Another Person's Treasure
By Julie Cramer
The classroom buzzed with the sounds of children learning subtraction. “Ten minus five is five.” But six-year-old David seemed oblivious. His clothes sagged on his small frame and his head, covered with a short crop of hair, remained down. Outside—in the city trash dump of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where David’s school is—trucks roared up to offload waste while buzzards circled overhead.
Bob Beams—a volunteer who had traveled to the dump with Orphan Outreach—sat beside David. “He was a cute little boy with a shy smile who was small for his age,” Beams said. “I noticed he didn’t understand even a simple problem like 2 minus 1. He just didn’t get the concept. We went over and over simple problems and he just was not learning. Another little boy told me David was dumb. My heart hurt and I choked back tears,” Beams said. And he began to question if David would ever get out of the dump—or survive at all.
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"Studies show that children living in conditions such as the Tegucigalpa
dump never leave unless they are educated."
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Studies show that children living in conditions such as the Tegucigalpa dump never leave unless they are educated. David’s possible learning disability added up to big trouble if he ever hoped to leave the dump.
After a desperate prayer for David, Beams began to drill him with subtraction tables. “David, how much is 4 minus 1?” he asked, and David responded with the correct answer—over and over again. “After a short series of questions,” Beams said, “David and I knew he had the concept!” Although it was a simple skill, Beams said that at the moment David understood subtraction, his world stood still—and hope for David’s future emerged.
Are you interested in ministering to children like David?
Would you like to join us on a trip to Tegucigalpa?
You can help a child like David. Join Bob Beams and Orphan Outreach November 1-8 as they travel back to David’s home in Honduras. Click here to learn more.
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About 300 children live in heaps of garbage. In the mountains of southern Honduras, these children mob the daily arrival of trash trucks to get the “best” waste. With what they can salvage to sell, they make less than a dollar a day.
When Jeony Ordonez arrived at the dump to discard of some trash, he and his daughter were astonished at the children living there. Jeony’s daughter pleaded with her father to help them go to school like she went to school.
Today Ordonez is ministry coordinator for The Micah Project and founder of Amor, Fe, y Esperanza (AFE), which means “Love, Faith, and Hope”—a school for the children in the dump. He and his wife, Jessie, began teaching the children informally, then more formally with a home-schooling curriculum approved and certified by the Honduran government.
“At first we received some resistance from some of the students’ parents since the kids were studying instead of collecting trash for recycling,” he said. “Slowly, however, the parents began to accept and trust our program. About 30 children enrolled in our daily classes.”
Eventually the classes moved from meeting in a lean-to in the dump to meeting under a tree in a soccer field across the street. A missions group built two structures under the trees to serve as classrooms and the government granted them the land. Today, two more buildings are going up, including a kitchen, cafeteria, and a high school.
About 120 students from kindergarten to high school attend classes for at least half a day. While many of the children must continue to rummage through the trash heaps, Ordonez aims to eliminate the need for children to work in the dump by 2010.
Orphan Outreach is part of that plan, helping to provide operational funds for the school, to connect electricity, and to continue construction.
Click here to learn more about AFE and Orphan Outreach’s projects in Honduras.
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