By Frank & Gayle Cawood
Special to The Citizen

We scrambled on top of our gear, piled on the beds of four battered pick-up trucks and headed on a medical mission trip to Carmelina, a small village high up in the mountains of Honduras. The “road” was like a boulder-strewn obstacle course in a TV commercial for an SUV. We had to jump off a few times so the trucks could make it up the steepest inclines. The vehicles bounced to a stop a half mile over the crest of a mountain, and we unloaded our equipment and medicine beside a collapsed bridge across a creek.

Next, after threading our way carefully across the bridge, was the trek up a very rough 2.5-mile trail to the village, carrying all the stuff ourselves with some help from two men with a horse and a donkey as we neared the village. The team set up the clinic in a vacant dirt-floored, one-room, open-air schoolhouse. The dentists pulled bad teeth, and the medical group, assisted by several Landmark High School students, treated about two dozen women and children; the village men were at work on the mountainside. The Landmark students played games with the kids in the dry, sandy schoolyard and performed gospel skits and songs in Spanish. All of the villagers who came to the clinic that day prayed to make or renew commitments of faith to follow Jesus, as two Honduran pastors who accompanied the Landmark team shared the gospel with them.

Some may doubt the depth of such professions, but on the way back to the trucks, we encountered Ellie, a woman treated by the medical team last year. She had given her life to Jesus Christ at that time and received a Spanish Bible from the Landmark group. She cried for joy when she saw us. For the past year, Ellie has been faithfully reading her Bible and listening to a Christian radio station, but her village is isolated. There are no churches in the area and not many Christians, and Carmelina is a local center for witchcraft.

Please pray for Ellie and the other people of Honduras, especially the village of Carmelina.