Download - Max International Virtual Office

MAX GIvES BACK
MAX GIVES BACK
Changing lives in Honduras
Amigos of Honduras has been funding and overseeing water and school projects in rural areas
of Honduras for the last five years. Max International has been honored to contribute time and
money for the last two of those years.
Ryan Laws, co-founder and chairman of Amigos of Honduras, updated Max Associates on
what has been accomplished, and what their contributions helped fund, since our Imagine 2008
convention. In addition to water and school projects, Amigos of Honduras funds projects that
help prevent the spread of AIDS in children, among other things.
Water is life and opportunity for many rural villages. Many of the people who work on, and benefit from, such projects
experience running water for the first time in their lives. Once water is readily available in a village, Amigos for Honduras
funds the building of a school. The government will then pay a teacher and provide children with one meal a day, which
is almost without exception their only meal, Ryan said.
“The villagers do all the work,” ryan said. “It takes months and months of work and they are always happy to do it.”
Amigos has also been doing ongoing work with a local AIDS clinic. Honduras has the second highest rate of AIDS in the
western hemisphere behind Haiti. Many children contract the HIV virus through breast milk. Amigos provides formula to
the clinic in an attempt to prevent the problem from perpetuating itself over time.
Ryan told the story of a little four-month-old girl they met last year named Genesis. Genesis was very sick and her
mother didn’t have any money. Amigos sent money for Genesis to Valerie (who runs the AIdS clinic from her tiny office
on the second floor of the AIdS clinic). Valerie took Genesis to a local children’s hospital. Valerie’s experience at the
hospital had such a profound effect on her, she wrote a letter to Amigos which she titled The Bowels of Hell. In it she said
that the term “Bowels of Hell” had always conjured mythical images of Satan sitting by a pit of flaming fire. But after her
experience with Genesis at the children’s hospital she realized it was a real place. She painted the following picture:
The Bowels of Hell is the emergency room where we were sent after the
cardiologist looked at our precious Genesis and realized how gravely ill she
was. Three children share a bed and still others need to sleep on their parent’s
hip because there are not enough beds. It’s where you share a bed with a
dead baby for hours before anyone has time to remove him. Your frustration at
not speaking better Spanish becomes futile when you realize what you think
should be done can’t be done—you are in a country without resources. When
a baby dies in the Bowels of Hell, which seems to happen every few hours,
15