Above: Marvincito is flanked by Axel and Maycol, just days after rejoining the Micah House after his last departure.
Above: Marvincito using yellow glue in July 2007, before joining the Micah Project.
Coming Home
After finally being able to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire this weekend, the beautifully rendered rags-to-riches tale about Indian street kids, I began to compare the plight of the Honduran street kids with those in the movie. One aspect of street life that the movie portrayed very well was the sense of constant movement in the lives of the street kids. After losing their mom, little Jamal and Salim were never in one place for too long, hopping trains from town to town and fleeing to a new place whenever things got too hot for them, and sleeping wherever they could find a dry place. That sense of mobility, of constant action and change, comes to define the life of a street kid; in fact, it can be almost as addicting as the drugs themselves.
Many of the Micah boys that come to us from the streets have lived life on the move. Even when they are taken into institutions such as orphanages or state-run shelters, they usually escape back to the streets in a matter of weeks or months. They get used to the frenetic nature of street life; the chaos seems to run through their veins. They are the ones that decide for themselves where they will go, how they will get there, and how long they will stay; they become accustomed to being the masters of their own limited lives.
Why is it then, when boys come off the streets and into the Micah Project, they tend to stick with us for the long haul? They can list a dozen different organizations that could only keep them off the streets for a brief period, but when they come into Micah they seem to come to stay. We are continually amazed, as a matter of fact, at how a drug-addicted street boy can so quickly become a part of our Micah family. When little Hector came off the street in November, within a couple of weeks it was as if he had always been with us.
It may surprise you that, as the founding director of the Micah Project, I don’t know why this is. Yes, my staff works passionately to set up an environment that promotes success. Yes, they are surrounded by people at Micah that love them, and do so sacrificially. But, I think it’s even more than that: something that keeps them in our home when the odds of them staying are extremely slim.
Little Marvin (Marvincito, in Spanish) might be our hardest and most heart-wrenching example of how chaos reigns in the life of a street kid. He is an example of one that did NOT have a smooth transition into the Micah House when he joined us in the summer of 2007. Going cold turkey off yellow glue threw his system for a loop, and he responded by frequently—daily, really—going into a terrifying rage. We did the best we could to keep him occupied and moving, but inevitably, something would cause him to explode. In one illustrative moment during his first week with us, he kicked his new bike in a fit of anger, threw himself to the ground and began screaming with a guttural roar.
“This one is beyond our help”, I thought to myself often during those first trying weeks. But little-by-little, the hardened look of distrust and anger began to melt away from his face, even if just for a few distracted moments at a time. And, though “escaping” from the Micah House is as easy as opening the front door and walking away, he stuck it out with us (it helped that he got hit by a car his first month with us and was in a full-length leg cast for several months after that!).
Through an almost imperceptible process, the angry, explosive little street kid began to show a loving, funny, and curious side of himself that inspired us to dream about what this little boy could come to be. We realized that, when he wasn’t working so hard to scrunch up his forehead into a scowl, he had a smile that could light up any room. We also learned that when he began to dedicate the same ingenuity to his studies that he had dedicated to running the streets, he had enormous potential!
2008 was a good year for Marvincito. He tested into the third grade, and was able to complete third and fourth in our home-schooling program. He still had outbursts of anger, but more and more he was able to take himself out of a situation, to calm down and refocus. The more we grew to know and understand his personality, the more we grew to love him! We had great hope that he would leave the streets behind him forever. As 2008 drew to a close, however, some external or internal trigger, or a combination of both, caused his addiction to rear its ugly head once again.
In the first three months of 2009, Marvincito has returned to the streets three times. The first two times, he came back to the Micah House within 24 hours of leaving. This last time, just a couple of weeks ago, he stayed out for several days. During that period, we thought that we might have lost him forever.
It began on a Saturday night, and we were all headed six blocks down the hill to our Leadership House (where our older boys live) to have dinner with some friends that were visiting from Portland. Marvincito, Hector and Wilmer said that they were going to get a head start and left the Micah House together. By the time the rest of us got to the Leadership House, we quickly realized that they had not arrived. They had passed right by the Leadership House, kept running all the way through the outdoor market, and up to the national stadium, where they bought their glue and immediately began huffing.
At first we couldn’t believe that they were gone--they had all been doing so well! The day before, on a field trip, they spent the entire ride back laughing and singing and playing. Why would they choose the chaos of street life over their family at the Micah House? What trigger fired in their brains to drive them back to the yellow glue?
Our first thought was to try to get to them before they got too high. We divided into teams (drafting our Portland friends into nighttime street work) and headed out to the market district. In the daytime, the outdoor market place is a frenzy of noise and color and life as thousands of people descend on the stalls to make their daily purchases. The market is a different and desolate place at night. Rats scurry through the trash left from the days sales; the only other living beings around are a few stray dogs and the homeless men, women and children that curl up in the empty market stalls to sleep. We met up with some of the street kids that know our ministry, but they said they hadn’t seen our three little lost boys. A couple of them volunteered to take us to some of the other street kid hang-outs around the city, and off we went.
For the next three hours, we walked through the dark streets of Tegucigalpa. Our street kid guides led us into the wealthy part of town, to a busy intersection where the kids often beg. As we chugged along on foot, passing fancy cars and fancier hotels, I kept thinking to myself, “if I owned any of those nice things, I would give them up in a second if it meant getting these three boys back.” As we futilely searched all of the regular street kid haunts, I kept thinking to myself, “Don’t they know that they’re not street kids anymore? They’re Micah boys! They’re our boys.”
Two things about that night felt especially oppressive. One was by the stadium, when we came face-to-face with one of the main drug dealers that sells the yellow glue to the street kids. I had not felt that we were in danger at any point that night, but as we descended the steps into the little squatter community by the stadium, made up mostly of addicts, I felt a deep sense of foreboding. We were quickly surrounded by a bunch of stoned men and we asked them if they had seen the dealer. They said no, but when we made no signs of moving along, she came out of her little shack. “Hey Michael, how are you Michael, it’s been so long Michael!!!” full of honey and sweetness, although she knew exactly why we were there. When we discovered that she didn’t have the three boys, we moved along. She kept going with her sweet act, but we understood that it was her way of mocking us.
The second sense of oppression came by way of my cell phone. We had gotten Wilmer an inexpensive cell phone for his birthday last year and that night I kept dialing his number, to no avail. My phone chose at that moment to get itself confused, though, and the whole rest of the evening, whenever someone called me, my phone registered the incoming call as “Wilmer”. Throughout that night, every time my phone rang, my heart immediately started racing, thinking that it was Wilmer. Though my phone always said it was him, it never was. By the way, not for nothing, but my phone did this until Wilmer came back to the Micah House, and then it stopped. I’m not one to see the devil behind every tree, but this certainly seemed to be his way of rubbing it in that he was in the process of reclaiming these three precious lives!
When we called off the search that night after walking the city for three hours, it was a sad and weary group that went back to the Micah House. The next morning, though, Wilmer finally turned his phone on. “Wilmer, where are you?” I asked. “Huh?” was his drug-hazed reply. We went on like that for several minutes. I encouraged him to come back to the house, told him that I wouldn’t go to church so that I could wait for him.
I asked him to pass the phone to Marvincito who was, if anything, even higher than Wilmer. Over and over, I told him “Marvin, you’re not a street kid anymore. Come home. We love you.” No real answer. Does the truth filter into the heart of a drug-fogged fourteen year old? My prayer was that it would.
Wilmer came back to the Micah House later that day, still high and much in need of a long nap. Marvincito and Hector were nowhere to be seen. A couple of street kids came by the house later that day full of bad stories about Marvin. That he had been using crack. That he and another street kid had assaulted a lady and stole her purse. In other words, that he had gone back over to the dark side. How does that happen so quickly, when less than 48 hours before, he was a smiling, happy-go-lucky little boy that we had come to love so much?
The truth was, though, that we had learned to love Marvincito for whom he was, dark side and all. His more frequent reversions to street life only made it that much more important to us to get him back on the path to healing. There is a deep and abiding sense that he is a part of our family now, and even if he runs from that, it is not any less true. And maybe that is what makes us different. Maybe the guys end up sticking it out with us because we are willing to keep loving them through the ups and downs of leaving the streets behind them. Maybe, just maybe somewhere deep down inside his soul, little Marvin knew that he was loved.
A couple of days went by, and our friends from Portland were out in the market to do a little more street ministry before heading back to Portland at the end of the week. There was Marvincito, hanging out with the other street kids, taking puffs on his yellow glue. Brian Wiggs, who will be joining the Micah Project long term in July (see February 11 blog), knelt down beside him to talk to him. After awhile, Marvin got on Brian’s shoulders and got a piggy-back ride all the way back to the Micah House.
After depositing himself in the armchair in my office, all I could do for a few minutes was sit there in silence. He had gotten into a scuffle at one point and had a blackened eye to prove it. He was gaunt and high and washed out and was already looking quite a bit like a street kid again. I had a mix of emotions and I didn’t know exactly how to put them into words: enormous relief that he was back, anger and sadness that he had left in the first place, and of course, a real and profound fatherly love. I tried to communicate some of that to him before sending him to his room to sleep off the glue.
A couple days later, a little rag-tag group of older street kids approached the door to the Micah House. They had convinced little Hector to come back, and they decided to escort him here just to make sure. We expressed our appreciation to them amidst our sadness: somehow, they knew that little Hector had a safe place to go, a place where he was loved, even if they had no such place themselves. In a matter of hours, Hector was playing soccer with the other Micah guys and laughing as if nothing had happened.
This past week has been an especially good week for Marvincito. He has seemed happier and more at peace than usual. If there is a danger in that, though, it is that it lulls us into thinking that maybe the battle is finally over. Maybe he has put street life and addiction behind him forever. Maybe he really does realize how much we love him and will continue to take positive steps forward.
It’s just not that black and white though. Addiction, abandonment, life on the streets—all these things have physical and emotional consequences--but they also have spiritual consequences as well. There is bondage and oppression; the evil one truly does believe that the streets are his territory. He’s not going to give up these lives without a fight.
But we fight with a Greater Power on our side. To get back to my original question: why do the boys stick it out with us for the long haul? Why are (big) Marvin and Tino getting ready to graduate from college this month? How is it that Oscar is now a missionary with YWAM? Why is Danilo studying ministry in Costa Rica? The answer is, if this is primarily a spiritual battle, your prayers have had a large role to play in their success. What I didn’t tell you about the week that the three guys left for the streets is that our Portland friends immediately called their friends and ignited a prayer chain of hundreds of people. I am absolutely convinced that those prayers are the reason that Marvincito, Wilmer and Hector are back with us today.
Millions of people went to see Slumdog Millionaire in the last few months. In the fairy-tale ending of that movie, the street kid gets the girl, gets the money, and even gets a splashy Bollywood celebratory dance at the end of the film. Well, millions of people may not read about our ex-street boys, but that is not important. If hundreds of you, or dozens, or even two or three gather together to pray for little Marvin and Hector and Wilmer, I know that our Heavenly Father will answer those prayers and will bring victory into these young lives. And that will bring about a great big celebratory dance in heaven, if not on earth!
It has been an amazing journey with these boys, and there is much road left to travel. Even in these scary times, when there seems to be so much upheaval in the world, and organizations such as Micah are feeling the pinch of the economic downturn, we know one thing: God is in control. We ask for your prayers that He would continue to act on behalf of these young boys and show His mighty hand through them!
Muchas gracias,
Michael Miller
Above: Cristino lived in a couple of different institutions before joining the Micah Project in 2000. This photo was taken in 1996.
Above: I ran into Marvin on the streets of Tegucigalpa the day before leaving Honduras after my six-month internship in 1993.
Above: Marvin and Tino graduated from Missouri Baptist University on April 28, 2009.
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