Amazing things do happen!

By Kyla Stewart, Dec 2010

There they sat, all the players in the drama, in the small Canadian Embassy in Guatemala. Luz Mila, her mother, and Dan, while Dan’s father, Gord, talked with the lady in the Visa booth. Waiting, praying, pacing back and forth. And from what Dan could hear from around the corner, it wasn’t sounding good. Luz Mila and her mother, Lorena, watched his every movement and he shot them a tentative smile and thumbs up before turning his concentration back to the little room in which Gord and the Canadian Ambassador were duking it out. This day represented the culmination of two years worth of effort; applying for passports, waiting on Visa’s, choosing the best route to use to bring a 16 year old girl from the back roads of La Ceiba, Honduras to study just outside of the modern day city of Toronto, Canada.

Luz Mila grew up in a place that has no name. She grew up in a place of beauty, on the top of a mountain that looks out over the tropical rainforest of Honduras, out to the ocean and beyond. A place that anyone who visits will be overwhelmed by the remoteness and beauty of it all. Not that there are many visitors. She grew up in a place where the closest neighbor’s house is over an hour walk away and the closest town over three. There are no cars, no bikes, and no transportation except for your own two legs. She used them often, every day, walking for hours on end to attend the school that she knew was her ticket out of the situation she was born into, but always returning home at the end of the day to her dirt floor, mud and stick walled house. Her home.