While I was drawing this, a man with what looked to be an SLR camera approached me from across the street.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t help noticing you were drawing something, and I just wanted to have a look, if that’s okay?’
‘Sure,’ I told the man, as I removed my headphones.
‘Wow,’ said the man. ‘That’s a lovely drawing. Is this what you do for a living?’
I told the man that I did a different job that paid me a lot more, and that I did this for the joy.
I then asked the man what he did.
‘I am a missionary,’ said the man who was wearing a baseball cap, large steel-rimmed glasses, a red North face jacket, and the fancy Canon SLR around his neck and the clear eyes and skin of a man familiar with Jesus. ‘And I live in Hounduras.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘how nice.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am here visiting my son.’
‘Oh, nice,‘ I said again.
I asked the man what kind of missionary work he did in Hounduras. ‘I am an educator,’ said the man, ‘and I was called by the Lord to do his work there.’
Then the missionary man told me that at first he found the food in Hounduras difficult to stomach.
‘I found the food difficult to stomach,’ he told me, ‘and the driving. But I am in a little school of 35 children and I teach the orphans English. And, boy, do they ever learn well.’
The man then told me he taught soccer, but that there is no grass to play on, only dirt.
Then he asked me if he could take my photo, to show the children back in Honduras.
Then after he took the photo, he stood there in silence for a few moments while I stared up at him, racking my brain for something positive to say about Jesus, until finally he wished me good luck with my drawing, and left.
A Hundred Houses 