Alabado Sea Jesucristo (Praised be Jesus Christ)! Today is All Souls Day….a time for us to pray for those who have died that are important to us and also to reflect on our own death. Life is fragile and to be cared for with all that is within us. We are also entrusted with the great task of protecting and defending life and becoming the voice of those who don’t have the opportunity to speak on their own behalf or cry out for mercy in a world that so devalues the tiny, the elderly, the handicapped and those that we deem “useless” or non-productive. What a tragedy to live in a world that has reduced the value of life to utilitarianism and forgotten the most fundamental principles of what it means to be cherished.

We have the privilege daily here in Honduras to be taught once again in the unmasked, raw lives of the poor what it means to be vulnerable and human. I thank God for this grace because I realize how much it is a part of my own salvation and call to continual conversion.

The past few weeks have allowed us to experience this vulnerability at its core. Where life is not cherished death is quite near. We have worked for the past 3 years with a family that we would deem not just dysfunctional but completely deprived of normalcy. The two oldest girls (9 and 7 years old when we first met them) in this family of 4 girls participated in our little girls’ program when they were able always carrying their “babies,” their 2 younger sisters. They were malnourished, dirty, depressed and constantly sick and in crisis. Their dad was an alcoholic and abusive and the mom could not be a mother. She had her first child, Maria Luisa, when she was 13 years old escaping her own abusive situation and never knew anything but surviving. She constantly left the 4 girls alone in the house, sometimes for days at a time without food or instruction and forced Maria Luisa to grow up too quickly.

Maria became the mother. Begged for their food, washed and cleaned, found powdered milk for the babies and all along tried not to demonstrate to her smaller siblings how scared she always was. She is a tremendous little girl, completely generous, too responsible for her age, and very bright. In the midst of impossible circumstances she has managed to pass almost 4 years of school. One tragic night 6 months ago, the kids had been in the house for 3 days without a sign of either of their parents. The 7 month old baby Heydi had been sick for several days, and Maria had no idea what she should do to help her sister. She tried everything she knew to do and in spite of her heroic efforts “her baby” died. We were visited after returning from a Pan de Vida retreat several hours away by the police and 2 hysterical little girls. Their other baby sister was very ill also and had been taken to the hospital by the police and a neighbor. I will never forget the chilling words of Maria Luisa saying to us “Mi bebe se murio”….Es mi culpa mi bebe se murio.” (My baby died….It is my fault, my baby died). This is too much weight for anyone to carry, let alone a twelve year old little girl who grew up too fast and had no recourse to thwart this tragedy.

The two girls stayed in our small missionary home for the first 2 weeks of their separation from their parents and we were able to live as close as you can get to the devastation of lives that have not been raised protected, loved and nurtured. Maria Luisa struggled deeply during this time with thoughts of wanting to die to be with her baby sister and even some plans in ways that she could take her life. We tried with all of our prayer and love to be a small part of the beginnings of the healing process of these 2 little girls.

Their other baby sister was released from the hospital and given back to the mother. We knew in the back of our hearts that this was another tragedy waiting to happen but the courts also decided (under a system that has close to no infrastructure to protect kids) to return the other two girls also to their parents. The parents of course promised to live differently and to care for their remaining kids. The chaos continued and just 3 months later their father was killed and the little girls were back on our doorstep once again devastated and broken. We ask the question often, how much pain can a human being sustain without breaking and dying? With these little girls we have asked this question frequently.

It took just a few short weeks after the murder of the father for the mother to continue in the same pattern. She found a new “boyfriend”, began to leave the kids by themselves again and forced the girls to survive through begging and finding what they needed on the streets and with people who knew their situation and wanted to help in some way.

The girls are street smart. The know how to manipulate systems and people to eat or survive. They never had normalcy and are quite used to existing in the midst of the chaos. Despite this being true, they still feel loss and rejection very deeply. They have suffered so much from feeling like they have never been loved, held, protected and cherished.

It was time for us to make a decision. We knew that if the mom’s patterns continued as usual we would be burying another one of the girls soon. It is just the nature of life and death in an extremely poor urban environment. They would end up very quickly prostitutes or at least horribly used by men and eventually be the next generation of single mothers or addicted with no real hope for a different future. We decided to finally go to Child Protective Services and have them removed from their home and placed somewhere safer and more stable. This was a very difficult day with many tears and anger but at the end of the day we were able to see through prayer that it was God’s grace that these girls were finally out of the chaotic cycle of barely surviving.

We now have the girls in a Catholic orphanage where there are counselors, social workers, stable house parents, activities, formation and all kinds of opportunities to heal and to grow. It is a great gift to see God bring hope into an impossible situation and remind these girls continually of His love and divine plan. Please pray with us for them and also for the possibility of many more kids in crisis to have the opportunity to experience the love and healing of Christ and to be given back the capacity to dream and know they are set apart by God for great things.