere but there. It just seems so backwards. But second and more importantly, is there any worse contradiction than for smelly piles of garbage or dirty street corners to be the homes of the people God created to be His children? Humans weren’t created to live in heaps of trash, we were created for the Garden of Eden. Granted, none of us lives in the Garden of Eden, or anything remotely close to it for that matter, but a home made out of cardboard and used tires isn’t exactly the next best thing.

I know this is getting long but it’s what’s on my heart tonight. I don’t want people back home to feel like this is an issue that is far removed from the States, that it only affects people in third world countries like Honduras. Go downtown, go to the soup kitchens and to the street corners. The poverty of God’s precious children is all around us. How long will we stand by and let the contradiction remain the way it is, when God is calling to us to bring justice to the people He has created?

Isaiah 58:6-7