We first met David in 2009, a 12-year-old boy toting his glue bottle through Tegucigalpa’s raucous outdoor market.   This little guy seemed out of place among the older and more hardened street youth with whom he spent most of his time.    But whenever we mentioned coming to the Micah Project, David put up stiff resistance.   When I sat by him that October at our weekly street kid soccer outreach and asked if he wanted to come up and see the Micah House, he firmly shook his head “no” and said “the big kids always beat up the little kids in places like that.”

 Throughout the rest of 2009, David continued to join us in our Friday soccer ministry to street kids and we began to get to know him better.   In the last week of January 2010, when we were introducing three friends of the Micah Project to our street ministry, we found him in very bad shape.  He was sitting in an alleyway surrounded by trash and raw sewage, just off one of the main thoroughfares of the outdoor market.  He had hurt his right foot, and his face, back and arms were covered in severe and infected bite marks.  We walked him back up to the Micah House in order to heal his wounds.
 
The hour that he spent in the Micah House that day was enough to convince him that we were a safe place to be.  As with most street kids, David had been in and out of many different institutions, never staying in any one place for more than a few months.  Micah is different though: the kids come to realize that we are a family rather than an institution and they usually decide to stay with us once they become a Micah boy!
 
We met David's mom a few days later and she explained how David came to be on the streets.  His dad died of disease eleven years ago, leaving her to raise him alone.  She remarried, but her new husband was shot and killed three years ago in an armed robbery in the market district.  Rosa, who had never gone to school, tried to support David and his little half brother by walking through the outdoor market selling gum and cigarettes.  She was too poor to rent a room by the month, so she had to move into one of the seedy and dangerous "hotels" in the market district where they can pay by the day.
 
The problem with their hotel is that it was in the middle of the most drug-infested and violent areas of Tegucigalpa.  David quickly got absorbed into that life; while his mom was walking the streets trying to sell enough gum to put food on the table, David was hanging out with kids who would eventually draw him into the street kid scene.
 
Please join us in praying for little David.  Pray for him as his body begins to detox after inhaling yellow glue fumes for the last three years.   Pray that God would continue to form him to the man that He wants him to be.