Dear friends: 
     Antonio Umanzor is a 14-year old kid I met recently while doing a story on street children in Tegucigalpa. Antonio's history of family violence is a litany of pain that's familiar to the millions of children who live on the streets of Latin America's cities. Yet Antonio's story has a happy ending from which we can learn a lot. 
     "My dad beat me, so I went to the streets to live. I couldn't take it any longer," Antonio told me. "Everyday it was the same. If the food was too hot, he hit us. If the food was too cold, he hit us." Antonio said his father hit everyone in the family equally, including his mother and six siblings. And when his father was finished, if Antonio cried very loud his mother would hit him and tell him to stop crying.  
     One day the police came, summoned by some neighbors. The police were going to take his father to jail but relented when the family protested. Then Antonio's father broke his mother's teeth, and she fled the house to live with her sister. Antonio's aunt said his mother could stay, but she wouldn't accept the children. Since Antonio and his siblings didn't want to live alone with their father, they moved out as well. Tony was eight years old. With his siblings he lived on the streets, begging for a living, sniffing shoemaker's glue--the common drug of choice among street kids--to ward off hunger and loneliness.  
     After several months, an older sister, who was also living on the streets, convinced Antonio to go to Casa Alianza, a shelter in Tegucigalpa run by Covenant House, a New York-based Catholic organization. Worried he'd get cold sleeping there, he took along some blankets. The staff at Casa Alianza accepted Antonio, but they threw away the dirty, lice-infested blankets. 
     Under the direction of Casa Alianza educators, Antonio moved into a group home, started school, and began learning job skills. He took classes in carpentry and welding. During Antonio's five years in Casa Alianza homes, social workers from the organization kept in touch with Antonio's mother, Concepcion. Last year the two were finally reunited, and Antonio moved into his mother's one-room house on a hillside overlooking Tegucigalpa, a house they share with three of Antonio's younger siblings.  
     Concepcion earns $70 a month folding laundry at a downtown hotel. Antonio peddles vegetables every morning from the back of a pickup truck in Tegucigalpa's poor neighborhoods. He earns $1.50 a day and gives half of that to his mother. In the afternoon, he studies. He's in 5th grade; his grades run in the 90s, except in math. "I got a 71 in math last year," he told me. "I can't handle it when they want us to divide numbers in four figures." 
     Antonio is also a patrol leader in Boy Scout Troop 31, a group composed of former street kids who have moved off the streets into group homes or have been reintegrated with their families. 
     The Casa Alianza officials who helped form Troop 31 didn't want to start something unique. Looking for ways to integrate kids like Antonio into meaningful, constructive activities, they approached Honduran Scout leaders about getting the former street children into existing troops. Yet Scout leaders rejected the idea, not wanting the mostly middle- and upper-class kids in their Scouting programs to be exposed to the former residents of Tegucigalpa's mean streets. 
     Casa Alianza officials and several kids like Antonio stubbornly decided that if there was no room for them in existing troops, they would form their own. So Troop 31 is made up exclusively of children who have been rescued from the streets by the love of Casa Alianza workers. Antonio and the other Scouts do what most Scouts do; they have meetings, go hiking and camping, and last year went to the regional Jamboree in Guatemala. Earlier this year, several of them got to form an honor guard for Honduran President Carlos Roberto Reina. Antonio is proud of his Scouting activities, and with a huge grin showed me the merit badges he's earned so far and which his mother has carefully sewn on his Scout sash. 
     I tell you about Antonio because he's like so many of the poor of this world, pushed aside, marginalized by the powers that control everything from urban economies to the Boy Scouts. Yet because people of faith reached out to him, he quit being a victim and now knows a lot about the abundance of life that is promised to all of us in the Gospel. 
     People who work in Casa Alianza were motivated to reach out to Antonio because they found Christ to be present in him. That's what Jesus' story about the Last Judgement is all about. If we want to find Christ in our communities, we need to look among those who are hungry and marginalized, who have been declared "non-persons" by the market economy that has taken control of so much of our lives.    
     The Christian Commission for Development--the agency with which Lyda works--is similarly involved in discovering Christ in the poor and marginalized. With the help of work teams from the United States, CCD is building a shelter for women--and their children--who are victims of domestic violence. The shelter will house them and help them get a new start in life. Only one other shelter exists in the entire country, and it turns away women everyday for lack of space. 
     I recently travelled to Intibuca, a remote province in western Honduras, to interview and photograph Lenca indigenous women for a Response magazine article about micro-enterprise loan programs. Such programs have become fashionable in the Third World today, but are often plagued by the same sexism and discrimination that have marked many development schemes during the last few decades. CCD has struggled hard to overcome these barriers in order to serve the truly needy in such rural communities. Indeed, one Lenca woman who was part of a group of women who had received (and paid back) a loan from CCD told me that CCD was "the only organization that's taken us indigenous women seriously." 
     CCD's motivation for such programs stems from the Christian understanding of its leaders and staff that if we are to encounter Christ today, we need to reach out to the people who are rejected by the society at large. 
     We just received a letter from a pastor friend in Davis, California, who was celebrating the decision of her congregation to vote by an overwhelming margin to become a reconciling congregation, openly welcoming all people, regardless of sexual orientation, into the community of faith. She rejoiced at the growth that the lengthy discussion had provoked in many church members, who had come to discover that they could not truly worship the God of life if they didn't reach out to all those who had been denied, for whatever reasons, access to the abundant life promised by Jesus. 
     At the heart of our own pilgrimage through Central America these last 13 years has been our repeated encounter with Christ in the poor, in the victims of repression and discrimination, in people like Antonio who have been told there is no room for them in modern society. Like Christ in the womb, for whom there was no room in the Inn, they have been marginalized and excluded. As we've opened our eyes and our lives to them, we have been constantly enriched by what they have to teach us about God. With you, we thank God for reaching out to us in the least of our sisters and brothers. 
     I'm writing this morning from Guatemala City. Outside I can hear the neighbor patting out tortillas while a man walks down the street yelling that he has plantains for sale. I'm spending two weeks here interviewing people about the role of the church in the peace process. Today marks the six month anniversary of the signing of the final peace accords here, and only limited progress has been made in implementing the dramatic changes called for in the accords. Please keep the people of Guatemala in your prayers. 
     Lyda is currently in the U.S., about to spend six weeks in residence at San Francisco Theological Seminary, the beginning of a three-year doctoral program in international feminist theologies. She'll return home to Honduras in mid-August. While she's in the U.S., Lucas and Abi are spending their vacation with grandparents in Redding, California, and Vancouver, Washington. 
     As always, we appreciate your support for our ministries here in Central America. Know that we also pray for you and your labors in the name of Christ. Blessings on you all.