El Gran Reto

The camps I`ve been helping with recently have been wonderful. They`re paid for and staffed by multiple institutions, PLAN International, World Vision, and a bunch of Honduran NGOs. Its really amazing and exciting to see young people develop leadership, teamwork, and critical thinking skills over a couple of days. Its really dramatic.

So many institutions working together can be a headache. On Thursday I went into Gracias and walked an hour to the camp site to find out that I had to make it back to La Campa because it had been decided to do the camp right outside of La Campa. Someone had decided to change it the night before and I hadn´t been informed. I was a little furious. But when I got to La Campa, I hung out with the institution people until it was decided that not enough young people showed up in the municipality to go ahead with the camp. In that municipality, turnout is generally low because people walk up to 6 hours just to get to the town center. We, the leaders, went on a hike for fun up a river, climbed up a ravine wall to see a cave where guaro (moonshine) used to be made. I only felt like my life was in danger a few times on the ravine wall, so we´ll praise the Lord for that.

I ended up going to the other camp that was going on in another municipality that I had never been to. I went in a car, a shiny new Ford Explorer, that had been donated to the camp NGO by USAID. SUVs like that don´t exist here except for maybe a couple in the cities. We were listening to techno and mainstream rap from the US. Also we were driving with the windows usp, and since no one could see through the extra-balck tint on the windows, they just looked at the USAID sticker on the side of the car. We were a good personification of a lot of aid money, self-serving, impersonal, and oblivious to the reality surrounding us.

At one point at the camp, we saw smoke rising from a hill fairly close to our camp. When the wind picked up, the coordintor guy said we should check it out to see if it was a controlled burn or not. Four of us then went on a super-exciting, physics-defying, absolutely terrifying motorcycle ride, me on the back, up an extremely treacherous footpath to fight a forest fire. We triumphantly fought one side of the fire, saving maybe an acre or two of forest.

The rest of the camp consisted of giving ridiculous-seeming challenges to the young people and watching them work at it until they figured it out. Its a whole lot of fun. I joked with my parter that el gran reto (the great challenge) is to climb that big pine tree over there, without touching the tree! (or cut it down with...a herring!) :O The great thing is that leadership, teamwork, and critical thinking skills develop during the challenge and everyone comes out with more confidence, knowledge, and wisdom than they had before.

El gran reto made me reflect that that is often how life is for all of us, how things work. We have a huge task set before us that seems impossible, and whether we achieve it or not, we come out with new and improved skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Of course, all this depends on our attitude. And God is the camp leader, watching, laughing about the seeming impossibility of the task, but knowing that it is developing us for our future.