Fighting Steep Odds

by Called and Sent Magazine
May 01, 2008

Mission Impact’s Hector Flores helps Guatemalan Mayans find hope, life with Christ

Hector Flores talks to a group of children in El Rejón, a village of about 2,000 people in south-central Guatemala.

SO WHAT NOW?

1. PRAY that God will give Hector Flores and his co-laborers at Mission Impact the resources and wisdom and vision they need to serve the poor in Guatemala.

2. GIVE to Hector's ministry. Click here to find out how you can help Hector or other Mission Impact missionaries financially.

3. PRAY for the Mayan peoples of Guatemala, that they will find Christ and relief from the poverty and alcoholism that plague them.

PHOTOS

EL REJÓN, Guatemala – It’s 10 a.m. in this dusty mountain village. Men ride through on horseback carrying field tools or loads of firewood. Women lug brightly wrapped babies on their backs and balance jars of water on their heads.

Down the dirt road that climbs through town, a glassy-eyed man with bits of straw pasted to his temple—apparently from a recent snooze or spill—veers unevenly toward Hector Flores.

Hector, 34, takes a break from signing up patients for a low-cost dental clinic that he's helping to coordinate to talk with the man. His thickly muscled frame dwarfs his new acquaintance, who wears high rubber boots and a look of confused agitation.

Clearly the younger of the two, Hector — a missionary with Guatemala-based Mission Impact — chats with the man in a way that is both fatherly and friendly. The man nods, and after a few minutes shakes hands with Hector and wanders toward a neighborhood of cornstalk-wall-and-tin-roof shanties.

The scene illustrates Hector’s heart for the 2,000 or so indigenous Mayan people here, who cut fields into the impossibly steep hillsides to grow corn and beans and vegetables, mainly for their own consumption.

Few motorized vehicles drive through all day—a truck here, an old school bus delivering supplies to a block-walled convenience store there. Many kids go without shoes. For today’s dental clinic, Hector is asking people to pay 5 quetzales, or about 65 cents (“So they don’t think when groups are here, they are like Santa Claus,” Hector says).

“They are poor, and they have a lot of needs,” says Hector, noting that alcoholism tops the list of social problems here. “They are 90 percent Catholic, but … they continue with Mayan rituals. This is one of the reasons why we are here, working with the people to share the Gospel — because they need to know and have a relationship with God.”

Few people know that need more deeply than Hector, a former drug addict from a nearby town who started his relationship with Jesus Christ 14 years ago after a run-in with his absentee father.

A Father Who Cares

Hector was 11 when his father abandoned the family. He discovered drugs about a year later—which ones, he doesn’t like to say. In 1992, shortly after he turned 18, he said goodbye to his mom, hoping to find his father and re-establish a relationship.

He got up early one morning and walked through town all day, asking for his father by name. His search ended on the steps of a blue-and-white house about 7 o’clock that night.

Hector knocked. His father opened the door. Behind him stood his three children from his second wife.

“He told me, “What are you doing here?’” Hector recalls. “I told him, ‘I am your son. I am here because I want to live with you.’ I told him, ‘It doesn’t matter if you use me to work for you. I want to stay with you.’ I really needed him at that time.

“He told me, ‘This is my family now. You are not my family. You are an adult now. You can do what you want.’”
The scene sent Hector reeling. Suicidal depression set in. He decided to try to kill himself with a drug overdose.

“I said, ‘I have nothing good here. I don’t want to live. It didn’t make sense that I was still alive.”

The escalated drug use damaged Hector’s brain—he began suffering chronic headaches—but they didn’t do him in.

New Life, New Mission, ‘New Brain’

Two years later, in 1994, a neighbor told Hector about God. But the notion of God as a loving Father didn’t exactly make sense to him. Hector accepted Christ that year, and he went on his first short-term mission trip, to another village in Guatemala, in 1996.

However, even as he attended church and learned more about God, drug addiction still dogged him. Many days they wiped him out physically, and the headaches persisted.

A turning point came in 1999. A friend introduced Hector to his current boss, Mission Impact founder Jeff Sprecher, who was leading an evangelistic Bible study in the nearby city of Antigua. The two became friends. Now living with his mother again, Hector resolved to quit the drugs for good.

He asked a woman in his church to come pray for his headaches. She agreed, bringing 10 other women with her to pray. But she had also prayed beforehand.

"She told me, 'God told me that you know why you are sick -- because you are using things,'" Hector recalls. "She told me, 'God said for you that He will give you another opportunity, because he has a plan for your life. He will give you new neurons. You will have a new brain today.’”

That day, the headaches stopped. Hector has not suffered from them since.

"This is a victory," he says. "It's mercy. It's an opportunity.”

After working different jobs for local businesses and other ministry organizations for several years, Hector joined Mission Impact's staff in January 2006. He is in charge of team logistics and Mission Impact's burgeoning ministry to children in El Rejón.

In Hector, Sprecher saw a young man with an automatic connection to local people who also had a passion to see other people develop vibrant relationships with Jesus Christ.

"Having good people like that makes an impact," Sprecher says. "You don't have to supervise their daily schedules, because you now the things they're going to be involved in are kingdom-building. With their maturity and clear vision, it's just life-giving to be around those people."

Today, after setting up appointments for a visiting American dentist, Hector shifts seamlessly to organizing a Bible presentation for about 50 children. The event includes a group participation Bible lesson about obeying parents, and a dental hygiene talk. It also includes a five-minute garbage collection contest to teach the kids about community stewardship.

Hector has been working in El Rejón for two years, first helping to build new houses. Now, he works mainly with kids. From the enthusiastic shouts and laughter of the kids today, it's clear Hector has made a connection.

"Last year ... God started to put in our hearts to work more specifically with kids, because kids are more open," Hector says. "We think that now is the time to start to plant seeds in the hearts of the kids.

"When we have the Bible study with kids, we always teach the values and morals," Hector says. "We teach them how they can help the community. For example, they don't need to throw garbage around."

Rough as the road has been, Hector holds nothing against God for the trials he's endured along the way.

“My life is one opportunity,” Hector says. “I am not perfect, but I work in His grace, in His Holy Spirit to be a man of God. It’s a great opportunity to explain to the kids, because I always wished to have my father, but it never happened. But now I have a better Father.

“This was the world God used for me to know about Him,” he says. “I’m still in the process of learning more about Him, but I feel like a son. It’s Jesus in my life. It’s not about what wrong things I did before and the bad things that happened in my past. It’s Him and His mercy and His grace.”