Role reversal

  Standing in the dusty lane they call a street and seeing the dedication and key ceremony for Santos and her boys took me back. It took me back to the beginning of the week when Santos was doing anything but smiling as we tore down her old house. Now, she is smiling from ear to ear and I am overcome with a sense of loss.
  We're done a the site. This is goodbye. Unless I come back on another mission I won't see this family again or any of the neighbor kids or neighbors.  I won't see little Victor and his endless energy and personality. The little girl who taught herself English and wrote "love" in a heart with one of the women on the mission. I won't work side-by-side with Orlando, Edgar, or their friends.  I won't be able to be silly at the work site and be rewarded with an honduran's observing smile.
  So as much as I am happy for the family and to have been a part of it all, I felt something missing as Tony and I rode standing in the back bed of that beaten down yellow pickup of Levi's. There was no laughing or joking around this time.  We just looked silently at the same buildings and people from the building site to the mission house, the same sites we saw many times by now, but we looked as though we took one long deep breath trying to take it all in and not let it out.
  God Bless Santos, her family and all these Honduran people we have met and grown to love.

Aaron Mason