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Letter From Honduras

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Click Photo to Enlarge A rare day of rest for Lycan in the beautiful country of Honduras.

Click Photo to Enlarge This summer, Lycan had many opportunities to work with children in different settings, from school rooms...

Click Photo to Enlarge ...to orphanages, and to share the love of God in practical ways.

Click Photo to Enlarge Nathan Lycan (second from the left) assists with a healthcare exam in one of the Honduran clinics he worked with this summer as part of his Samaritan's Purse internship.

With one sister in El Salvador, another sister in Africa, and a year's experience living in Paraguay, Nathan Lycan has a family that could easily be classified as scattered. But they are unified in one mission: to serve others in the name of Jesus Christ.

Lycan spent the summer as an intern in Honduras--working as a Spanish translator as well as a nurse's assistant in a public health clinic--for Samaritan's Purse, the international ministry of Franklin Graham.

The ORU sophomore biology major (French/Spanish minor) sent us this e-mail a few weeks ago concerning his experiences on the field. We thought our readers would be interested in what he had to say...

Everything here in Honduras is great. The longer I'm here, the more grateful I am to the Lord to allow me to do this internship. Honduras is a beautiful country and has everything to offer, from the mountains to the west to amazing Caribbean islands off the coast. The people are warm and through the internship, I've been able to work with a variety of different groups, including the Lanca Indians of the western mountains in a region called La Esperanza.

I'm still in the process of regaining my Spanish. Until I got here, I hadn't realized how much you lose unless you speak every day. During the school year, it's tough to maintain a foreign language but hopefully I'll be on par by the time I return to the States.

In total, there are five interns in Honduras and I'm living with one of them in the house of a doctor who works for Samaritan's Purse. Each intern was assigned a project in which they'll spend two months researching, visiting the field, and composing their final product. The subjects range from designing a program to deal with the serious AIDS crisis in Honduras, to implementing a farming and agricultural program for rural areas, to creating a food distribution program for poverty-stricken areas.

My project is a mixture of practical, hands-on learning with local and visiting doctors, as well as program design and implementation. I'm grateful to be able to visit Samaritan's Purse project sites several days a week and not only observe, but participate in community development. Also, I will be compiling a Samaritan's Purse Health and Hygiene/Community Development curriculum which will be used as a practical field manual for field workers as well as a proposal piece to show the kind of work Samaritan's Purse is doing in Central America.

I'm very glad to have this project because it's such an interesting mixture of hands-on learning with more abstract, theoretical implementation of a program. A regular day could involve anything from teaching first aid and how to care for machete wounds to villagers, to working with SP workers and learning more about international relief, to removing parasites from children (yesterday...interesting experience), to playing with children in a local AIDS orphanage.

The more I see of SP's work here in Honduras, the more impressed I am by their heart to truly serve the Lord by loving and helping others. The doors of ministry are opened through practical acts of humanity, and everyday people are accepting Jesus as their Lord.

Nathan Lycan