1996 El Nino del Barrio

El NinoWe turned right out of the church, Primer Iglesia Bautista de Leon, Nicaragua. We went down the partially paved and remaining cobblestone street for one block and crossed the craziest, Indi-like two lane cobblestone road. Down a block or two and then a right – right after we walked pass one last house there it was – the barrio.

The house that we passed was a modest mud/straw brick house that had been plastered with mud and had a tin roof. Some of the homes in Leon had been built of real block but only a small number had concrete slab floors. As we passed that last house, we walked down onto what appeared to be a small rutted dirt road. The vista opened up into mile after mile of hubcap, plastic, stick and cardboard village with a mud/straw house interspersed. The further you went into the barrio, the more rudimentary the houses became. Black 14 mil plastic pulled between small tree limbs that had been tied together with shoelaces. Even in the mud “house” edges of the barrio, small trenches for sewage had been dug to the middle of the “roads” where gravity created an open trench sewer.

The smell was incredible. The people were amazed that we were there. Some had never met a North American. With merely an open heart, mobs of kids and teens would follow you, touch you and talk to you. It wasn’t much harder to reach out to the adults. Some of those, however, did not trust so easily.

One of the first houses we visited had a mom making tortillas and bread on an open fire oven – basically it was a mud fire box elevated from the ground with an old piece of steel laid across the top. As I looked to the left, I saw him. El Nino – the little boy – sitting inside of a barbed wire enclosure where animals were kept. I never determined whether the barbed wire babysat him or protected him as his mother worked. I never asked.

Seeing a poor little boy who didn’t have a real home sitting naked in the dirt really changed me. It is one thing to see these places on TV, change the channel, and maybe send $10. It is an entirely different thing to stand with your hands on sticks woven into barbed wire and then have to walk away from him – leave him still sitting.

We went house to house that day – like all the remaining days – handing out our testimonies and a simple Gospel message printed in Spanish. We had learned to share our faith simply in Spanish and did so. It seemed to get hotter with each passing day. Tiredness crept over us and I have never been so thankful as when we landed on the tarmac in the United States.

Time and distance separate me from that little boy who would now be in his teens. I never made it back to Leon to work again. I wonder if the church there went back to see his mom. All I know is that he made the message of world poverty real to me. People are dying every day from lack of food, clothing, clean water and medicines.

Even worse, there are not enough people domestically or foreign sharing the love of Christ in ugly places. The American church loves its fancy palaces and many conveniences shared with those who have but shares only pennies on the dollar with those that have not. If we cared, we would find a way to funnel money into missionaries and evangelistic relief instead of handling them after our needs. This is the lesson that I learned from El Nino.

“He who is first shall be last and he who is last shall be first.”
Jesus