Honduras trip gives global perspective to Lombard church
Lombard, Ill., and Tegucigalpa, Honduras, don’t have much in common in the way of climate, language, culture or living conditions.
But helping out in a place so different from home is part of what makes a yearly medical mission trip to Honduras a powerful experience for members of Peace Lutheran Church in Lombard.
About 50 church members returned in mid-January from this year’s weeklong trip with stories of how they assisted doctors, dentists and optometrists in providing health care for Honduran families in need and how those experiences shaped their world view.
“People become more globally minded, and that’s something that’s very important to me,” said Pastor Marty Hufford. “It’s just nice to help people have more of a global perspective.”
Peace Lutheran members, which included teens, college students. moms and an 80-year-old, joined this year’s trip, coordinated by World Gospel Outreach, an Evangelical missionary organization that operates only in Honduras.
“One of their goals, of course, is to share Christ with the people of Honduras,” Hufford said about the organization. “But they also want to earn the right to do that by really improving people’s lives.”
For four days, trip participants helped at medical clinics hosted at Honduran churches. They retrieved instruments for dentists, calmed patients and located pill bottles, glasses, medicines to dole out to those in need, said Fred Steinbach, a Peace Lutheran member who also works for World Gospel Outreach.
“It’s something that has been a real blessing for our church as it’s a focal point of our mission effort,” Steinbach said about the Honduran trips, which began in 1999.
The church collects used glasses and raised $2,000 before this year’s trip to buy new glasses. Participants also brought with them $8,000 worth of medicine.
“Many of the people who come in need basic medicine, over-the-counter medicine that you and I can go to our drugstore or grocery store to get but they can’t afford,” Steinbach said.
Seeing other humans struggling to meet their most basic needs for food and clean living conditions opens the eyes of many participants from Peace Lutheran, Hufford said. At least 150 different church members have made the $1,600 trip in 13 years.
“A lot of our kids come from families where Junior drives the Lexus to school every day,” Hufford said. “They go down there where half of everyone has lice and they’re living on a dirt floor, and it’s totally a different world.”
Eye-opening is exactly how 18-year-old Erica Heller of Wheaton describes the Honduras trips. She’s attended twice, but didn’t make last month’s trip.
“It really just opened my eyes and broke my heart,” Heller said. “I’ve lived in Wheaton my entire life and it’s so different, just an entirely different experience.”
Seeing the poverty of the Honduran people has motivated Heller to consider a career in social work, assisting marginalized communities in inner cities, she said. She said she enjoyed activities such as washing and braiding Honduran girls’ hair and helping build concrete floors for the small, one-car garage-sized homes of Hondurans.
Concrete is an improvement from dirt because it helps prevent the spread of parasites, Hufford and Steinbach said.
Trip participants spent their evening and overnight hours at World Gospel Outreach’s mission house, which allowed them to eat meals together and reflect on each day of service. Near the end of the trip, Steinbach and other leaders prepare participants to go back to the suburbs and their usual responsibilities.
“For one week you’re in a very spirit-led serving experience in a very poor part of the world, and then we’ll come back to the U.S. and we’re immediately back into our very fast-paced life,” Steinbach said. “Each one of us on the team has to re-evaluate our priorities on how we’re going to spend our time and our resources, and how much we’re going to care about the people around the world.”