A letter from Ashley Wright serving in Honduras
November 2014 - An Amazing Response
We arrived back in Honduras from our summer vacation renewed and excited. Within a couple of weeks pastors were sharing some disturbing news, “The summer crop failed due to many months without any rain,” they said, “and in many of our communities people are really suffering from hunger.”
In these communities the people live by subsistence farming. They grow enough beans for their families and to buy seed for the next harvest, and that is about it. If anything goes wrong, like no rain, they are in trouble. In the five years we have been here, this the second time there has been such a long drought. It is always devastating.
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Failed crops in Southern Honduras
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Everyone pitches in to help
I can’t imagine not being able to feed my family. The only thing I can relate it to in my head is remembering an episode of “Little House on the Prairie” when the crops are smashed by hail or eaten by locusts. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family would go hungry. At least in the U.S. today in most places there are food banks. In Honduras there are no food banks. Where can people turn for help but to their church?
Mark immediately sent out a Facebook plea hoping to gather a few dollars for emergency food aid. The response was amazing. Churches and individuals from all over the U.S. contributed money. Within about a week’s time the Presbytery of Honduras, through the Honduran Presbyterian Women, was able to deliver food to 307 families in dire need. But we knew still more needed to be done.
As I have written before, our kids go to a school with children of families who have lots of resources. I have written about the juxtaposition of the very wealthy and the very poor. It seems at times that there is no way to bridge that. However, last year one of Ethan’s friends at school started a service club called “The Honduras Project” with the purpose of aiding the poor of Honduras. Mark explained to her about the drought and devastation in southern Honduras and the great need in these communities for food aid. The club president asked Mark to come and give a presentation to the members.
Mark and our friend Alex Rodas gave a talk to these high school kids, and again the response was amazing. It has been said that in order to spread the gospel, you must start with the young. We have often fretted over how to convince the more powerful, upper-class elite to be more active and involved in seeing and helping those in great need in their own country, because ultimately those in power in Hondurans have to have a heart for their own people in order to effect change for the better.
Not only did these kids step up to the plate and pledge 10,000 pounds of food for immediate aid, they thought more deeply about the future, questioning what would happen after this initial need was met. Weren’t the people just going to be in the same spot again after the food was gone? they wondered. Mark and Alex were able to move into a discussion of “relief aid” versus “development aid” and show how after the crisis is over, the harder work of development must begin so that the same problems don’t happen again. It was wonderful to see the wheels turning in these teenage minds about how best to help their fellow Hondurans, and even more wonderful knowing that we were doing it under the banner of Jesus Christ.
Mark and I frequently get the comment that we know Honduras better than Hondurans do because we go out to so many different little communities where the churches are. Now young members of the Honduras Club, who will one day be leaders in their country, packed and delivered 10,000 pounds of food to a rural place they had never seen before, and hopefully this sparked a desire to learn more and do more for their fellow Hondurans.
We want to thank all who have so generously participated in this great need. We know the work is not complete. We continue working with leaders of the Presbyterian Church of Honduras in finding ways to support not only the current crop planting to assure food for families in the coming months, but also imagining new ways to give opportunity for these children of God to assure their own ability to provide food for their families and their future.
And in the same way we continue to ask for your support in all the ways that you are able—spiritual and material—so that we can continue to live with and serve the people of the Presbyterian Church of Honduras, their communities, and the youth who will soon be making decisions for the health and welfare of the people of Honduras.
Ashley Wright
The 2014 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 43
The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 28
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