As I've been getting ready to go I revisited a piece of writing from my trip to Honduras last year. I can't help feeling that it might seem overly dramatic at times and completely blinded by my cultural bias, but I do remember it expressing how I felt when I returned. However I feel about the description now, ultimately, I still feel the same way about my conclusions. I've share this with many of you before, but have posted it below for whoever else.
Reflections on Honduras
Carved into the rugged highlands of Honduras is the capital of Tegucigalpa. This city is a maze of districts tucked in narrow valleys and up steep winding roads. The crisscross of streets which the city’s millions of taxi drivers navigate with an unsurpassed ferocity is an impenetrable labyrinth to me filled with diesel fumes and exhaust. The seemingly random layout of the city would make a civil engineer’s stomach turn in the states. It is the reflection of a culture that weathers change rather than planning for it, and how could they? The country has endured hundreds of uprisings and rebellions since it gained its independence from Spain, with the States helping to overturn the government on multiple occasions at the urging of the big fruit companies. Yet the people continue on almost impassively. They adapt; they improvise; they keep going at the same unrushed pace they always have.
The ranch I spent most of my time at is set away from this, about an hour outside the city to the north. It is both an inspiring testament to what can be accomplished when people’s hearts share the same goal, and, at times, a tragic reminder of the brokenness of our world. The ranch is home to between 300 and 400 youths at any given time and employs a small army of support staff. It is an impressive place with over 2,000 acres containing livestock, gardens, cornfields, workshops, two medical clinics, a western style surgery center, a school, an HIV home, an elderly care home, and more projects and buildings that I never had time to see. “We just keep pushing,” the assistant director, Ross,explained to me. “If you set what some would call ‘unreasonable goals’ you find that your results are higher than what they would be if you were more sensible about it.” I agree with him, but I know that even if every project was fully funded and every dream fulfilled it would still be just a band aid on a gaping sore. Still, are we not meant to be a light shining in the darkness, even if the darkness is vast and overwhelming?
And the darkness is vast here. Even with the best efforts of the most dedicated staff members the kitchen still runs out of food, the kids still can be just as terrible as they can be cute, and the bureaucracy when trying to accomplish something can be nothing short of maddening. Outside the ranch life is much harder. There is no middle class here that I have seen, not to speak of anyways. It is the wealthy and then the different levels of poverty which divide people. There are those who make a living wage at an okay job. Others scrape by on a small piece of land. And then there are the destitute, the people who have built their homes next to the dump to make their scavenging more convenient. This is no different than any other developing country Isuppose, but it is the stark contrast of beautiful hills and a good growingseason that sets Honduras apart in my mind. In a place where there could beenough for all, greed and foolishness has deprived almost everyone.
Then there is Hospital Escuela, a ten story tower near the city center with 30 years of dirt caked onto its outside and paint barely clinging to its inside. It is,I had more than one person tell me, where people are brought to die. Like everything in Honduras this place is a mix of the best and the worst of humanity. It is at once an incredible demonstration of human ingenuity and of our inadequacy. In the pediatric orthopedic department, where I spent most of my two visits to the hospital, many of the stools, gurneys, and beds where held together by casting material. While getting a tour by one of the residents, Dr.Merlin, who volunteers at the ranch, I stepped aside to allow a child to pass by in a wheel chair frame with a white plastic patio chair bolted to it in place of the original seat. This remains one of dominant images in my head of Honduras. It epitomizes a culture that won’t let anything go to waste, whose‘recycling’ is simply a matter of practicality and survival and not environmental integrity (truly a luxury of the west). “We don’t have the right tools, but we do all that we can with what have,” Merlin explained to me, and I believed him. Merlin and his colleagues are some of the most impressive people I have met. The first time I met him he was all smiles and energy despite having been working for two days straight with only a brief couple hours of sleep at his apartment a few blocks from the hospital. He took Tiffany, one of the volunteer nurses, and me on a tour of his unit and introduced us to some of his patients, including a young deaf boy who lit up when he saw him. The boy couldn't sign, but Merlin understood him perfectly and the two of them joked and laughed as we looked around.
The unit wasn't much, a few large rooms with 10-14 beds in each, but you could sense Merlin’s pride in what they were doing to help these kids. He talked us through a couple of the cases ranging from bone infections to growth defects.It was overwhelming, but I heard the urgency and commitment in Merlin’s voice and I knew that they could not be under better care.
I came back to Hospital Escuela a week later to follow Merlin during one of his surgical rotations. The patient was around ten years old and had unilateral hypertrophy of the limbs (his leg and arm where growing dramatically faster on one side of his body than the other). The operating room was not too much different from any other room in the hospital with faded cement walls and the same red stone tile that you find on every frequently washed surface else wherein Honduras. The swinging double doors made of beat up wood came to rest with a two inch gap that the nurses constantly adjusted closed as people came and left to maintain as much sterility as possible.
I was put in charge of operating the C-arm, a portable x-ray machine designed on a C-shaped rotatable axis.This, however, involved little more than pushing a button for each shot since the other features of the machine had long since broken. It was not the only well used piece of equipment in the room. Merlin explained that whenever possible they reused pins, screws, and whatever could be safely sterilized from previous operations. Halfway through the operation one of the two specialist spent 10 minutes taking apart and fixing the hand drill used to set the pins while Merlin and one of the nurses worked diligently to free the end of a pin from a screw which had been used one too many times. All I could think is how any surgeon in the states would have stormed out in protest under these conditions, but these three doctors were nothing short of jovial. They joked with me, using the opportunity to practice their English, and took the time to explain each step of the surgery. While removing staples from a previous failed surgery one of the specialists looked up at me with a goofy grin and a surgical tool in his hand and exclaimed, “It’s like going fishing!” The surgery was a success,but was much longer than anticipated; the price of not having the right tools.Unfortunately that meant the other surgeries for the day had to be rescheduled,a common issue here. This boy was supposed to be operated on the week before,but the hospital was without water for a day-and-a-half, another common problem, so the surgery was postponed.
As I left the hospital I wandered through the Emergency Department waiting area. In modern hospitals in the states we do our best to make these areas as clean and tranquil as possible with soft lighting, moderately comfortable furniture, and maybe a TV quietly tuned to the local news in the background. The goal is to reduce anxiety, to provide a sense of calm and control for people who are having one of the worst days of their lives. We soften the reality because,quite frankly, we are a soft people. There, though, in that lobby was the truth of the matter for a people who are tough enough to take it. It was busy with private ambulances wheeling in back-boarded patients (there is not really a public EMS system here), med students bustling to and from their classes, and family members searching for stretchers to wheel in their relatives from the parking lot. With all that, though, it was not the chaos you would expect. The staff moved with a deliberateness that spoke of how used to this pace they were, and the patients, resigned to the fact that they may have a while to wait, bore their pain with an impressive silence and dignity. These people are used to hardship. They know the true meaning of perseverance. We,unfortunately, do not, which I know personally after a summer of pouring pain medicine into people who had no real injury. I wished I had all those drugs back in that moment so that I could help the people who truly did need it, but would not ask for it.
I've had a few days now since returning to think about what I want to take away from this experience. Should I allow my frustration to build over how incredibly inequitable this world is? That an accident of birth determines whether your worries center around what to wear today or if you’ll have enough to eat? Maybe I should be angry at my country for all the injustice we have done to this place. Or maybe I should be driven to fix this problem, to throw all of my heart into righting the injustices I saw. But I don’t believe in any of this. I don’t believe in accidents of birth, though they may seem radically unfair to me. I can get as frustrated as I want about my privilege and other’s poverty,but that is simply self-righteous ingratitude for all that God has given me.The truth of the matter is I’m not sure I believe the world is “fixable” and that any efforts I make towards peace and justice with my heart set on mending it are, as Solomon said, vanity.
Rather, I believe that the world is an opportunity…not a problem. In each injustice and every inequality there is a chance for redemption, a chance for God’s love to shine through. God told us that when we feed the hungry, we feed him, when we clothe the naked, we cloth him, and when we visit the sick and the prisoners, we visit him. Each moment in life is a chance, a choice even, to either be a redemptive force or to uphold the sinfulness of the world. I am learning to accept the world’s brokenness instead of being incensed by it. All that I believe, after all, is founded on a God who let his son fall victim to our sinfulness so that he could use it for our redemption. There are many subtle differences here, things that I don’t have the skill to flush out in writing, but I believe that for me and my calling it comes down to this: Brokenness is not a problem to be fixed, but rather a foundation for God’s redemptive work.
I think back to the boy in the patio chair on wheels. Where many of us would have seen trash somebody saw something ingenious, something worth saving for the purpose of blessing another. So the question is what is the rubbish in and around you and me that God is waiting to turn into something beautiful to bless others? I pray that we would have eyes to see it otherwise we will miss an amazing experience.
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