Oliver
No Longer an Orphan
If you are a Honduran orphan under the age of 21, you cannot leave Honduras. Though Micah has legal custody of our young men, we still need a biological parent to sign the authorization for our guys to get a passport.
This was a big problem for Oliver, who is an orphan. He had been selected along with eight other Micah guys to travel to Costa Rica for a soccer tournament this week as a member of the Honduras Rush soccer club. The other guys have at least one living parent and we were able to get passports for them. Oliver would have to miss the trip. Another disappointment for a kid who has suffered SO much loss in his young life.
Oh wait. Hold on a minute. I just got a message that our guys and their team arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica about 15 minutes ago, after a 30-hour (30 hour!!!) bus trip. And guess what? Oliver was on that bus!
To say that God moved mountains to get Oliver to Costa Rica feels like an understatement. Last week, our lawyer and long-time friend Marlon Castellanos was able to get Oliver an audience before a family court judge to plead his case. The judge had compassion on Oliver and issued a ruling allowing him to leave the country…but only if the head of Honduras’s child welfare agency signed off on it.
On his way to see the family court judge, Oliver was nervous but he wore his shirt that says Brave, Brave, Brave. I told him that the shirt gives him superpowers!
Marlon raced the ruling over to SENAF, the Honduran government agency overseeing child welfare in Honduras. The head of that agency oversees hundreds of thousands of cases of children at risk. Surely, analyzing whether Oliver could leave the country to play in a soccer tournament was low on her list of priorities. Somehow, his situation made it to the top of her pile, though, and, within a couple of hours, she had signed off on the trip.
First thing the next morning, Marlon took Oliver to immigration to get his passport and a formal document allowing him to leave the country. Within hours, Oliver had the passport in hand. Not only that, but Honduran immigration officials also called Nicaraguan immigration agents at the border crossing to explain that Oliver was a special case so that they would not hold up his entry as the buses passed through Nicaragua on their way to Costa Rica.
Have you ever had to deal with government bureaucracy? What about government bureaucracy in a third world country? I can’t impress on you enough how impossible the above scenario should have been. Any part of this process could have gotten snagged in red tape for months, if not years. Oliver should not be in Costa Rica right now. But he is.
If a passport is a symbol of freedom, then this whole miraculous journey is a symbol of our Heavenly Father’s personal, intimate love and bondage-breaking care for His son Oliver. I’ve written about Oliver’s journey to Micah before. He was born in a mountain village with no running water or electricity to a young woman who died of a drug overdose when he was a toddler. He lived with his grandmother for a while, but her own struggle with alcoholism made it impossible for her to care for him. At the age of 9, he left his mountain village and hitchhiked to Tegucigalpa. Sadly, his only option for survival in this city was to join a group of older street kids, an extremely vulnerable situation for him. His only solace came in a bottle of yellow shoe glue.
Oliver huffs from a bottle of yellow shoe glue in 2019
In March of 2020, at the age of 12, Oliver joined the Micah Project. He has never left, though his journey towards freedom from addiction, loss, and trauma has been a difficult one. Before joining Micah, he had never slept on a bed. Most nights in his first few months at Micah, he would move a blanket to a floor and sleep there. Even this year, the dark trauma of his time on the streets often keeps him awake at night. He misses a lot of class time because of sleepless nights.
But Oliver has persevered. In 2024, at the age of 16, he has grown to almost six feet tall. He still has hard days, but he is growing and maturing day by day. This trip to Costa Rica will be a tremendous encouragement to him. It is a sign to him that he is no longer an orphan. His Father is using Micah to break through the bondage of his past life, to show him the true freedom he has in Christ.
Michelle and Pat Corley congratulate Oliver after his sixth-grade graduation in November 2024.
2025 is going to be a big year for Oliver (for one thing, I think he will pass me up in terms of height!). God will continue to help him pursue freedom as he becomes the man he was created to be.
Our Father has used YOU to help Oliver to break free from the bondage of his past life. He has used YOU to help Oliver understand that he is no longer an orphan. Your love and support for Micah has transformed this life.
This blog post was originally written as an email titled “Christmas is Freedom: No Longer and Orphan.” in December 2024. If you are not receiving our emails and would like to, please sign up at https://bit.ly/micah-email
