The Jaramillo Family Makes a Difference

The Jaramillo Family lives in Eagle, CO. Hannah is a nurse and Evan a police officer. They have three children, and they sponsor Christian who lives in Honduras and is Deaf.

Hannah says that the idea of helping a child somewhere else in the world who doesn’t have the same opportunities as most of us do here in the U.S. is hard to pass up. She wants her kids to know that the world is so much bigger and we all need each other.

Christian is six years old and lives with his family in a small town in very rural Honduras. He is the only one of four children that is deaf so the diagnosis came as a shock to his family as it does to most. Staff from Deaf Child Hope visited Honduras in March and got to spend time with Christian and his family at their home.

His parents shared about the struggles they faced

His parents shared about the struggles they faced even getting the hearing loss diagnosed. It took multiple trips to multiple doctors, each one further

away. The family does not have a car so they would use the bus system which makes for a longer trip and means you need to walk to the nearest bus which is probably far away and also walk to your destination once you get off the bus. Even after the hearing loss was officially identified by doctors, nobody had any resources for them. It wasn’t until a teacher, Ellie, came along a few years later and told Christians parents that she was teaching sign language and providing an education to deaf children, in the town close by, that they started to have some hope.

She was like an angle had come to us

“She was like an angle had come to us” Christian’s mother said to Deaf Child Hope staff. “When she arrived on our doorstep because she had heard we had a son who was deaf, it was a very real answer to prayer.”

Before that Christian nor any members of his family knew any sign language. In Honduras their sign language is called Lesho. You learn Lesho the same way you would learn American Sign Language in the States. Pay for classes or a tutor, know somebody who is deaf, use government funded programs, get online, buy books… Only if you live in poverty in a developing country, NONE of those things are accessible to you, especially when you don’t even know how or where to begin. Well a teacher was a start, so from there Christian and his family started to learn sign language and were enveloped into a whole other world. There was an entire community of deaf right there in their district that they have never met before.

You see in Honduras, deafness isn’t really discussed. It’s like that because people don’t have the resources to do anything so it seems like a hopeless situation and why talk about a hopeless situation? But with Ellie’s arrival in 2017, the deaf community has started to understand the possibilities, and hope is present for the first time in that region of Honduras.

How does the Jaramillo family make a difference?

How does the Jaramillo family make a difference, when they are 2,000 miles away in Colorado? Well they support Christian, through prayer, friendship and financially so that his opportunities continue to grow. Christian’s language and literacy skills are still getting started but he doesn’t need words to know that an American family far far away cares about him and believes in him. So to Christian and his family that really is a miracle.