rnship follows a 9-to-5 job office schedule, four students will participate in an internship that combines educational, medical, agricultural and spiritual training in Honduras through Mission Lazarus, a nonprofit organization that offers a holistic approach to community building. Rather than making copies and brewing coffee all summer, these students will teach rural school children, play with orphans, milk cows, offer medical treatments to mountain communities and evangelize in one of the world’s poorest countries from May 26 to July 28.
Seniors Kelcey Simpson and Claire Walker and juniors Annalyse Faulk and Daniel Mata will join eight interns from other schools and live in a developing country known for its increasing instability and violence. Safety concerns caused the Peace Corps to withdraw from Honduras in January, and a Honduras spring break mission trip was recently canceled as well.
According to a 2011 United Nations report, Honduras has the world’s highest murder rate with 81.2 homicides for every 100,000 residents. In spite of the current safety hazards, neither Simpson nor Faulk is worried.
“Seth Daggett, the man in charge of Mission Lazarus, knows what he’s doing,” Simpson said. “He’ll let us know what to do and [what to] be wary of. I probably should be more concerned, but I’m not.”
Currently, Simpson and Faulk’s primary challenge is to raise enough money to spend the summer in Honduras. They have been sending letters to friends, family and congregations to obtain the $3,665 they each need.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a big challenge,’ but you just keep going on and having faith because it will all work out in the end,” Simpson said.
While in Honduras, the Mission Lazarus interns will be put on rotations that will allow them to serve the locals in various ways. As they meet the physical needs of the Honduran people, they will also offer to conduct home Bible studies with anyone who shows interest in learning more about God.
Simpson said she hopes these experiences in a foreign country will unify the interns and bond them as a family. She said her semester abroad in Greece last spring showed her how close people can become when they spend all their time living and working together.
Faulk said she is familiar with how mission trips work and living abroad can change people’s lives. She said she has gone on domestic mission trips to a Navajo reservation, New Orleans and on medical mission trips to Panama, while her parents have been missionaries in Venezuela for the past two years.
She said she was able to connect with one of the other Harding interns, Mata, because her parents also live in Venezuela.
“I could say that I’m going to Honduras to help other people, but really they’re helping me because they have a different perspective,” Simpson said. “Over there, less is more. I think I’ll come back wanting to change the world because it seems so unfair that they have so little and we have so much.”
