With a Subtitle: Seeing God's heart for the people the world forgets, in a garbage dump in Tegucigalpa.
A brief Excerpt: A short-term missions team travels to a garbage dump outside Tegucigalpa to build a house for one family – and discovers up close that God has not forgotten the people the world steps over.
Editor’s note – We publish a lot here about what we believe and why. This piece is different. Zach O’Leary traveled to a garbage dump outside Tegucigalpa, helped build a house for a family that had almost nothing, and came home changed. We’re running it because it puts hands and feet on a truth that is easy to nod at and hard to live: God sees the people the world steps over. Read it slowly. Then ask what He might be asking of you.
A View From El Picacho
It was another hot and humid day as I walked up El Picacho mountain in northern Tegucigalpa. I wasn’t out of breath — most of the way up was via car — but I was still tired. It had been a full week of work.
A loud voice called out, “Vamos! We’re now on our way to the Jesus statue.” It was Hernán, our Honduran leader and pastor we partner with.
After a couple hundred yards, there the giant statue stood, arms spread wide, overlooking the city. I looked out and took a deep breath. It was beautiful up here.
For miles you could see the lush, forest-filled mountains of Tegucigalpa, with tens of thousands of homes stretching across them. Though from here, you couldn’t see that many of them were rundown, with walls covered in razor wire and trash lying everywhere. Nothing like my hometown, or anywhere I’d ever seen.
“You know what’s amazing?” said Hernán with passion — something he did regularly. The small group from our church, myself included, listened intently.
“There are 2 million people down there. God knows what’s going on in every single heart immediately and perfectly right now! As if they’re the only person on the planet. How amazing is that, brother?”
I smiled in agreement.
Then I noticed John to my left. He was my pastor for the last 7 years and previously the lead pastor of our home church for 30 years before “retiring” (meaning he was no longer an elder but still focused on global missions and training pastors). He uncrossed his arms and pointed high and to my right.
“There’s the dump.”
I squinted and followed the direction of his hand.
“It’s amazing, Zach. No one cares about them, but God does,” he said with all tenderness. “We get to be a part of His work here, and it’s not about us. It’s all about Him and His love for people.”
I smiled again, but this time, with tears in my eyes.
Editor’s note – Two pastors stand on a mountaintop, looking out over a city of two million, and what moves them is not the skyline but the God who knows every heart in it. That is the right place to begin everything that follows. Before a single hammer is lifted, the real question is whether we believe God actually sees the people we are about to meet — and loves them.
The Dump in Tegucigalpa
Earlier that week, John’s words were already echoing in my mind as we pulled up to the dump for the first time. He had repeated that line multiple times: “No one cares about them, but God does.”
The dump is a settlement outside the main hub of Tegucigalpa. People there live in abject poverty compared to the rest of the city. Their main resources are scavenging through the dump for any materials they could use for homes, clothing, and whatever might be useful.
Hernán noted many of the homeless in the city end up here.
As the giant van carrying the missions team of Americans and one of his sons approached, we took everything in, silently praying for God to bless our time and efforts.
We were here to build a house for a woman named Luz. She had four children with a man named Ariel. Previously, they weren’t married and hadn’t given their lives to Christ. But in the last few years, both had come to receive Him and, shortly after, officially married each other. Hernán’s church had been praying about who to build a house for next and ultimately felt led to Luz and Ariel.
We stepped out into the heat and walked down into the dump. There was trash everywhere you looked.
Most of the houses were dilapidated shacks, with a few having better wooden walls that still looked barely livable. Dogs and chickens wandered through the roads and through people’s homes. When we came to the bridge extending over a 30 foot drop into the river, you could see the water was dirty… and also filled with trash.
The families here had nothing.
Some ate once a day. Some kids had one parent, or neither. Many couldn’t read or write. Many got sick drinking from the river. The oldest sibling was often left to raise the younger ones while parents were away trying to find work — leaving them exposed to physical and sexual abuse. Many of the girls had their first baby at fourteen.
As we came upon Luz’s house, I turned and saw a little girl walk up to our group.
She was maybe five years old with bright eyes and a smile that melted your heart. I happened to be at the front of the line. She looked at me and immediately spread her arms wide for a hug. Having a little daughter of my own, I did what any dad would do: I swept her up in my arms and placed my head against hers.
“¿Que es tu nombre?” I said, forgetting I should have said “¿Como se llama?” She smiled with a sheepish grin. “Cindy.”
“¿Y como estas?”
“Bien!” she said, as both her eyes and smile seemed to grow even bigger. I put her down and she went to hug the rest of our group.
Not long after, I found out Cindy was one of Luz and Ariel’s children. I’d meet two more shortly after — Kady, who was seven, and David, who was four — just as sweet and wanting to be held by the Americans. In fact, they made sure to never be put down when they could help it.
We finally met Luz for the first time and entered what was her current house, if you can call it that.
There were no walls for the main structure. Just beams holding up sheet metal containing a few leaks. The ground was dirt mixed with trash and sloped on a hill, so you could only imagine how bad things got during storms. A hen and her chicks pecked the ground across the floor while a dog wandered in and back out again. I poked my head around to the one room of the house, where an unplugged refrigerator sat next to several dirty twin mattresses.
This wasn’t a house. It hadn’t hit me yet that people actually live this way.
Luz was already thankful for us being there, as Hernán translated her words. But seeing it up close made me and the rest of our group want to get to work.
Editor’s note – It’s worth sitting with that picture for a moment — dirt floors, a leaking roof, children raising children. Pastor John’s refrain, “No one cares about them, but God does,” is close to the whole Bible in a sentence. The God who numbers the stars also numbers the people no one else bothers to count.
Who Does Jesus Go To?
Over the next three days, our team built the house, fixed the bridge, ran VBS for kids in the dump, and provided medical care for families who had little access to any. In every case, we met physical needs and shared the Gospel. One never came without the other.
With all this time to work and observe, I thought about Jesus.
First, how He works through His church. Hernán and his congregation were already doing the work before we arrived — meeting physical needs while sharing the love of Jesus. And the people wanted to hear about Him, because Hernán’s church genuinely loved them. Why? Because the love of Jesus was in them.
You could see the fruit of it.
At VBS, the kid total jumped from 40 on the first day to 90 on the second. Parents came too. Around 180 came to the medical brigade for basic care they never received. When anyone shared about Jesus, people leaned in — there was a spiritual hunger.
One example stood out to me later in the week. John stood under a large shaded tree and spoke to a group of kids. “Who here knows the president of Honduras?”
“Asfura!” a few shouted.
“Does he know who you are, or where you live?” They all shook their heads no.
“Well, God knows who you are. And He loves you,” he said, pointing at them one by one. Then John told them who Jesus was, why He came, and why He died for them, with Hernán translating. A simple but not watered-down version of the Gospel they could understand.
One of the mothers nearby was listening.
I could tell from what little Spanish I understood that she was trying to communicate something about Jesus redeeming sin. At the end of John speaking, she broke off with him and a translator to pray. They were on their knees, hands firmly holding each other’s shoulders, while she wept aloud.
This woman had previously been a prostitute and had her first child at fourteen.
She had been through everything imaginable. But through her tears she cried out, “You don’t judge me for who I’ve been.” John prayed over her, thanking God for His faithfulness and for changing her life.
I couldn’t understand every word from afar, but her heart spoke loudly and with force. She loved God, hated who she was, and now loved who He was making her to be.
After this moment, I thought about who Jesus went to.
In Matthew, His ministry begins with Him going throughout all of Galilee — teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every affliction among the people (Matthew 4:23). He went to the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the blind, the lame. People the world dismissed because they had nothing to offer. People whose lives were marked by terrible sin or suffering.
And they came away completely transformed. New creations.
As Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
I thought about the woman at the well in John 4. A Samaritan and despised by the Jewish people at that time.
But Jesus speaks with her, calls out her sin, and tells her He is the living water, that “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again” (John 4:14). By the end of the conversation, that woman was clearly changed, running back to her village proclaiming, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” (John 4:29)
Standing in that dump, watching it all happen in real time, made the Scriptures come alive in a way I’d never experienced.
Jesus loved people. He still does. All who are willing to receive Him and His words, He does not disappoint. He promises to not only save, but to never leave, forever.
There was fruit ripe for the harvest right here — people being saved, needs being met, a local church loving people the world had forgotten. I could see it, and feel it, palpably.
It hit me even harder when we gave Luz and Ariel the keys to their new house.
Editor’s note – Notice who Jesus keeps drawing near: the Samaritan woman at the well, the tax collector, the mother weeping in the dust. He never asked people to clean themselves up first. He met them, named the truth, and made them new. That pattern has not changed, and it is still the only real hope any of us has.
The Keys to a New House
When the house was finished, we gathered around it before calling Luz and Ariel over. What we’d put up wasn’t large — maybe 300 square feet, roughly the size of half a garage. But it had walls, a real roof, a solid door, windows, and a floor that wasn’t dirt on a slant. For a family of six, it was everything.
Hernán called us all together and handed them the keys.
Luz took them in her hands, looked at the house, and began to cry.
Through tears, she spoke in Spanish — Hernán translating to the group — and what came through was not simply gratitude toward us. It was praise toward God.
She talked about their old house and how hard it was. When the weather turned bad, there was nowhere safe to go and they were often afraid or looking for another place to sleep. Rain came straight through the ceiling. Ever since being saved, Luz had prayed for God’s faithfulness and His help, trusting Him to provide, with no guarantee of when or how.
And now she was holding the keys.
She didn’t say “thank you for the house.” She said “All glory to God! He is good.” She proclaimed His faithfulness across everything her family had walked through — the poverty, the years in that shack, the uncertainty, her family. And through all of it, she had sought Him with her whole heart.
I thought about Matthew 6:33 — “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Luz didn’t seek the house. She sought God. She came to Christ, married Ariel, raised her kids in the dump, trusted Him through years of real suffering — and He answered. First in being with her and giving her joy through hardship. And then blessing her with needs met by the church. She trusted God, believing He was faithful to His promises.
Right there, the work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart.
Hernán and John prayed, and most of us started to cry. I could hear Luz speaking praises to God as they prayed.
Then Ariel did the honor of opening the door for his family. He smiled with contentment while a mix of many Hondurans and Americans cheered for these dear brothers and sisters.
Editor’s note – Luz did not praise God for the house. She praised Him for being faithful long before the house existed. That is the order Jesus gave us in Matthew 6:33 — seek first the kingdom, and trust Him with everything else. She lived it in a place most of us will never see, and in doing so she quietly exposed how thin our own trust can be when the roof does not leak.
Getting Out of My Own World
I prayed often in Honduras. And what came out of me was already there before I went.
I wanted to get out of my own world for a while, and I knew this trip would do that. I prayed it would help me see up close what God is actually doing in the world. He didn’t disappoint.
On the long journey home to California, I thought and prayed more.
I have legitimate things to worry about. Job stress. Financial provision. Leading my family. Those things are real and they matter. But standing in that dump… they seemed so much smaller.
Because if everything was gone tomorrow, would I still love God? Yes. I would.
We get distracted though.
I live in privilege just by living in America. I have the means to give, to serve, to go visit Honduras. But it also means I’m tempted to worry about things that, in light of eternity, are pretty small. God is at work right now, and He wants to use you and me for His kingdom.
If Luz can praise God, seek the kingdom first, and trust He’ll meet her needs, so can you and I.
None of what we have belongs to us anyway. In the parable of the talents, the servant who buried his one talent in the ground had nothing to show for it. Whether God’s given you two, four, or ten, the call is the same. Use what He’s given you for the kingdom and return it back to Him.
That’s where true joy is. In Jesus.
Can you imagine standing before Him one day and hearing, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master”?
I don’t have it all figured out yet. But I can’t live in my own little Zach world. Especially not after what I saw. Not after the kids of the dump, the mother on her knees, and Luz holding those keys.
It’s an encouragement to give to missions. To go see what God is doing. To share the Gospel at home without fear. And to trust Jesus with your own life the way Luz did.
Seek first the kingdom and His righteousness, for He is faithful to His promises.
The world is full of people no one cares about. But God cares.
And He’s asking whether you and I will be part of what He’s doing for them. Say yes!
Amen.
A Word from the Editor
Zach is honest about the pull of his “own little Zach world” — the job, the bills, and the noise that shrinks our view of God. Most of us live there too. The dump in Tegucigalpa works like a mirror: it shows how small our worries are next to eternity and how wide God’s heart is for people we will never meet. You don’t have to fly to Honduras to answer Him. You do have to say yes where He has placed you. Use what He has given you, however much or little, and hand it back to Him. That is where the joy is.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
scavaging