It’s 7:30 a.m. and it’s humid. It’s the rainy season in Honduras, so the humidity is normal. Freshman Colby Keene stirs and wakes in a simple mission house in a poor village in Yoro, which houses about 20 other volunteers from Mercy & Grace Ministries on this trip. He has a busy day ahead of him.
After all, those 1,000 cement blocks aren’t going to move themselves down the mountain and into the village, to become houses for the Honduran natives.
For Keene, helping to build homes for people is one of his favorite Christian missionary trip projects because it’s a fulfilling way to help those in need.
“Within a week we had to hike 1,000 blocks in between about 15 guys,” Keene said. “It was about a half a mile hike, but it’s up and down hill. So that was good work,” Keene said.
This isn’t the first trip that the 18-year-old Greensboro native and catcher on the North Carolina A&T baseball team has made to Honduras, a small country in Central America, nor will it be his last.
“It’s kind of where I have connections already,” said Keene, who has been to Honduras four times since 2009. “My parents have a ministry, and I know some people over there. I feel called to do that.”
Keene, along with his younger brother Caleb, and his parents, Chuck and Dianne, have made several missionary trips with Mercy & Grace Ministries. They have helped to build houses and churches and to bring necessities like food and medical care in villages in the department of Yoro in Honduras. They have also aided the homeless and inner-city poor in Memphis, Tenn., and in the public housing areas where Michael Oher (of The Blind Side fame) grew up.
“To see Colby acting out his faith through his love for missions both in Honduras and right here in the U.S., makes us proud to call him our son,” Dianne said. “Since his early years as a believer he has never strayed from his faith and has always announced it proudly. Even as early as his Little League baseball days, he placed stickers on his helmets proudly sharing his love for Christ.”
Keene has been proudly sharing his love and care while serving as a missionary. Keene’s already gotten a taste for what the work of a missionary will be like in the last three years. His involvement with Mercy & Grace Ministries actually started with his parents, who helped to organize Mercy & Grace Ministries and kick-start their efforts from the United States. His father is the president and his mother serves as the secretary of Mercy & Grace Ministries.
The Keene brothers’ first trip to the country in 2009 was a life-changing event. Dianne saw this change in her sons during a trip to deliver food to the hungry at the city dump in Tegucigalpa.
As the family drove into in area of town unfit rodents, a thick black smoke with toxic fumes produced a sickening stench in the air, Dianne described. Keene watched the men, women and children fight off the buzzards as they pilfered through the freshly dumped garbage looking for yesterday’s leftovers hoping for a morsel of food to call lunch.
“As soon as the people saw us coming they began to run to the truck because they knew that we were bringing them a plate of food to fill their starving stomachs,” said Keene’s mother. “I watched my precious son serve these men, women, and children a simple plate of chicken with rice along with a cup of water, knowing it was producing the same raw emotion in him that I experienced the first time I came to the dump.”
Being able to give and share a message of hope, through acts of charity and service, is what drives Keene to serve those in need.
“Because they really have nothing. The whole village out in Honduras when we first started going there, they didn’t have any block houses. They were all stick and mud houses. I think now they have six or seven block houses there. We bring them hope and a message of Jesus Christ that they just cling to,” Keene said. “These people have never been reached. They’ve never seen an American. They’ve never seen anybody other than Hondurans.”
The services Keene and his ministry are able to provide are immeasurable. They provide construction, feeding projects, medical clinics, vacation bible school and many other needs. The trips last 7-10 days and average 20-30 volunteers. Keene, who has served as a leader on a number of mission trips, said the plane flies to the Tegucigalpa airport before the group buses into the mountains to begin work.
A typical day on a mission trip is simply planned, and involves just simple immersion into hands-on projects. Keene’s group stays in a mission house in a poor village, and begins the day early.
“We wake up around 7:30 a.m., get on the bus and drive up in the mountains,” Keene said. “Get up, get on the bus, go out and work all day until about 5 or 6 p.m. Come back, eat and relax. When you’re out there, you’re working hard and it’s hot. It’s definitely hot down there. We usually go in the rainy season, so it’s humid.
“It’s work,” he continued. “But then you stop and do a Bible study or devotion. Or what we’ll do is we’ll go back, get ready and go back and do a church service at night,” he said.
With all of its fulfillments, Keene is eagerly anticipating his next trip to Honduras, a 10-day stay scheduled in July, to continue to share the message of hope to ease the burden of those in need.
And when he’s next facing a major project in Honduras, like helping to lug 1,000 cement blocks through the mountains to build more houses, Keene will probably be thinking about story of Benaiah for inspiration.
“Benaiah was one of David’s mighty men, and he actually faced a lion in a pit on a snowy day and killed it. That’s kind of how I feel sometimes—chasing a lion, nothing really makes sense,” he said. “There’s a great task at hand, but with God you can accomplish that task--chasing a lion and killing a lion on a snowy day.”
Keene has been tackling large tasks in his missionary work. And that’s something he is excited to dedicate his life to after he graduates from A&T.
Keene, who was last in Honduras for two weeks over the Winter Break, also added that he’s not limiting his plans of service to just Honduras, and is open to serving as a missionary in other parts of the world.
In the meantime, Keene hopes to leave A&T with his degree in civil engineering, attend a seminary and begin missionary work. He recognized that his plan is second to God’s.
