STORY-WITHIN-A-STORY:
1. Made famous in the late 16th century via Shakespeare’s ‘play-within-a-play’ device, it is a rhetorical strategy for highlighting interconnecting lives.
Every day Oscar plays outside of his Grandma’s house. Covered in mud almost year round, he bathes in the river and wrestles with his brothers. He’s never had a father. His mother is 500 kilometers away, in the heart of Managua.
Oscar’s grandma watches him from the house, peering out into a gray afternoon. She sees his seven-year-old belly ballooned out from parasites and worms. Watches him through the grass. None of his brothers have school uniforms. None of them get quite enough food.
That same gray afternoon, Pastor Earl Bowie drives as far up the Coco River as roads allow, tires bouncing from pockmark to pockmark, dry brown roads the whole time paralleling the river. He wanders village to village, experiencing and meeting and investigating life downriver from Puerto Cabezas. On the outskirts of a community near Waspan, Nicaragua, he meets an old lady with children all over her house. The abuelita introduces him to her grandchildren, and begins to share her story with the Pastor.
2. References the practice, in heraldry, of placing a smaller shield upon a larger coat-of-arms, as in: protection, or adoption.
By nightfall, Oscar is placed in Pastor Earl’s passenger seat, and driven back upriver to the orphanage in Puerto Cabezas. The Verbo Church Pastor had seen a talented child—malnourished, but not critically; without a mother, without a father, left to an old lady who struggled every day to care for her grandchildren. When Pastor Earl offered a spot at the orphanage to her grandson, she recognized that it would be an incredible opportunity for Oscar, and tearfully agreed.
Oscar spent the next eleven years of his life at the orphanage, growing and learning alongside children his age, under the supervision and mentorship of Pastor Earl and the caretakers of Puerto Cabezas’ Casa Bernabe.
He lived in the Discipleship House at the orphanage—a place for the older boys to live in community with one another—and as the years went by, began to take leadership among his peers. Encouraged and mentored by Pastor Earl, Oscar began to realize he was a natural leader. He would wake up at five in the morning and lead a devotional with the other boys. Morning chores. School at 7. He tutored the younger children, and worked in a restaurant to help provide funds for the orphanage.
By the time he was fifteen, Oscar was a leader among the other children at Casa Bernabe. Although he visited his grandmother as often as possible through the years, there was a marked difference between his life and his siblings’ lives. He recognized and appreciated the opportunity that had been given to him—for education and health, spiritual nourishment, direction, and care.
3. When multiple histories intersect.
But Oscar’s story was only just beginning. Just before his sixteenth birthday, Oscar met Dustin. Dustin was on an American mission trip led through ORPHANetwork to Puerto Cabezas, with his home church. He and his wife had decided before the trip began that they wanted to support two children from Nicaragua. They wanted to support a child who was as lost and without direction as possible; a difficult child. And they wanted to support the sharpest, too.
Dustin knew Oscar was going somewhere from the moment they met, so the two began to dream together. Oscar shared his desire to go to college for architecture. They dreamed of a hope that Oscar would lead a firm that brings in enough profit to organize massive humanitarian projects. When Dustin asked Oscar what he would do with a million dollars, Oscar replied quickly and assuredly with a plan. He had thought it through.
So Dustin and his wife began to support Oscar. By the time he was eighteen, Oscar was ready to transition out of Casa Bernabe. From long talks with Pastor Earl, Dustin, and his professors, Oscar decided to put college on hold and take a year of intensive English at Ave Maria, one of the best English institutes in Managua. After that, he’ll attend college, and begin his own life.
The joy and blessing that Oscar has grown into—from his humble beginnings in the muddy riverside landscape down the Rio Coco, to the white tiled halls of Ave Maria—is God’s work and plan for his life. It is exciting and incredible to watch God’s people come alongside children like Oscar to be lights in the children’s lives, illuminating such paths as Oscar’s.