A Reflection at Year's End from Honduras
A Reflection at Year’s End from Honduras
What a year we have had. For so many months, the darkness that is COVID-19 has covered everything and touched everyone, through the loss of a home, a job, a friend or acquaintance, and through the millions of loved ones and total strangers who have battled the disease. Every day, the statistics shake us to our core. Here, in Honduras, we also faced two devastating hurricanes in quick succession, Eta and Iota.
For the girls, boys, and teens at Casa Alianza Honduras, where I serve as street outreach coordinator, these disasters have brought isolation, insecurity, grief, and fear. Our young people have experienced all this individually and together, unsettling and disrupting their emotional well-being. Our Casa Alianza staff quickly and continually adjusted to meet their needs for safety, physical and mental health care, nourishing food (at a time when food insecurity is rising dramatically across our country and all of Latin America), and more. With every disaster that confronted our youth, our staff pivoted to create the necessary programs and activities to accompany them through it.
In the midst of so much uncertainty, where human life is left to chance, our children and youth trusted our guidance. They diligently wore their masks and kept their distance in order to keep one another safe. Not only did they adapt to the safety measures we prescribed, they took them on as a new way of life. They showed so much love for each other and our staff as they shouldered both personal and collective responsibility for each other’s safety and protection.
The girls, boys, and teens at Casa Alianza Honduras are the very definition of resilience. Their example is so inspiring. They have adapted to new ways of schooling, from in class to online, and have continued to press forward with their personal, educational, and career goals. They’ve shown us we can make it through adverse circumstances; that even in hard times, we can express empathy and solidarity, love, determination, and self-control.
As 2020 draws to a close, from Casa Alianza Honduras, which our children and youth consider their safe place, they send their encouragement and good wishes to everyone who has felt the weight of the pandemic and other disasters. Their hope and ours is that this Christmas will be a time for healing, forgiveness, and restoration, trusting in the strength of the human heart and the spirit of love that unites us.
This reflection was written by Denia Cruz, street outreach coordinator at Casa Alianza Honduras, our Covenant House program in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.
