Los Pinos

I like to travel.  To see new places.  I wanted to see the whole United States and travel every highway.  I had no desire to go to Europe or any where.  I was convinced that there was a life time of adventures in the good ol' USA.  If I had no desire to go to England or Italy or France, you can well imagine that I had no desire to go to 3rd world country.  ( On a side note, since I have been to some of those places, I want to travel the world now.)

But, in 2003, I did come to a third world country on a mission trip.  The first day I packed food.  I decided a third world country was not so bad.  At least, I could come back every year for a mission trip.  Little did  I know that I would eventually live here.

As a group of us was  packing food, others were building houses and starting construction on a church building in a community called Los Pinos.  One of the houses that was built that day was for a family that had children in desperate need of clothes.  I went to Los Pinos the second day of the mission trip.  I had never seen such poverty.  I went to deliver clothes to this family.  We walked down, down down the steepest hill I had ever seen.  Mostly, I was looking down to see where I was going. 

The clothes were delivered and we started back up this hill or mountain or whatever.  I was huffing and puffing my way back up.  I stopped to catch my breath.  As I looked up to see how much further we had to go, there it stood.  A house made of sticks and garbage bags.  And people were living in it.  Since I was huffing and puffing, it would have been easy to blow the little house down, had I wanted to.  At that moment, my heart was broken.  I cried.  No, I sobbed.  I knew, without a doubt, that I would be back.  I had to.  I was not thinking living here, though. 

Today Matt and I were in Los Pinos.  And, you know what?  Los Pinos still breaks my heart.