A letter from Mark And Ashley Wright in Honduras
August 30, 2010
We have been having an interesting time here in Honduras lately. Last year we had a terrific drought and had to learn how to live with very little water. We couldn’t flush toilets, had to take “bucket baths” and had to be very judicious about which clothes to wash — i.e., we washed the white school uniform shirts but not the dark blue uniform pants. We had to embrace the “pig pen” look for a while. More important, the drought was also causing famine in the southern part of the country, especially in the area of Moropocay, where a couple of the churches are located. Things were beginning to look quite desperate, and the U.S. Embassy even calculated that Tegucigalpa, the capital city where we live, only had 60 days of water left. Then, during Holy Week, the skies opened up! The rainy season had begun a month early.
Strong, daily rains have caused flooding and destruction in many parts of Honduras.
As the rainy season kicked into gear, we began to have the opposite problem. We had lived in Tegucigalpa for almost eight months, and we didn’t know what rain looked like here. But we soon found out. Twice in one week in May there were such deluges that the streets flooded and we weren’t able to pick up the kids from school on time. The street into our neighborhood filled with several feet of water as the drainage system was overwhelmed by water and the garbage that had washed in from everywhere. Now, in August, we are having so much rain that two weeks ago a tremendous crater developed in the main highway that goes between Tegus and San Pedro Sula. In many neighborhoods, especially those where there was no planning and very little money, many houses and businesses have been washed away.
Worshipers praise the God of hope in Tegucigalpa.
Our friend Xenia had just completed a wall next to her home in a poor area of the city. Last week it came down in one of the big storms, and now there is water and mud coming into her house every time it rains. Her husband is out of work and her life seems very difficult. She has shared some incredible stories with us about the situations and violence that have peppered her life. And yet when we hear them we are awed and humbled by the remarkable faith and spiritual maturity with which she has faced them. She has literally faced the threat of death head on by witnessing to the power of Jesus Christ to erase fear and change lives. She faces threats with testimony. It’s powerful stuff in this place so full of problems that we struggle to even know where to begin.
There’s a kind of “rawness” about life in Honduras; poverty, corruption and violence are always close by, and even such things as the threat of running out of water or being washed away by it. It makes one examine the question of where our strength and security really lie. People like Xenia show us what life is like when strength and security are firmly in our faith in God, where they belong.
Ashley and Mark Wright
The 2010 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 281
