Day 4. The pump house team has finished the excavation of trench around the concrete pad where the well is dug. Arms are sore from breaking up rock with a pickaxe. Our team mixes and pours concrete now, leveling the wet mud so block can be laid. Enrique found us two locals this morning, and we’ve paid them to help with the work. They’ve taken over the role of boss now, pointing and directing in Spanish. They know what they’re doing and work deftly, unfazed by the lack of equipment and tools we take for granted.

Our team shovels gravel. A man dressed for work, in a button down and slacks, stops. He takes a shovel and with a few quick, sure strokes, finishes the job with a grin. The men here appear slight, but they are strong. They’re used to working by hand in this latitude, under this sun. The local who is acting as foreman can’t believe we’re from Florida. He wonders why our skin is not brown.

On the dirt lot where the kids are playing and coloring in papers, I’m sitting on a beam. Kids climb on me. They like to be held. They get very happy when told their coloring is beautiful. They smile. Many of them have rotted teeth. One little girl reaches up her arms to Bailey. She wants to be held. Bailey picks her up with a look of surprise. I can tell by her awkward smile that she’s a little self-conscious. Bailey’s not overly demonstrative, but I can tell she’s touched by this little girl’s abandon. Bailey’s heart is connecting with the kids, and I store this image in my heart. I remember Bailey’s prayers going back at least two years, prayers for this place and an opportunity to come here. In this moment, I am comforted; Mike and I are not her only loving parents. God is parenting her in ways I cannot rival. I can hardly express this feeling in words.

I won’t ponder long. I’ve lost Carlito again. He’s been coming with us and flitting back and forth between the work site and the play yard. But he’s wandered off. I find him playing video games in one of the markets and convince him to join us.

Rixy is helping us direct games for the kids, wielding a whistle with a wild sense of power. She is not much older than most of the kids. She smiles wide and bosses her younger companions with delight. Michael, in a baseball hat, watches. When Rixy, high on her whistle, forgets to translate, Michael helps. In between he tells me about his school. It’s an alternative school, and Henry told me that Michael earned a scholarship to go there. That’s why he knows English. He walks miles to and from school every day.

I study Michael: his eagerness to help, his attentiveness to us. Everything about him foreshadows possibility. He is a born leader in a community whose natural progression is poverty. Children who might go to school don’t because they’re needed to watch younger siblings. Without education, they don’t learn English. Without English on an island that makes its revenue from tourism, they don’t find jobs. Without jobs, they’re stuck. Young teens have babies that in turn trap them in the poverty cycle. Motherhood becomes the warden who crushes their tender aspirations.

Time will tell what Michael will lead others to do. I remember his mother squeezing my hand last night, her tired, world-worn eyes. Without a husband, she too is trapped. I am hopeful Michael encounters the grace and love of Jesus. I am hopeful he grows to be an agent of change, to help make the Colonia a place of redemption and life. Later we tell the story of Joseph: a multicolored coat that incited his brothers’ jealousy, how his brothers sold him to slave traders, how many years later God redeemed their evil with good. Rixy translates, “What men meant for harm, God used for good.” We hand out the flavored water and cookies.

We leave the Colonia for Casa Isabella, making sure Carlito isn’t left behind. We dig through our gear back at the apartments and find a snorkel and mask for him. We wade out into the clear, turquoise water of the Caribbean. I put on my mask and slip the snorkel through a plastic loop, then dive headlong into the cool waters.

It is like a baptism, swimming in these waters. They seep into the wrinkles of my skin and wash away the dirt and sweat, the sunscreen and bug repellant. The oils from my skin have painted a thin, wavy rainbow on the surface of the water, like Joseph’s coat floating above me. I reflect on what the world has meant for harm and the people of the Colonia. I kick my feet and push at the water with my hands to flip my body. I swim downward. I look for life among the rocks and good from the hand of God.

Day 3. Enrique arrives after breakfast, and we climb in the back of his truck with our gear. We fill water jugs at Henry’s house and begin the ascent to the Colonia. The roads are badly eroded from rains. Some aren’t navigable. Enrique’s Toyota creaks and rocks as we climb. We’re at such a steep angle we can see the hood of the truck but not the road. The foot traffic is dense. The cars are just as talkative as at the airport, beeping their island chatter as they whir past. Read the rest of this entry »

Day 2. We wake with the sun at six o’clock, veiled as it is by a mantle of stratonimbus. It’s quiet except for the intermittent comings and goings of a pickup truck with an engine that sounds like coffee percolating. The day is fresh, the water luring. On the dock, looking into glassy water, I can see all the way to the bottom. I feel as though I’m peering into an aquarium. Small fish dart in and out of the swaying grass. Read the rest of this entry »

Last July, I traveled to Roatan, Honduras with my husband Mike, oldest daughter Bailey and a team of family and friends. The following are journal entries from a week there.

Day 1. We arrive to a congested Customs line at an island airport, here on Roatan, off the coast of Honduras. A uniformed man with a gun holstered on his belt, stamps our passports. We follow the dense crowd to baggage carousels. Bags slowly circle on the worn, black belt. Passengers dart back and forth, picking up bags like birds snatching seeds from a feeder. We gather our bags and head out the double doors towards the sun. Henry and Frances from Living Water for Roatan meet us outside, in a hot breeze thick with salt and the smell of diesel. Old Toyotas sputter down the road, talking like women, an island Morse code of short and long beeps. Read the rest of this entry »

On the fumes of the night, I found a blog. And on the first hit, I was hooked. Sentences swung back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. Time faded. And a blog I did devour. It was heaven, and I remembered something about good writing. A good writer makes me want to write. Her art is in letters, in making them into story. A good writer is not afraid to look bad to her audience. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. And she writes her life, however sad or comic or seemingly insignificant, through a lens of redemption and grace.

As I reflect on my favorite writers, the ones I most admire, the ones who most inspire me, I realize something else. The writer writes to fail just as much as to succeed. It is the risk she absorbs every time she sits to write. In writing she merges her pain with her bliss and welcomes her reader to a momentary world where he can make sense of his own. Oh, and we love her, love her so much we steal from her. We’ll take her thoughts and re-word them into the sentence of our own life until they become ours as much as they were ever hers. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m thinking of home again, of the life we left when we vacated a house and neighborhood we’d lived in for almost 15 years. Every once in while, this past brushes up against my skin and, unguarded, the tears come. Like fringe on an old blanket, the faint and gentle threads of this past linger. I knew the blanket so well, knew its threads, the way they fit together and moved. But the fringes are different. Thin and lacking substance, fringes are like ghosts. I feel them unexpectedly, brushing up against a new day in a new place, and suddenly I remember that old blanket that was home and neighborhood and haven. In a cool draft, I miss its warmth and mass. Read the rest of this entry »

On this tenth anniversary of 9-11, we relive the day that the towers of the World Trade Center buckled and collapsed, the day the Pentagon smoked and airplanes crashed. Televisions across the country re-broadcast pictures of flames pouring out of the jagged chasm in the North Tower. September 11 would be the day our national self image was forever altered, and its images are a flood of memories. We remember. We struggle to explain the event to children who didn’t yet exist when it all happened. Emotions are once again fresh and sore. And as we revisit the terrorist attack, I am amazed at how grief is an attack of its own, often unsuspected until it is upon us. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the house of my childhood. We moved every five years, but this was the house because it was the last place we lived together as a family. The year we moved away from it, my brother left home for college. And every place subsequent wasn’t quite the same. Our family was never quite the same either, and as my brothers each left home for school and visited later with wives, I came to know that something had been lost to us forever there in that house. Read the rest of this entry »