NTGT : Honduras

BY : Shelby Miller

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Gratitude in November is almost a reflex, muscle memory, something we have come to expect. It’s easy for me to look around my house full of luxuries and find things to be thankful for. It’s easy to scroll through my contacts and find a family full of precious souls to be thankful for.

I grew up in America where our houses are typically warm, safe, and full of things. I grew up with good healthcare, access to food, and safe places to play outside. Gratitude is almost too easy for us. But determined to prove that gratitude was a mindset, a choice, a possibility for everyone, I decided to take Naming The Good Together to a place that did not have the luxuries that I grew up with. 

Close your eyes and imagine with me for a moment. You wake up to the sound of your neighbors arguing as the sun peaks through the sheets of metal that make up the walls of your house. You wipe the sweat from your forehead and try to blink the sleepiness away. It’s only six but it’s already hot. You slide your feet out of bed and onto the dirt floor and make your way outside to the makeshift bathroom. There you pour cold water over your body to start the day. Looking through a pile of clothes, you pull out a t-shirt and some shorts then slide on your shoes that seem to get thinner by the day. There isn’t any food at home, so you don’t have breakfast. Grabbing your backpack you walk out of your village and head to school about a mile away.

Does this sound like your childhood?  Mine either. 

But this is where I live now — El Progreso, Honduras. I work for Hope Through Him Ministries, a non profit that works with students in the inner city. This is how my students start their day. Though it is much different than the November mornings I remember growing up, I was positive that gratitude could be possible for them too. So I sat them down and talked about gratitude. We talked about what it meant, how to practice it, and how gratitude can affect our brains. I passed around a worksheet called “Buscando Lo Bueno” (looking for the good) and challenged my students to name something they are thankful for every day for one month. 

As I look over their worksheets at the end of the month, I can’t help but smile at the things they wrote down. Simple things like mom, my friend David, soccer, being a part of the dream center program, having chicken and rice for dinner, being able to read, being able to live with my mom, passing math class. 

Even in Honduras, in extreme poverty with food insecurity and no running water or electricity, my students practiced gratitude. When I asked them what they noticed about this exercise, one student said, “when I started looking for things to be thankful for, it was much easier to find things to be thankful for.” Isn’t that what gratitude is? Not creating a life you can be thankful for, but cultivating gratitude right where you are. Finding the good and focusing on it. And then calling everyone around you to do the same. Students were thankful for their parents’ jobs, for their grandmother living another year, that they had dinner last night, that they had clothes that fit them, that they were able to go back to school this year.

After this month, I can say without a doubt that gratitude is for everyone. It just has to be a choice we make. I hope as you continue choosing to name the good, that gratitude becomes the natural posture of your heart. I think you will notice that as you look around, your life was always full, you just needed to notice it and name it.