At the end of June 1969, we moved to Honduras. We rented a house at about 5,000 feet above sea level, in a place overlooking Tegucigalpa. From our house, Charlie saw a barrio and the Lord planted it on his heart. We would go downhill every day and try to get there, and eventually we found a way to it. I think it was 1,200 square feet. We hung a bell, put up a big cross in the yard, and started holding services.
We had a vacation Bible school at night for adults and children, and well, one night a drunkard came in waving a pistol and said we were preaching against Mary and he was going to shoot us. But one of the men hit him in the chest with the barrel of the gun and was able to overpower him and take the gun away. That shows you are not always welcome. That was the first church we started, called Calvary Baptist Church in English.
In another year, we started Gethsemane Baptist Church next to it. About two years later, in Oropoli, we started Mount Olive Baptist Church. So in the first three years there in Honduras, we were able to start three churches.
But every time we visited the churches, there would be a little body laid out waiting for us, a child dead because of roundworms. It broke our hearts; we asked “What do we do, what do we do?”
We also knew a recently converted single father who was living in Tegucigalpa and attended Gethsemane Baptist Church. His wife had left him, leaving him to rear his five-year-old son alone, and the father dearly loved his son, carrying the boy with him wherever he went. This included to his work delivering milk door to door from metal cans slung across the back of a mule.
One day the father came to our house bringing his very sick little boy. His son was admitted to the hospital but the very next morning, the doctors told us that the little boy could not survive because his G.I. tract was totally filled with long roundworms.
I will never forget when the very next day, we picked up his body at the morgue. They had put his body into a black garbage bag, tied at his ankles, and his little body was bowed at the waist. It was the most pitiful thing that Charlie and I had ever seen. We and the father were sobbing uncontrollably.
After we laid the little boy to rest, Charlie and I discussed the fact that the little boy’s life could have been saved with five cents’ worth of medicine. This strengthened our resolve to take medical-dental-evangelistic teams to Honduras.
It was then that Charlie had a vision that we should address medical needs but also preach the Gospel. But it was also then that we went on furlough, after about four years on the mission field. During that time, Charlie took our daughter to the dentist and told the dentist about his vision. The dentist said, ‘Well, I’ve been wanting to do that!’. So we got a group of seven (it’s funny, because many of the BMDMI groups are 35-60 people now!) to go to Oropoli, and that was the start of BMDMI.
We estimate we treated over a million patients during that time, and every one of them has heard the Gospel. Of course we don’t know how many professions of faith were made, but we know there were many—they’re very receptive to the Word of the Lord. We’ve produced children’s homes, Bible institutes, and over a hundred churches in Honduras. Today we’re in Honduras, Nicaragura, Guatemala and Nepal. It’s been wonderful to act in faith and then wait on the sidelines and just watch Him work.
