Mile after mile, the story of Mario
Now that summer is basically here, I wanted to share a story about an individual I met in Honduras a couple of years ago on one of my missions trips. It was Friday morning in beautiful San Pedro Sula, Honduras and my uncle needed to go the central part of the city and since I stay at his house when on my missions trips, I said lets go! You hardly ever find any long term parking around the central park area so after finding some parking, we had to walk like 10 minutes which wasn’t that bad. So as we are walking towards the central park area I start reminiscing to when I was a little kid when my mom use to take me to see the water fountains there and throw some change in the water fountains. I remember it being such a clean place with beautiful grass, no trash thrown around and it actually was nice to visit. As we start arriving to the central park area, all I can see is trash thrown everywhere, the fountains weren’t on anymore and instead filled with debris, no beautiful grass area or benches to really sit at. It really started to hit me like man what changed over the years?
So as I was thinking this to myself, we kept walking towards the area my uncle needed to go and on the way there we ran into a gentlemen named Mario who knows my uncle. At this time its around 11am and its already extremely hot. So I see this gentlemen pull up pushing a push cart full of popsicles working for a company named BonInce. My uncle introduces me to him and starts telling me a little bit about how he knows Mario, what he does and that he’s been doing this for 4-5 years. We really didn’t get into too much detail about his background because we needed to get to the area where my uncle needed to go, and yes we did buy several popsicles if you were wondering :)
So as the day went by, I stood thinking about this gentlemen and how much he has to walk to make a living for himself. So as the afternoon arrived, my uncle and I were picking something up at the pharmacy near my uncle’s house and once again I saw the gentlemen down the street pushing his push cart selling popsicles. At this time I asked my uncle does this guy walk all these miles selling popsicles? And he said yes, he does this everyday to make a living for himself. Once he told me this, my heart was totally moved in the way where how can our organization help this gentlemen make his day to day easier.
So once my missions trip was over and I was back in the U.S. I had my uncle get a hold of the gentlemen cause we never ran into him again before I flew back home. About a week went by and my uncle finally was able to catch him walking outside the area of his house and asked him to come in cause he wanted to speak to him. My uncle shared with him that we wanted to help him with a couple of things to make his day to day easier. My uncle made a video of Mario greeting us and letting us know how we can help him. Once we recieved the video, we started putting together a package for him that consisted of brand new sneakers to replace his sandals that used to work in, a couple of brand new shirts, new belt, new socks, some cologne, a cooling towel for his neck, razors, bodywash and so much more. We then sent all this over in one of the 200lb boxes that we send to Honduras on the regular.
Mario's wages were never going to really allow him to purchase these items that we sent to him. On a good day he would average 150-180 Honduran lempiras ($6-$7.50 USD) a day and then only keeping 80-100 Honduran lempiras ($3-$5.00 USD) after paying what he needed to pay. Stories like this push us even more to continue serving, loving and giving back to this world in whatever way we can because we never know how difficult others may have it, but at the same time remain grateful and humble.
Above I did mention that we send 200lb boxes to Honduras full of essential items to just give away, but these boxes due cost us around $180.00 to ship them off from Tampa using Cargo Honduras. If you are interested in supporting us by helping us ship off boxes then you can visit our donation portal on our website. Once again we truly appreciate ALL the support because we know story's like Mario's would not be possible without you.
Thank you ALL
