farahk

ola!
well i'm going to use my page to summarize my journal...there is way too much to type!

there were a lot of things that struck me during the trip. the first thing was the gap between the rich and poor was so evident and how there was no middle class. i vividly remember driving through san pedro sula seeing a mcdonalds, billboards advertising coke and fila...it was like back home but i also remember thinking the houses were bad but nothing could prepare me for what i was about to see. on our way to the little city of Yoro. through the mountains we passed a home that will always haunt my mind. a family of six lived in this little shack (8 by 10 feet) the family was drying corn from the ceiling and there were large potato sacks and clothes scattered everywhere. there were several chickes i believe sleeping in the home with them. when i heard they lived there i literarly started shaking. it was just one of those heart breaking things. i think it was at that moment i realized that when i came back to canada i wanted to DO MORE!

the nice thing about the trip though was that we got to see how people's lives had changed through us doing the 30-hour famine. we visited a number of housing sites and saw how world vision had built homes for all the communities whose homes had been hit during Hurricane Mitch. the thing during this that amazed me was how these simple houses cost only $3,000 and how this one house was the world to them. where we have people back home who spend over ten million on one house. it really makes you sick!

at one of the housing projects i met this really sweet girl who just came and sat on my lap and kept cuddling with me. her community now had a school, a source of agriculture, someone who had knowlege of health care, clean water, and homes.
we also visited a number of agricultural projects where we saw how just simple teaching methods had changed the lives of so many people. one of the farmers we met (Daniel) was an alcoholic and was struggling with family problems and had no skills to farm. world vision came in and taught him. its nice to see that just learning how to diversify crops can make a difference.

another thing that will stay in mind forever was a lady named Roza that we met. Roza was thirty-seven years old and had been diagnosed with Chagas disease. The Chagas bug lives in the homes of people and comes out at night. it bites people right underneath the eye and when it is scratched the feces left on the surface of the skins gets into the bloodstream. in adults it can be only treated within four weeks otherwise sometime in the next ten years the adult will die from a heart attack. in kids it can be treated within fourteen years.. the sad thing is that chagas affects fourty-five communities but only twenty-one of these communities are funded at the present time. anyways roza is sick and lives with her three kids and two neices. she was probably the strongest person that i met. she knew that she was going to die yet stayed strong and continues to stay strong for her family. its weird because in Canada when people are diagnosed with something they tend to get depressed. it amazed me that roza continued on with every day life.