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Recently I started thinking about my old High School and posted some of my post-high school history on a website called Classmates.com wherein you can attempt to make contact with those old high school friends you might not have seen for ten or twenty years. I got this email in response to that post. I included my reply here for those of you who would like to know a little more of our story. It wouldn't even fit in the reply space on the website.
Roger,
I'm sorry, I don't remember you from high school but I wanted to write to you because of the work that you are doing in Honduras. My family and I have gone on three missions trips to Tegucigalpa with our church. Every year we(our church) build homes, distribute food, conduct medical clinics, and have Vacation Bible School for different communities, and much, much more. We are currently fundraising for a work we are doing in one particular community. There is a church building that serves not only as a church but also as a feeding center for the children in the community. We have built a kitchen next to the church and we feed the children in the community one hot meal a day, six days a week. We have hired the women in the community to cook and serve the meals. We have just recently finished building a day care center. Now the older children of a family will be able to go to school instead of watching the younger children while mom is working. Again, we will hire women in that community to run the day care. I have a heart for Honduras and I love hearing about all the work that God is doing there. I don't know if you have read "My Story" but I am a home school mom of four. My oldest will graduate college this year and my youngest is 16yr. I am also a freelance Producer/Director. My husband and I have been in the production business for over twenty years. Here is a link to our church website where you will find two Honduras Video Productions that we have done. www.palmettochurch.org
I would love to hear more about the work that you are doing in Honduras.
Blessings,
Tammy
Dear Tammy,Thank you for your message. It is good to know that I am not the only redeemed product of that decadent and hedonistic decade in which we grew up. That's kind of a joke. The eighties were decadent, no doubt, but many of us were trying, even then, to follow the Lord.I can't say that I was the type people would wish to remember from High School, unless it was for a good belly-laugh. I graduated in '87, but was not officially part of the senior class because I was short one credit that I made up that year so I could graduate on time. I was overly busy trying to fit in with everyone in every crowd and failing miserably at it. I was your basic geek. I tried too hard, which resulted in people not liking me. Well, here we are, twenty years later, and there are still those that don't like me, but I don't try to fit in like I used to. Hasn't stopped me from being a geek, though... :DMy wife and I live and work in Honduras, but it's not the Honduras you know and visit. When we visit Tegucigalpa it takes us a trip by airplane and a 7 hour trip by bus to get there and we buy supplies for at least a month when we go. Puerto Lempira is way out East on the North Coast, about 45 miles from the Nicaragua Border. Do you remember hearing about the Iran/Contra Affairs back in the '80s? It had something to do with illegal arm sales to Iranians in order to create a slush fund for support of clandestine operations that "never happened" in and near the borders between Honduras and Nicaragua. I had friends that were "never there". Anyway, this is the area in which all that happened.We live in the midst of an indigenous people called the Miskito Indians, who are neglected and/or oppressed by the government that claims sovereignty over their land. Children die daily due to malnourishment and life threatening diseases. Pre-teen girls as young as seven years old are forced by their parents to prostitute themselves for income. Crack is sold in broad daylight. Drug smugglers in league with Colombian cocaine producers have the best vehicles, largest houses and most prosperous businesses in the town.We are a relatively small influence for good in this town full of truly bad influences. My wife, Katrina, is dearly loved by people here because of her work with children. She feeds malnourished children and heads our ministry in a complex called House of Hope, or Casa Esperanza in Spanish. House of Hope was built and is funded by a non-profit organization in Allen, Texas, that goes by the name of Send Hope, thus the name of the local ministry. The purpose is multiple, in that we not only feed and work with malnourished children, but we also help handicapped children to receive the surgeries and/or prosthetic devices they need to live a better life. During that process we also seek to infuse their lives with as much of God’s Word and practical application of the same as possible.We were doing all that we could in our rented house five years ago when the founder of Send Hope, Tom Brian DDS, on one of his many visits, stepped over a toddler sleeping on our living room floor and voiced his opinion that we needed to stop bringing so many people into our home. My wife replied that when the Lord built her a separate place where she could perform the tasks He had given her, she would cease the invasions of our living room floor.Tom, unbeknownst to us at the time, had a rather large amount of non-profit funds saved up with which he did not know exactly what to do. He had always thought a home for handicapped children would be a good idea and when he saw Katrina and me working in that area but needing a facility in which to work, he decided to build a ministry house that became House of Hope.
We began our ministries as single young people with a fire in our hearts for the mission field. But our story begins earlier than that. It actually begins where my High School story leaves off, with me trying to fit in and wondering where I COULD fit in. I fell into drugs and rock and roll because that was easier than anything else. I eventually came to a point in my life where a fairly nasty character was looking to kill me and I wanted completely out of that lifestyle.
My wife’s story is similar. The only difference is in whom it was that wanted to kill her. In her story the nasty character was herself. She almost succeeded in suicide several times before she realized the call of God on her life and began to follow Him. We both went through Teen Challenge, the recovery/discipleship ministry that David Wilkerson started after the events told of in the book, The Cross and The Switch Blade. (Which incidentally is being reprinted in a 25th Anniversary edition this year. So look for it. We’re in the Epilogue!) Katrina graduated from Teen Challenge and became a counsellor there. I was so rotten they threw me out. They are some of our most faithful financial supporters now, but at the time they wanted nothing more to do with me.
I need to mention here that although we were both in the same Teen Challenge location, Katrina was already in the mission field by the time I went to Teen Challenge. So, we were never there at the same time.
I went on to volunteer at a street mission in south-central Florida. The pastor of this mission and church had discipled Katrina and licensed her as a missionary before she went to the mission field. I was cleaning toilets and learning to humble myself when one day we heard that Katrina Ryan, our rising star, our missionary hero, had been in an airplane accident and was hospitalized in critical condition.
Nobody knew this yet, but God had revealed to me before I went to Teen Challenge, that Katrina Ryan would one day be my wife. So I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was going to be okay, but we were all praying for her.
When she was released from the Honduran hospital, where she had been for two months, she returned to the USA and to our little street mission, where her ministry had really started. While she was there, recuperating, she and I got to know each other and I shared with her what God had shown me. She naturally thought I was a nutcase and wouldn’t even allow me to speak to her for months, but she came around.
I spent almost a year in the mission field myself, corresponding with her by way of a journal in which I wrote daily. When I filled up a composition book, I sent it to her and so forth. Eventually she got to know how my heart worked and fell in love with me through my journals. I got a letter from her telling me the wedding day was set, the reception and honeymoon were paid for and I needed to get home and think about how I would pay for my tuxedo.
We were married 6 months after my return to the United States, on January 21st, 1995. That time frame was special for another reason also. It was the time frame of her grandmother’s 25th wedding anniversary with her second husband.
Katrina’s people have always been very close-knit families on both sides. Her father is Irish and her mother is Czech/German. Both are from Chicago, where she was born. Because of this “close-knitness” they were accustomed to celebrating together as a family on big special occasions. So when the “Grands” called Katrina and invited her to a family cruise to Cozumel on the 23rd of January and she reminded them she was getting married on the 21st, they began to conspire together and decided to spring for the Honeymoon Suite on the cruise for us, so we could join them and still have our honeymoon. Spending your honeymoon with your wife’s entire extended family on her mother’s side is not usually recommended, but it worked out in this case.
Somehow, she came down with a blood virus that veritably incapacitated her for most of the cruise and I spent half my time nursing her and half my time, when relieved by her sister or a cousin, hanging out with the rest of the family and getting to know them. We also managed to conceive our first child, Roger “Bubu” Engle, during that cruise, which led to a long line of “Made in Mexico” jokes that he has yet to live down.
About three months after he was born we were on a road trip together and passed through a neighbourhood I had once lived in. While driving by I recognized the parents of an ex-girlfriend and we stopped to say hello. We were surprised to meet their grandson who looked just like me. They explained that their daughter had not known where to find me when she discovered she was pregnant and they had helped her raise him now for three years. Immediately I made every effort to become a positive part of Joshua’s life and my wife insisted on doing the same. Joshua, now sixteen years old, is to this day a very special part of our lives. He is living with his mother currently. When he is not with us we miss him dearly.
Well, we continued to work as volunteers at the street mission in Sebring, Florida, until after our second child, Christian, was born in June of 1997. Then, in the same year, we returned to Honduras as a missionary family, where we floundered around, dealing with disappointments and learning about God’s purposes in our lives. Eventually we found the place where God wanted us to be and in 1999 we settled our family in Puerto Lempira. We still live here, where I home school our children and Katrina has studied nursing in the Honduran government nursing school and now uses what she learned to better help the sick and unfortunate children of this area.
We have had one more child of our own, our little girl, Victoria, and taken several Miskito children in as family members at one time or another. Little Selvin is the one we decided to keep. When he was brought to us by one of our workers who had found him almost dead in the village where she was visiting family in Nicaragua, we did not know if he would survive or not. He was literally skin and bones and looked to be on death’s doorstep.
When his mother died, his father “gave away” all of his eleven or twelve children to various families in the area and went off to start a new life with another woman. Unfortunately for Selvin, the family he had been “given” to viewed him as cattle or at best a slave. They fed him very little and when they did feed him it was only scraps. We tried to serve him chicken and he would peel the meat off the bones, give that to one of our boys and proceed to chewing up the chicken bones as was his customary way of surviving.
A couple years later when his “adopted mother” came demanding that her child be returned to her, we asked her to leave us with him for a little while longer. We explained to her the respiratory problems he had suffered as a result of his sever malnourishment. He had been diagnosed with pneumonia numerous times and hospitalized several of those. We explained to her that he needed to be near a proper health center, (which is a stretch in describing the local hospital), in order to begin nebulisation treatments quickly in case he came down with pneumonia again. Doctors had told us that all this was directly caused by his previous malnourishment and lack of immunity development that stemmed from it.
When she stated flatly that she did not care whether he lived or died, but that he must come with her immediately Selvin, who had to be forced to approach her in greeting and then ran back to me crying from fear as soon as possible, was quickly nudged behind my legs as I stood to face her down. I told her that Selvin would only leave that house with her “over my cadaver!” Thankfully, the local authorities, knowing of our love for Selvin and our works of kindness in the community, backed up our impromptu and informal “adoption” of Selvin. He still lives with us and is now a healthy and strong, though short, ten-year-old. He amazes visiting Americans who do not know us when they come to Puerto Lempira. “This little dark-skinned Indian boy,” one man related to me after we met, “just walked up to me and said in perfect American slang…Hey dude! What’s up?”
“That’s my son, Selvin!” I proudly stated.
We hope will probably live with us until he is grown, as he has become, in every way but by blood, our own son. There is no Department of Family Services involved in our lives or his, but this little boy sure is a big blessing in our lives!
We are a happy family though we have our struggles, and we are currently attempting to FINALLY get our residency. Our idea is to stay in Honduras, making it our home, and change the culture of Puerto Lempira, by raising the standards of the children we work with.
House of Hope now has its own school, School of Hope, which is actually run, funded and staffed, in part, by the Honduran government. We also have full-time and part-time volunteers that provide much needed help in all areas. Some do construction, some do maintenance, and some do therapy with the children. We have 12 employees, all local people, and 43 children at present.
Our family’s support comes from individuals and churches in the United States where Katrina tours the country, whenever possible, as a modern day Robin Hood, stealing the hearts of our rich American friends and giving their money to the poor in Honduras. (If you’ve been among the victims of her Robin Hood approach, don’t resent it. It’s all for a good cause!)
We have truly been blessed in this difficult, but rewarding life.
I'm sorry, I don't remember you from high school but I wanted to write to you because of the work that you are doing in Honduras. My family and I have gone on three missions trips to Tegucigalpa with our church. Every year we(our church) build homes, distribute food, conduct medical clinics, and have Vacation Bible School for different communities, and much, much more. We are currently fundraising for a work we are doing in one particular community. There is a church building that serves not only as a church but also as a feeding center for the children in the community. We have built a kitchen next to the church and we feed the children in the community one hot meal a day, six days a week. We have hired the women in the community to cook and serve the meals. We have just recently finished building a day care center. Now the older children of a family will be able to go to school instead of watching the younger children while mom is working. Again, we will hire women in that community to run the day care. I have a heart for Honduras and I love hearing about all the work that God is doing there. I don't know if you have read "My Story" but I am a home school mom of four. My oldest will graduate college this year and my youngest is 16yr. I am also a freelance Producer/Director. My husband and I have been in the production business for over twenty years. Here is a link to our church website where you will find two Honduras Video Productions that we have done. www.palmettochurch.org
I would love to hear more about the work that you are doing in Honduras.
Blessings,
Tammy
Dear Tammy,Thank you for your message. It is good to know that I am not the only redeemed product of that decadent and hedonistic decade in which we grew up. That's kind of a joke. The eighties were decadent, no doubt, but many of us were trying, even then, to follow the Lord.I can't say that I was the type people would wish to remember from High School, unless it was for a good belly-laugh. I graduated in '87, but was not officially part of the senior class because I was short one credit that I made up that year so I could graduate on time. I was overly busy trying to fit in with everyone in every crowd and failing miserably at it. I was your basic geek. I tried too hard, which resulted in people not liking me. Well, here we are, twenty years later, and there are still those that don't like me, but I don't try to fit in like I used to. Hasn't stopped me from being a geek, though... :DMy wife and I live and work in Honduras, but it's not the Honduras you know and visit. When we visit Tegucigalpa it takes us a trip by airplane and a 7 hour trip by bus to get there and we buy supplies for at least a month when we go. Puerto Lempira is way out East on the North Coast, about 45 miles from the Nicaragua Border. Do you remember hearing about the Iran/Contra Affairs back in the '80s? It had something to do with illegal arm sales to Iranians in order to create a slush fund for support of clandestine operations that "never happened" in and near the borders between Honduras and Nicaragua. I had friends that were "never there". Anyway, this is the area in which all that happened.We live in the midst of an indigenous people called the Miskito Indians, who are neglected and/or oppressed by the government that claims sovereignty over their land. Children die daily due to malnourishment and life threatening diseases. Pre-teen girls as young as seven years old are forced by their parents to prostitute themselves for income. Crack is sold in broad daylight. Drug smugglers in league with Colombian cocaine producers have the best vehicles, largest houses and most prosperous businesses in the town.We are a relatively small influence for good in this town full of truly bad influences. My wife, Katrina, is dearly loved by people here because of her work with children. She feeds malnourished children and heads our ministry in a complex called House of Hope, or Casa Esperanza in Spanish. House of Hope was built and is funded by a non-profit organization in Allen, Texas, that goes by the name of Send Hope, thus the name of the local ministry. The purpose is multiple, in that we not only feed and work with malnourished children, but we also help handicapped children to receive the surgeries and/or prosthetic devices they need to live a better life. During that process we also seek to infuse their lives with as much of God’s Word and practical application of the same as possible.We were doing all that we could in our rented house five years ago when the founder of Send Hope, Tom Brian DDS, on one of his many visits, stepped over a toddler sleeping on our living room floor and voiced his opinion that we needed to stop bringing so many people into our home. My wife replied that when the Lord built her a separate place where she could perform the tasks He had given her, she would cease the invasions of our living room floor.Tom, unbeknownst to us at the time, had a rather large amount of non-profit funds saved up with which he did not know exactly what to do. He had always thought a home for handicapped children would be a good idea and when he saw Katrina and me working in that area but needing a facility in which to work, he decided to build a ministry house that became House of Hope.
We began our ministries as single young people with a fire in our hearts for the mission field. But our story begins earlier than that. It actually begins where my High School story leaves off, with me trying to fit in and wondering where I COULD fit in. I fell into drugs and rock and roll because that was easier than anything else. I eventually came to a point in my life where a fairly nasty character was looking to kill me and I wanted completely out of that lifestyle.
My wife’s story is similar. The only difference is in whom it was that wanted to kill her. In her story the nasty character was herself. She almost succeeded in suicide several times before she realized the call of God on her life and began to follow Him. We both went through Teen Challenge, the recovery/discipleship ministry that David Wilkerson started after the events told of in the book, The Cross and The Switch Blade. (Which incidentally is being reprinted in a 25th Anniversary edition this year. So look for it. We’re in the Epilogue!) Katrina graduated from Teen Challenge and became a counsellor there. I was so rotten they threw me out. They are some of our most faithful financial supporters now, but at the time they wanted nothing more to do with me.
I need to mention here that although we were both in the same Teen Challenge location, Katrina was already in the mission field by the time I went to Teen Challenge. So, we were never there at the same time.
I went on to volunteer at a street mission in south-central Florida. The pastor of this mission and church had discipled Katrina and licensed her as a missionary before she went to the mission field. I was cleaning toilets and learning to humble myself when one day we heard that Katrina Ryan, our rising star, our missionary hero, had been in an airplane accident and was hospitalized in critical condition.
Nobody knew this yet, but God had revealed to me before I went to Teen Challenge, that Katrina Ryan would one day be my wife. So I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was going to be okay, but we were all praying for her.
When she was released from the Honduran hospital, where she had been for two months, she returned to the USA and to our little street mission, where her ministry had really started. While she was there, recuperating, she and I got to know each other and I shared with her what God had shown me. She naturally thought I was a nutcase and wouldn’t even allow me to speak to her for months, but she came around.
I spent almost a year in the mission field myself, corresponding with her by way of a journal in which I wrote daily. When I filled up a composition book, I sent it to her and so forth. Eventually she got to know how my heart worked and fell in love with me through my journals. I got a letter from her telling me the wedding day was set, the reception and honeymoon were paid for and I needed to get home and think about how I would pay for my tuxedo.
We were married 6 months after my return to the United States, on January 21st, 1995. That time frame was special for another reason also. It was the time frame of her grandmother’s 25th wedding anniversary with her second husband.
Katrina’s people have always been very close-knit families on both sides. Her father is Irish and her mother is Czech/German. Both are from Chicago, where she was born. Because of this “close-knitness” they were accustomed to celebrating together as a family on big special occasions. So when the “Grands” called Katrina and invited her to a family cruise to Cozumel on the 23rd of January and she reminded them she was getting married on the 21st, they began to conspire together and decided to spring for the Honeymoon Suite on the cruise for us, so we could join them and still have our honeymoon. Spending your honeymoon with your wife’s entire extended family on her mother’s side is not usually recommended, but it worked out in this case.
Somehow, she came down with a blood virus that veritably incapacitated her for most of the cruise and I spent half my time nursing her and half my time, when relieved by her sister or a cousin, hanging out with the rest of the family and getting to know them. We also managed to conceive our first child, Roger “Bubu” Engle, during that cruise, which led to a long line of “Made in Mexico” jokes that he has yet to live down.
About three months after he was born we were on a road trip together and passed through a neighbourhood I had once lived in. While driving by I recognized the parents of an ex-girlfriend and we stopped to say hello. We were surprised to meet their grandson who looked just like me. They explained that their daughter had not known where to find me when she discovered she was pregnant and they had helped her raise him now for three years. Immediately I made every effort to become a positive part of Joshua’s life and my wife insisted on doing the same. Joshua, now sixteen years old, is to this day a very special part of our lives. He is living with his mother currently. When he is not with us we miss him dearly.
Well, we continued to work as volunteers at the street mission in Sebring, Florida, until after our second child, Christian, was born in June of 1997. Then, in the same year, we returned to Honduras as a missionary family, where we floundered around, dealing with disappointments and learning about God’s purposes in our lives. Eventually we found the place where God wanted us to be and in 1999 we settled our family in Puerto Lempira. We still live here, where I home school our children and Katrina has studied nursing in the Honduran government nursing school and now uses what she learned to better help the sick and unfortunate children of this area.
We have had one more child of our own, our little girl, Victoria, and taken several Miskito children in as family members at one time or another. Little Selvin is the one we decided to keep. When he was brought to us by one of our workers who had found him almost dead in the village where she was visiting family in Nicaragua, we did not know if he would survive or not. He was literally skin and bones and looked to be on death’s doorstep.
When his mother died, his father “gave away” all of his eleven or twelve children to various families in the area and went off to start a new life with another woman. Unfortunately for Selvin, the family he had been “given” to viewed him as cattle or at best a slave. They fed him very little and when they did feed him it was only scraps. We tried to serve him chicken and he would peel the meat off the bones, give that to one of our boys and proceed to chewing up the chicken bones as was his customary way of surviving.
A couple years later when his “adopted mother” came demanding that her child be returned to her, we asked her to leave us with him for a little while longer. We explained to her the respiratory problems he had suffered as a result of his sever malnourishment. He had been diagnosed with pneumonia numerous times and hospitalized several of those. We explained to her that he needed to be near a proper health center, (which is a stretch in describing the local hospital), in order to begin nebulisation treatments quickly in case he came down with pneumonia again. Doctors had told us that all this was directly caused by his previous malnourishment and lack of immunity development that stemmed from it.
When she stated flatly that she did not care whether he lived or died, but that he must come with her immediately Selvin, who had to be forced to approach her in greeting and then ran back to me crying from fear as soon as possible, was quickly nudged behind my legs as I stood to face her down. I told her that Selvin would only leave that house with her “over my cadaver!” Thankfully, the local authorities, knowing of our love for Selvin and our works of kindness in the community, backed up our impromptu and informal “adoption” of Selvin. He still lives with us and is now a healthy and strong, though short, ten-year-old. He amazes visiting Americans who do not know us when they come to Puerto Lempira. “This little dark-skinned Indian boy,” one man related to me after we met, “just walked up to me and said in perfect American slang…Hey dude! What’s up?”
“That’s my son, Selvin!” I proudly stated.
We hope will probably live with us until he is grown, as he has become, in every way but by blood, our own son. There is no Department of Family Services involved in our lives or his, but this little boy sure is a big blessing in our lives!
We are a happy family though we have our struggles, and we are currently attempting to FINALLY get our residency. Our idea is to stay in Honduras, making it our home, and change the culture of Puerto Lempira, by raising the standards of the children we work with.
House of Hope now has its own school, School of Hope, which is actually run, funded and staffed, in part, by the Honduran government. We also have full-time and part-time volunteers that provide much needed help in all areas. Some do construction, some do maintenance, and some do therapy with the children. We have 12 employees, all local people, and 43 children at present.
Our family’s support comes from individuals and churches in the United States where Katrina tours the country, whenever possible, as a modern day Robin Hood, stealing the hearts of our rich American friends and giving their money to the poor in Honduras. (If you’ve been among the victims of her Robin Hood approach, don’t resent it. It’s all for a good cause!)
We have truly been blessed in this difficult, but rewarding life.
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