Our Story
In 2001 Pastor Jeony Ordoňez (who had been working with street kids in Tegucigalpa) went to the city dump to throw away his garbage with his young daughter, Chris. They saw hundreds of kids, not much older than his five-year old daughter, sorting through garbage with their bare hands!
“Daddy,” his daughter urged him, “We need to pray for these children working in dump.” Ordonez agreed. Every day following the visit, his daughter reminded him of the children in t
he dump, urging him to do something.
How can you ignore the voice of an innocent child? Or perhaps, “the voice of God?”
In June 2001 Pastor Jeony and his wife began holding classes in the garbage dump. As more children came, more volunteer teachers were drafted.
In 2003 the small group of teachers moved their roughly fifty students from the trash dump to a nearby field. A tree provided shade from the sun. During the rainy season, class was contingent on the weather. Pastor Ordonez used a home-school curriculum approved by the government, and drafted more and more volunteer teachers as the numbers of students climbed.
In 2004 AFE was officially founded, but it wasn´t until 2006 six that its children were finally able to study in classrooms! Mission teams came from the United States and built AFE´s first building in April 2006.
From those early beginnings AFE now has two three-story school buildings, and a cafeteria with around 150 children, from toddlers to the 11th grade.
AFE is a relatively new organization, but already making a difference in the lives of children like Antonio, the first child we rescued from the garbage dump.