A story from our co-founder and San Antonio Del Mar campus director, Janet Lambert.
It was a hot day in September, a record-breaking heat wave that made even our normally cool campus by the ocean seem unbearable. I was waiting for a staff member coming up from Ensenada. They were late and I was anxious to get home because the next day was a big deal! We were going to build our first Home of Hope since the start of the pandemic. I didn’t have a lot of patience in that moment, but sometimes when you least expect it, hope shows up.
As I sat there on Hope Plaza at the YWAM campus a taxi pulled up and a beautiful young lady got out. She began to explain to me why she had come. I speak a little Spanish, but she was speaking quickly with her excited voice and I was struggling to understand. Finally, she pulled a picture out of her backpack, it was an old well-worn photo of a home build. She told me how thankful she was over and over. This I could understand, and with tears welling up in both of our eyes, her story began to unfold.
We built a home for Esperanza’s family seven years prior, when she was just 14 years old. Her family meant a lot to our staff. Just months before we built her home Esperanza had attempted suicide. After watching her younger siblings starve day in and day out she decided it would be better for the family if she wasn’t around. It would be one less hungry mouth to feed. Her attempted suicide brought government attention, and they approached us asking for help in building them a home. We quickly mobilized to help them, visiting them many times both before and after the construction. The team that built for them fully adopted them, loved them, provided for school supplies and even uniforms the kids would need. We had worked with the mother to start a small-scale tamale business from her new Home of Hope house. We were going to walk with this family through this difficult season, and the story was full of hope. Until one day our staff visited and the family was gone. We later found out from a neighbor that one of the parents had incurred a debt and sold the home and gone back into drugs. They moved away and we never saw them again. Our staff were devastated, the build team was devastated. We felt that we had done everything we could, sometimes hope seems to disappear. We felt that we had done everything we could, and that our efforts were wasted, but now all these years later, hope showed up unexpectedly.
As Esperanza sat with me on Hope Plaza she told me how difficult it was when her parents sold the Home of Hope house. She always kept the team photo from the build close to her and she would look at it when she needed encouragement, remembering that there were people who loved her, and believed in her. After selling the house her family had moved to Mazatlán, Mexico, but she never forgot the love that had been shown to her.
Esperanza took a bus for 24 hours up from Mazatlán to find us and thank us, and she came to let us know that in December she will graduate with a nursing degree! She arrived in downtown Tijuana and when she got off the bus she looked for a taxi driver she could trust and who could help her find us again. She had a vague seven-year-old recollection of where we were. She related that on the bus she had prayed that God would help her find us. This young woman who grew up in abject poverty living in an unstable home, abandoned by her father, suffered the untimely death of her dear sister, is now a single mom of a two-year-old son with special needs and yet she is going to graduate from University! She told us that because of the love and investment that Homes of Hope made in her family she saw it as her duty to make something of herself.
Do you know what Esperanza means in English?
HOPE.
Sometimes, when we least expect it hope shows up. Esperanza’s story, and her journey to thank us was the perfect timing. It was a reminder for our staff of the value of what we do, and after so many disappointing months of everything being shut down, and so many cancelations, we were about to embark on sharing hope through Homes of Hope again!