One year ago today we landed in Honduras. In 18 days we will be on our way back to the States. Yet our work is keeping us from looking too far ahead. We still have much to do in these final weeks. In fact, one of the largest items on our radar does not take place until a few days before we leave… We have been asked to give an eight hour training the weekend before we leave to the regional directors of UB’s school ministry. In the meantime the soccer league is also coming to its end this next weekend, church school restarts this weekend, and we have plenty of general loose ends to address.
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One of the conversations that has been surfacing a lot lately between Orlando, Silvia, and ourselves is that of justice and accountability. As you might imagine, the genesis of these conversations is the readily apparent lack of justice and accountability in Honduras. This, along with poverty, are two of the greatest discrepancies between our two countries. You see, we can speak of the violence one sees here. But, as some of you have mentioned in your comments on our blog, brokenness and violence appear everywhere. Teacher strikes occur both here and there, murderous rampages occur both here and there… But justice and accountability are foreign and unintelligible concepts in Honduras.
Just before Christmas our friend was kidnapped at dark off the major street that runs through our city. He was on his way to be left for dead in the mountains before he managed to throw himself from the moving truck. The head injuries that he incurred from the bat and boots of his kidnappers, plus his fall, were more than enough to kill him. We thanked the Lord in a special service this past week as Eric rejoined our prayer group, to the astonishment of doctors, for the first time since the incident. The day after the attack we saw a picture worth 1,000 words. In front of us in line at the market were uniformed policemen purchasing an entire case of alcohol.
Those who attacked Eric, or those who killed the brother of one of the Union Biblica staff the day after Christmas, will not only never be found… These incidents will never even be investigated.
This really sank in the other night upon catching up on some U.S. news. We receive a Florida news station, and they were reporting on a shooting. The viewer could watch as the police, who had already practically shut down an entire section of the city, attempted to find the person responsible. We called the police the night our church was robbed at gun point. They arrived an hour later with no intention of follow-up. To be sure, it is a deficient system, more than these specific policemen, that creates a culture starved of justice and accountability.
