I never learned his real name, but at the hospital this mute man was brought to after being hit by a car in the city of Coban, Guatemala, the staff called him "Leonardo". He had been in there for several years when we came across him, alone in a dark hospital room.
While volunteers from Outreach For World Hope were busy repairing some old, rusty, falling apart hospital bed frames, a small group of us who weren't needed for that decided to go room to room, offering to pray bedside with any sick patients who wanted us to accompany them.
"Don't bother", a nurse told me when we entered Leonardo's room. "He can't hear you", she explained. "He's deaf".
"That's OK," we answered. "Can we still pray with him?" He was exuberant as we came to his bedside, grabbing and clutching my hand tightly as we began to pray. When we finished, he wouldn't let go, desperately puling me back every single time we tried to leave his bedside, not wanting us to leave him. For some reason, I got this strange feeling he could actually hear us, though I had been told by the nurse he was deaf.
Crazy as it sounded, one of our volunteers had an iPod (remember those?) and suddenly, we were inserting earbuds into Leonardo's ears. "Hit play", I said. A moment later, Leonardo was smiling widely, raising his hands into the air as if giving praise to God!
All that time, this elderly man had been laying there, ignored, staring at a ceiling, no TV nor anyone to talk with, all because someone "diagnosed" him as being deaf when he was actually only mute, completely able to hear. How on earth did that happen?
In any case, the simple, relatively inexpensive iPOD that Leonardo would be gifted as a result of our time together, loaded with Christian music sung in Spanish, would change his life and bring that formerly abandoned man joy until the day we got the call that he had passed away.
People ask, "Why don't you just send a check? Why do you actually waste your money and time GOING there?"
People like Leonardo are why. People like the severely malnourished children on the brink of death we come across, in remote villages a check to United Way might never reach, are why. People like their families, who struggle just to get through the day with nothing but beans and rice and often could use some encouragement in PERSON in order to keep persevering with lives that often seem hopeless, are why. There are countless reasons why.
We really need volunteers for our trip to Guatemala, Aug 2-7. Elsa is coming. Marisol is coming. Erica Sunshine Lee is coming. About a dozen other volunteers are coming. Will you come? We ESPECIALLY could use someone with a pharmacist background, but if you have ZERO background in ANYTHING, zero language skills, and simply a heart willing to answer Jesus's call and go where he might lead you, even if it's a place a bit outside your comfort zone....would you be willing join us?