Paul Myhill's Blog

Resurrecting an Old Project in Nicaragua

PROJECT PROFILE:

Poverty is widespread in Nicaragua. In a country that has massive unemployment and with almost 50% of the population living under the poverty line, many families are struggling to survive, leaving their children extremely vulnerable to gangs, traffickers and drug dealers. Many children are simply abandoned - left to fend for themselves on dangerous streets and city dumps.

Understanding the link between these abandoned children and the persistent poverty cycle, Verbo, a denomination of 14 churches, reaches out to these children by providing feeding programs, schools and homes. Verbo is also building a model farm and agricultural training program for at-risk youth to provide valuable vocational training, Christian discipleship and safe housing. This farm will not only provide the youth with job and life skills, but will be an important source of income for the project itself and the homes the Verbo Church operates. For the farm project, Verbo is currently renovating an existing building that World Orphans constructed almost 15 years ago. The cost for the renovation is approximately $30,000.

NICARAGUA COUNTRY PROFILE:

Number of Single Orphans* (one parent lost): 113,000

Number of Double Orphans* (both parents lost): 3,900

*not including abandoned, sold or trafficked children

Population: 5,891,199

Average Income: $410 per person

NETWORK PARTNER:

CONTRIBUTIONS:

To give to this project please view our giving options (link below) and write "NIC-Nueva Guinea" in the online memo field or on the memo line of your check:

Giving Options

Broken Heart

It was a million dollar view. The wooded property on a hillside overlooks Guatemala City. Volcanoes dot the horizon and add further majesty to the scene. One would expect the rich of society to be dwelling on such a plot. A mansion could have suitably left its footprint on the land, nestled in comfort and grandiosity. Grecian columns would have matched the noble girth of trees. Rock gardens and ponds would have complimented natural terraces of foliage and sloping outcroppings. It would have been a fine estate, one of enduring legacy, one fit for a national leader or captain of industry.

Instead, a stark and underfunded Catholic orphanage sits on the land. Manicured lawns have given way to bare dirt. Grand vistas and pools of leisure have given way to makeshift playground equipment of old tires, splintered wood and rusty rebar.

The children, covered in dirt and dust, looked every bit the orphan, although they were officially part of the rescued statistics. Scabs and sores bore further evidence to ongoing lack and need.

And then there was the little boy, the one without a name.

He was purple. He has a heart problem that prevents his extremities from getting adequate oxygenation. Is he still alive even today, a week after our visit? He’s just another boy in institutional care with an issue that his caretakers are poorly equipped or resourced to solve.

The thing that struck me is that this boy, discarded for being damaged or incomplete, is worth much more than any regal manor or stately home. The things of greatest value are already occupying this prime piece of property. They are the land’s greatest heritage, its greatest legacy.

Instead of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop the property with an architectural statement for the generations, isn’t it worth a couple of thousand dollars to leave a more lasting generational impact...to fix one little boy’s heart?

Pop-Pop-Pop

We had just turned in for the evening. The four of us were sharing a dorm room in a seminary within walking distance from the city dump. The surrounding neighborhoods were cordoned off by concrete barricades, presumably to prevent unknowing persons from driving into the wrong area and to hinder the escape of vehicles involved in drive-by shootings. We were told that even the police dared not go into some of these communities.

Pop-pop-pop. The sound was close and distinctive. Unlike the resonance of small explosions that most Hollywood sound editors use, the blast of real gunfire is one of staccato echoes piercing the quiet. Pop-pop-pop-pop.

Minutes later we heard the sirens, followed by a rapid volley of shots. As quickly as it began, it was over.

Guatemala’s three-decade civil war fostered a culture of violence and left almost 200,000 people dead. By most accounts, that many juveniles are now part of vicious street gangs, causing the country to be one of the most violent in the world. The homicide rate is astronomically high, almost ten times that of the United States.

Three people were killed in our neighborhood during our short stay in Guatemala City. The week before our arrival, a shootout in the housing development next to one of our church projects resulted in the death of four gang members who had kidnapped a six year-old girl for ransom. Days prior, they had invaded her home, murdered her parents, and were demanding money from the extended family. Multiple drivers were also executed on their routes while we were in the country. In response to bus companies’ failure to pay protection money for driving through gang territories, the drivers are routinely killed by these wayward youth, to the tune of dozens of deaths each year.

In this decade after the civil war, Guatemala remains a country beset by savagery and unrest, this time at the hands of fatherless youth – either orphaned or effectively so because of absent fathers.

The Chain (part two)

Jullio was brought to his current home by a woman claiming to be his mother. She signed a document asserting that she was abandoning him to their care due to extreme poverty and an inability to care for an impaired child. The home soon figured out that the woman was not who she claimed to be and that Julio was, in effect, dumped into their care as a result of a trafficking deal gone bad.

Born for cash, Julio now inhabits this world as a child struggling for identity and answers. This apparently triggers anger to well up in him, causing difficulty for the home and for the other children who are now part of his family. Those children receive less attention and care as the family devotes additional time and energy to address Julio’s special needs.

It is indeed a chain – a wicked one where every link tugs and pulls at others. Despite much love and counseling Julio may never feel whole. And the home’s other children, rightly or wrongly, may never feel that they got the attention they deserved because of his presence.

Lives are not things to be tinkered with. And they’re certainly not to be initiated for trade. Perhaps Julio’s mother rationalized her actions by believing that he would be raised in a wealthy American home. Maybe she figured that he would cast an unseen legacy, as a child that would find knowledge and prosperity that greatly surpasses her own.

She got it wrong...to a degree.

If not for the church, Julio might have been sold as a slave laborer or, far worse, as a sex toy for a rich Guatemalan pedophile. He could have just as easily been left on the pavement, like other children we have encountered throughout Central America. As a street child with a disability, Julio would have left a far worse legacy that his mother could have ever imagined. Her baby boy, the fruit of her womb, would have suffered abuse upon abuse...while the money in her pocket had long since vanished.

The Chain (part one)

Although we were told he has violent tendencies, Julio presented himself as a jovial and pleasant young boy. He stroked and tugged at my arm while continuously begging to have his picture taken. His broad smile was comprised of a mouthful of crooked teeth framed by parenthetical dimples. Just eight years old, he lives with fourteen other children at a church home we funded a few years ago near Guatemala City.

Julio was bred for a business transaction. His mother received money to get pregnant on the condition that she would turn over the newborn to a crime ring that specialized in sourcing children for international adoption. Sometimes these women collaborated with their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes they were prostitutes that used unprotected sex to score a bigger payday. And sometimes they were conveniently impregnated by members of the crime syndicates. In all cases, poverty drove their decision to turn womb from incubator to factory.

As agreed, Julio’s mother relinquished her infant to an intermediary that would temporarily raise him before his sale to a home for ‘orphaned and abandoned’ children. There he would stay until a lucrative adoption could be arranged.

Julio’s intermediary owners soon began to suspect that he might have some sort of disability. Once confirmed, they were unable to pass him down the supply chain. The final organization wouldn’t take him. He was damaged goods with a no-return policy.

Children of the Dump (part two)

During that first visit, children younger than six were working either independently or alongside their families to scratch morsels out of crumpled cans and cups, constantly beating off the competition of macro and micro-winged pests. Shacks made of rusty razor-edged tin, warped boards, and ripped tarps dotted the landscape of fermenting garbage mounds and craters. The children were covered in filth; it was etched into their skins and psyches. Ragged t-shirts and sweatpants were mere excuses for threads to suspend grime from gaunt bodies. Fibers were saturated with fetid sauces, drippings and smears. Little feet, often bare or inserted into dilapidated shoes or flip-flops, squished and crunched across mounds of multi-colored options and impediments. Each step could yield either treasures or treachery.

This was no place for a child. This was no life for a child.

Very few families and homeless kids live in the Guatemala City dump now. A giant landslide of refuse took dozens of lives. Eighteen bodies were never found, left to decompose within the piles they once plied. A fifty-foot wall of tumbling trash served as both executioner and embalmer. Now, rag-picker homesteads have been moved to the outskirts and curious missionaries like me have to observe from surrounding outcroppings and waste-strewn hills.

Children of the Dump (part one)

The graveyard is at least ten city blocks long and five or six city blocks wide. Mausoleum after mausoleum lines a grid work of streets that cut through the expansive cemetery of above-ground tombs. Most of the crypts are very elaborate, reminding me of latter-day versions of the carved sarcophagi in the necropolis of Hierapolis, Turkey, where the Apostle Philip was executed. These more recent vestiges do indeed show wear and tear themselves from the battering of tropical storms and the chiseling of homeless day laborers who find shelter and employment in the sprawling city of the dead.

People of lesser means are laid in multistory sepulchers adorned with colorful epitaphs and creeping plants. Some of these stacked vaults have been bashed in, and the remains removed, due to families’ inability to pay the regular maintenance fee. Rusty metal barrels ominously sit next to open graves, presumably to transport the former occupants to no-rent areas…or perhaps to the adjoining dump.

Large black vultures circle the edges of the cemetery, marking the boundary where interred trash merges with interred bodies. I stood on an outcropping, a place where these filthy beasts roosted on monochromatic crypts devoid of pomp and circumstance. A scene out of an Agatha Christie movie, swarms of birds perched on dead trees and equally-dead tombs while their brothers and cousins filled the air with the constant whooshing and whomping of large wings in motion. The morbid foreground panorama is placed against a background of trash and slums that reach to the horizon.

The stench of wet vulture droppings is mixed with the stomach-wrenching odor of decaying waste, hauled in by a continual line of trucks weaving in from the city’s compacted neighborhoods of three million residents.

Some of those residents were directly below us, sifting through the fresh refuse swarming with maggots and flies, looking for items of perceived value and sorting recyclables into piles of future subsistence income.

The last time I was in the Guatemala City dump was quite a few years ago, but just a few years removed from the country’s thirty-six year civil war, the longest in the Americas I’m told. Tensions were still high and wounds were still raw. The images of families working through piles of waste, in a country where many people had been laid waste, were disconcerting, to say the least.

To be continued...

Would You Press the Button? (part two)

I see the button as an allegory, a metaphor of sorts.

The fact of the matter is that we press that button every day.

As we go about our daily lives of comfort and excess, without consideration of how our choices and actions might impact others, we adversely affect ‘strangers’ the world over.

When we buy a new bathroom rug because the last one is apparently out of style, we keep an eight year-old boy, Rajan, chained to a loom in Nepal.

When we pick up a latte from our favorite barista, we fuel a conglomerate that forces Juan, a poor Costa Rican coffee grower, to sell at prices far below what would allow him to afford that same cup of coffee for himself.

When we buy the latest fancy T-Shirt with gold embossing at XYZ Casuals, we rob Ajay from ever leaving the cotton plantation that holds him and his sisters in perpetual bondage in South India.

When we go on an exotic spa vacation to Southeast Asia, we entrap Isra, a fifteen year-old Thai girl from the impoverished hill tribes, in a world of daily violation and exploitation.

When we visit that adult Website that our teachers warned us about, we enable pornographers to imprison a scared teenage girl, Imana, in a Burundian hotel room for three days, robbing her of her innocence and privacy.

When we choose to adopt a child from a country with a less-than-reputable child-placement program, we cause Esmeralda to reluctantly give up her new baby girl in Latin America.

When we select that rare hardwood for our kitchen cabinets because it nicely matches the existing wallpaper and is much grander than the neighbor’s remodel, we help to eradicate the ecosystem that sustains Daniel and his family in Brazil.

When we choose to get an organ transplant in Eastern Europe because the wait is too long in the United States, we cause the abduction of Serge, a street child in Moldova, and the subsequent harvesting of his kidneys.

Whether it’s the big and profound (organ transplants, Internet pornography, and international adoptions), or the seemingly trite and trivial (cups of coffee, T-shirts, kitchen cabinets, vacations, and bathroom rugs), we constantly enslave, maim and kill our neighbors around the planet.

What’s unsettling is that the facts are out there and are readily available. They can be researched with relative ease. But we simply don’t have the time and inclination to do so.

We’re just much too busy...and comfortable.

We keep pressing the button.

To be continued...

A New Life for Orphans (part two)

Trashy Beginnings

Dennis Rainey (CEO/President, FamilyLife): We have a very special person here in the studio who has already done something about (rescuing orphans) and is here to help those who need a little guidance to know what they can do. Troy Wiseman joins us again. Troy, welcome back.

Troy Wiseman (Co-Founder/Chairman, World Orphans): Thank you, good to be here.

Dennis: Troy and his wife, Tina, have four sons. They live near Chicago. He is the co-founder and chairman of World Orphans. It's a ministry that has funded or co-funded the construction of more than 500 church-based children's homes. He doesn't like to call them orphanages, and I agree with that. And he’s done this in more than 45 developing countries.

Bob Lepine (Vice President/Chief Content Officer, FamilyLife): I'm curious about the first one in Nicaragua. Tell me how that children's home got built. I guess it's still active today, right?

Troy: Yes, absolutely. The co-founder of World Orphans, Bob Roosen, was actually in Nicaragua doing an outreach ministry and called me up and said, "Hey, there's this pastor here, there's all these kids, and he needs to get them off the street. If I put up half the money, will you put up half the money? We're going to do a children's home."

That's really how it started.

Dennis: You'd never done one before?

Troy: Never. He called me from Managua, and I said, "Well, where are the kids coming from?" He goes, "Well, we got them out of the dump. They were living in the dump." And so...

Dennis: Literally living off the streets.

 

(Image: A street child walks past his scavanging ground in Nepal)

Troy: Living off the streets, and...

Dennis: What ages?

Troy: Oh, wow, they were from 11 to 3.

Dennis: A three-year-old living in the streets?

Troy: Yes. Just around the garbage. They ate the garbage. And the older kids get the garbage first. They'll beat up the little kids because they could eat the garbage first. It was unbelievable.

 

(Image: A child surviving amongst the trash in Cambodia)

Dennis: Where would they stay if they were getting their food from a garbage dump?

Troy: Under a bridge, under the garbage, under a tree. They'd just sleep anywhere. They have these dogs that hang out with them. If somebody's coming at night, the dog will bark. That way they can wake up.

They just huddle together. But, you've got an eleven-year-old brother or a ten-year-old brother taking care of a three-year-old sister. That just shouldn't happen.

(Image: An orphan picks through the garbage in Sierra Leone)

Bob: Now, when your friend calls you and says, "This is the situation in Nicaragua," you'd never seen this? He's describing it to you over the phone?

Troy: Right, I saw all those street kids when we were in the factories building the clothing company, so I had a good picture. I didn't know they were living in the garbage dump, but that was God's way of saying, "Hey, this is what you've been praying about, and this is what we're going to do."

So that was the beginning.

From: FamilyLifeToday with Dennis Rainey
Broadcast date: 08/07/07
(Edited and Abridged)

To be continued...

PAUL’S COMMENTS

Please simply read the above link (repeated here) to get just a small glimpse into the lives of children who live in, eat, and defend trash piles.

To learn more, please sign up for updates, here.
You can get involved as a financial partner, here.

Poverty to Royalty

"How well do these street kids respond to Christ and His Church, especially those that are being rescued from their circumstances?" I asked while in Brazil.

"They see the love and understand it. But to contextualize it further, we explain that Jesus was born under a lean-to where animals were fed, Moses was sent in a basket down a river to escape slaughter, and Joseph was sold into slavery...but they all found themselves in royal households as the King and the most trusted of officials."

Although the analogy certainly has its limitations, the reply caused me to send out a verbal, "Amen!"

Street orphans can all understand poverty, abandonment, and slavery. They can understand having to endure torture. They can understand having to escape death, false accusations and bondage to others. Scripture reaches out to them clearly through these accounts and others such as the orphan who became queen (Esther) and the prostitute who became the heroine and was then inserted into the Royal lineage (Rahab.)

God has already prepared the way. His Word provides the reason, the comfort and the promise. All we have to do is show tangible love and point these children to what He has already explained and exemplified so very well.