Making a Difference a World Away

I consider this little girl to almost be my own because I’ve grown to love her over the three years that we have been sponsoring her.  Estefani is a student privileged to be part of a program at a christian day care in Honduras where she is fed, loved, educated, and read Bible stories.

Five years ago, my husband and I visited the day care where she currently attends.  That trip to a third world country totally changed my life.  Honduras is a very poor country with very poor sanitation.  I was shocked to see people throwing their trash, literally bags of trash, into rivers and to drive by piles of garbage heaped on the streets with dogs pilfering through it.  The city we visited had its mountain sides dotted with shacks that the people called homes, most without running water.  I will never forget watching two children play with simple sticks and how happy they were.  I will never forget watching a 7 or 8 year old girl darting through traffic, asking stopped cars for money while her baby brother sat in the dirt on the side of the road.  Women and children are very commonly abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends.

The Lord put it on our hearts to sponsor one of the children at the day care and in a very small way make a difference in her life.  We have packed Christmas bags for her and sent school supplies.  On Brad’s last trip to Honduras, he actually got to meet Estefani,  and he called me on one of his visits at the day care, and I talked with her on the phone in my very limited Spanish!  She mostly just giggled!

Estefani is very blessed because she lives with both of her married parents, which is almost unheard of in Honduras!  We rejoiced with her as her family welcomed her new little brother into their family about a year ago.  We receive an update on her yearly, and with her most recent update this spring, we discovered that her family did not own a Bible.  I couldn’t believe it!   I ordered a Spanish children’s Bible for her and a Bible for her parents as well.  I inscribed the Bibles with their names, date, and wrote in Spanish that God loves them.  (There is a very cool website that translates English to Spanish and vice versa!)

We have friends at church who go to Honduras several times a year, and on their most recent trip last month, we asked them to hand deliver our Bibles to “our little girl.”  They did and snapped this picture of her.  My friend asked her if there was any message that Estefani wanted them to bring back to us.  She said, “Tell them I love them.”  How precious is that?!

You may think that a gift you send to another country or even another state for that matter doesn’t make an impact because you can’t see it with your own eyes, but it does make an impact.  Look at this precious smile!  Our prayers at night usually include Estefani.  We are also recently praying that the Lord would draw her into his word and her parents, too!