their faces call me to love

I spent a day up in Chinandega this week with a team that was working in El Limonal, a community I have written about before on this blog, and here. The team was there to build a concrete floor for the local "cafeteria" (the place the kids eat lunch when it's available), and a storage area. I was there to take pictures, visit with folks, and relate with the team. Of course what normally happens in these situations is that the kids invariably are drawn to the gringa with the camera, and this time was no exception. I think I took photos of every single child who came to the work site last Wednesday. Many of them jumped right in, mixing and shoveling cement with tools built for people twice their size. Other just stared at us and waited for the lollipops (that's another topic for another post). And a few sat with me and sang popular praise songs in Spanish and talked to me about Jesus.

One of them was an 11 year old named Ana Maria (pictured with me above), who sat next to me again at the evangelistic outreach that night, learned how to take photos using my camera, and wrote me a note calling me her "mejor amiga". Such tender expressions from a beautiful girl with an innocent smile and an open heart, who lives in the midst of what many might call despair and misery. Ana and others still live with their eyes wide open to the possibilities of life, willing to laugh, to play, to be children in spite of the daily struggles they face. Their faces call me to love, to cry, to pray, to struggle, to seek justice for these, the least of these, the forgotten on the margins of everything.

May they be forgotten no more.