this is pedro (aka peter for his american friends).

he's amazing.

probably one of the coolest people i've ever met.

our team had the great privilege of working with him and two other micah boys while in honduras and their stories are burned in my mind forever.

i keep playing back the moment when nova and i were standing on a bridge in tegucigalpa with pedro, waiting for some of our other group members. we were on our way to the market where a lot of the street kids live and he stopped to point out some of the history behind some of the buildings and neighborhoods within site of where we were.

he pointed to a small shanty village on the side of one of the mountains, right where the river began to curve. "my mom lives there. she's still on the streets."
me: "do you visit her?"
pedro: "maybe once a month."

he said it with such nonchalance that it kind-of threw me off for a minute. i started to wonder what it was like for these boys that their families and friends were still roaming the streets they once called home.

then he pointed to a dark line that ran across one of the taller buildings close to the bridge we were on. "that's how high the water was when hurricane mitch hit. people were floating dead all over the place. it wasn't a good time to be on the streets."
me: "how old were you?"
pedro: "ummmm ... about 10. yeah, 10."

again, the same nonchalance in his answers. as he kept telling his story, i couldn't help but think of how miraculous it was that we were standing next to a kid who, at 10 years old, was living on the streets of honduras and defying death in the face of a natural disaster.

he tells his story as if it isn't particularly incredible. he is still the only kid in the micah house whose whole family is still living on the streets with the exception of his little sister who is now in an orphanage. i watched him interact later that night with some street kids he once hung out with and realized they all had similar stories. they had all survived hurricane mitch. non of them really had families. the 14 and 15 year old girls who came up to us when we offered food were prostitutes and nearly every kid had a bottle of glue under their shirts that they kept replenished in order to stay high.

that's their life. it's the same life that everyone else around them has.

but pedro got out. and now he's making music with marvin (another kid in the micah house) that tells his story of redemption and love.

their lives inspired me. it made me want to understand them more, rather than be understood. and for the first time in my life, i realized the selfishness of my intentions to have meaningful conversations with other people. i've always felt i am the person who no one understands and i've spent my life trying to break the preconceived notions they have about me. what a waste. i learned more about who i am and what i was created for by keeping my mouth shut and listening to someone else's story.

you know, it's so much easier to assume other people need what you have. it makes you feel like you were created to do something significant when you're seeing your talents and skills contributing to the betterment of another life. but the very people that i thought i was there to help, were the very people that i needed help from when it came time to creating solutions that mattered.

i'll never forget that moment on the bridge because it's there that i understood that we're all in this together ... each having a specific role to play that can not be refuted ...