In 2007, on one of my first trips to Honduras, I was sitting on the front step of a rectory with a fellow missioner, both of us worn out in the particular way you get worn out when you've spent the day trying to solve a problem that shouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
The problem was this: we'd worked with the parish priest to start a small nutritional program, volunteers cooking and serving meals to children in a town that was struggling under the weight of poverty and its distance from anything resembling commerce. It should have been simple. Show up, cook, feed the kids who need feeding. But fewer and fewer children were coming to eat.
It took us a while to understand why. The children who had the least, the ones the program existed for, had no way of knowing what time the meals were served. They didn't own a clock or a watch. For a while, that hadn't mattered, because their friends who did have clocks would come find them when it was time. But then school schedules shifted, those friends went back to class in the afternoons, and there was no one left to go get them. The poorest children weren't missing meals because the food wasn't there. They were missing meals because no one had come to tell them it was time.
I remember sitting with that problem on the step of that rectory, turning it over, half-frustrated and half-amazed that something so basic, the ability to simply know what time it is, could be the difference between a child eating and a child going hungry.
That's when my fellow missioner asked me the question I still think about, almost twenty years later: How long do you plan to keep doing this?
I didn't have a five-year plan. I didn't have an exit strategy, or a metric for when the work would be "done." What I had was an answer that surprised even me as I said it out loud: "I'll stop when the Holy Spirit tells me to."
I've thought about that answer a lot since then: how presumptuous it might have sounded, and how it was also just the truest thing I knew how to say. I didn't have a plan for how long. I only knew I wasn't finished.
Twenty years after that first trip to Honduras, I haven't stopped. I'm still doing this work. But it's grown into something I couldn't have designed on that rectory step, even if I'd tried. What began as a handful of volunteers solving a problem about clocks and mealtimes has become Healing Hearts Honduras, and the same town that once needed someone to remember to come get the children is now served, alongside families throughout the region, by a hospital that didn't exist when I first arrived.
The children we were feeding then are grown now. Some of them have children of their own who will never know what it was to go hungry because no one told them it was time to eat. That's not something I can take credit for. It's what happens when you stay somewhere long enough, and stay faithful to it long enough, for something small to become something that can hold a lot more people than you ever could alone.
I still don't have an end date. I don't think I'm supposed to. But I know a little more now about what it looks like when you don't stop: that feeding program was one piece of a parish partnership I'm still part of today, and it's out of those relationships, sustained over twenty years, that Healing Hearts Honduras grew, reaching farther, into a hospital that serves families throughout the region, than one town and one rectory step ever could on their own.
I'll let you know when the Holy Spirit tells me otherwise. In the meantime, there's still a lot of work in front of us, and I'm grateful for everyone who has decided to stay in it with us.
This memory is one I don't think I've told publicly before, and it came back to me because Decided Excellence Catholic Media ran a feature this month on my faith journey and the fuller story of how Healing Hearts Honduras came to be. I'm so grateful to them for helping tell it, and if you haven't read it yet, I hope you'll take the time to.
Kirstin
