Los Pinos Updates, Part 1

I’ve had a couple people ask me lately about Herman and his family, and I realized I hadn’t done an update on them in a really long time. (Just so everyone gets their family tree straight, Herman’s family is the same as Anderson and Asmin’s family. Anderson and Asmin’s mom is Herman’s sister, so Herman is their uncle, and they all lived in the same house together in Los Pinos.) So here are two updates on this family, specifically about Keisy (Anderson and Asmin’s sister) and Herman.

The first, and easiest, update to send out is about Keisy. Last month, Keisy left Tegucigalpa to go live with her dad five hours away in San Pedro Sula. For the past solid year, I have spent almost every Thursday and about a dozen weekends pouring into 9 year old Keisy’s life. It wasn’t always the easiest thing for me to do, for a multitude of reasons, but I am so thankful I got to be a part of about a tenth of her life, and show her that I love her, but more importantly that there is a God who loves and cares for her.

Keisy is the first of five children, and never really had time to be cared for, but was always put in a place to care for the next baby that came along. She is a girl desperate to be loved, so desperate for attention, more than I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t get it from her mom, and certainly not from her dad, and it’s clear that she has been worn, and worn, and worn down at a really young age. She does not listen, she does not obey, she tells a lie without blinking an eye, she steals, and every time you talk to her, it just seems like something doesn’t quite connect to her mind. They tell her in school she has serious memory problems; they say it’s from the malnutrition.  

But regardless, she is a daughter of God, one who needs love just like we all do. Her leaving is an excellent but hard reminder for me to love and love well, even when it’s difficult, every single second, because time and circumstances are so unknown. Maybe she’ll come back to Tegucigalpa in the future, or maybe my place in her life was only one year. Either way, I can only pray that God used me to reflect who He is and His love for her.

 (Keisy's 9th birthday we got to celebrate with her)

Pray for her that God goes with her, and although I worry about her living with her dad, I know God can care for her better than I can, and God made it clear that atleast at this time and for whatever reason, he did not call me to invite her to live on the property and care for her 24/7. So this is His plan for her. Pray that he protects her physically, mentally, and emotionally. I thank God for the opportunity He gave me to love on her for a year, and only He knows the future!