When anacondas want dinner, they ambush their prey.  Their dark green skin makes them virtually invisible in the water, and when a small animal or human comes along, they strike.  Without warning, their dinner is pulled beneath the surface, never to be seen again.

The hardest part of my job as an English teacher isn’t telling Stephen to sit down for the twentieth time.  It’s not competing with cell phones for my students’ attention or having to proctor state tests.  It isn’t even receiving angry emails from parents.

The hardest part of my job is watching students get ambushed and dragged away from all that’s good in life.

Drugs, lies, and despair, like giant green snakes, hide just below the surface of the darkness waiting to strike.  All it takes is a little loneliness and the wrong crowd, and suddenly the innocence of a young man or woman is squeezed out in the corrupting coils of the Father of Lies.

The same is true all over the world, even in little Mexican towns.  Every year when Spring Break comes around, my family and I join an amazing team of people and head south to Boquillas.  Within its dirt streets and brightly painted houses, there’s a special kind of innocence; kids play soccer at the cancha and old men sit in the shade of the purple flowered jacaranda trees.  The people there have shown our family how to live.

But the drug cartels have an influence of their own, slithering their way even to that remote area and claiming the lives of young people along the way.

Our first day in Boquillas, just a few weeks ago, the sun was shining bright and our worship leader, Kevin, was playing Forrest Frank’s “Happy” over the sound system.  Kids were lining up at the gate with bright smiles, getting nametags and high-fives.

After helping to set up a tent by the basketball court, I walked toward the elementary school where everyone was gathering.

Crossing the dirt road, I heard a deep familiar voice.

“Aron!”  That’s what people call me in Mexico.  It’s close to my actual name, and easier to pronounce in Spanish.  It sounds more like “Air-OWN!” with an emphasis on the “O” sound.

I looked over and thought I saw Carlos waving at me almost a block away under a shady tree.  He’s a young man who I’ve known since he was 10.  He’s always been built like a bull with a shorter frame, a barrel chest, and legs like tree stumps.  He came to all the sports camps we hosted and loved to be physical.  Chest bumps, bear hugs, boxing—he loved any kind of physical contact.

One year, I made up a game where I’d say, “Cuidado! Serpiente!” and I’d clap my hands and arms together like one big snake looking for its prey.  When I weaved my way toward the kids, they’d laugh nervously, and then I’d grab one of them and squeeze him in a tight hug.  They loved it!  Especially Carlos.

What I didn’t see then was how prophetic our little game would become.

Carlos was 17 now, waving at me from a safe distance and too old to join in the games with the kids.  I waved back and kept walking until I had to stop.

I couldn’t shake this feeling that I needed to walk up to him.

So I did.

I turned around and walked right up to that shady spot.  It was Carlos, sitting with some friends in the rubble of a broken wall.

“Hola, Carlos!” I shouted in broken Spanish.

When I got in the shade, I could see their eyelids were heavy, like they’d just woken up, and their movements were slow.  Carlos’ friends laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of kids playing.  It was a mocking, weak kind of laugh, and my heart sank.

They were all high.

“Hola, Aron,” Carlos said.

The boy who once shouted “Serpiente!” at me, trying to get me to chase him, now was sitting in the dirt, hopeless.  Instead of arms being wrapped around him in a tight hug, the coils of an enemy bent on his destruction were strangling the life out of him, and all the wide-eyed wonder of his childhood was slipping away.

He looked at me, trying to force a smile.  I could tell there was still a flickering flame of desire inside him to pick up a baseball and play with us.  But he was caught, stuck in the grip of something he couldn’t escape.

I tried to smile back at him, to keep him from feeling judged, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Como estas?” I finally asked.  The boys watched me and then looked back at him.  He was their leader, which didn’t surprise me.  Since he was little, all the boys looked up to him.

“Bien,” he said.

Then, he caught me completely off guard.  I watched him reach behind his back.  The boys giggled knowingly.

When his hand finally came back, he held something that made my stomach turn.

It was a broken plastic bottle.  The mouth of it was intact for smoking, but the base of it was flattened.  A foil cup was attached at the end with finely chopped black and green bits of some drug stuffed into it.

He held it with a resigned smile, like a baby deer acknowledging the anaconda’s coils wrapped around it.

“Queries?” he asked, holding it up to me.  The boys laughed, and I shook my head no.

I invited him to come to the youth event for teens later that night.  He nodded his head like he wanted to go, but walking away, I felt hopeless.

He’s stuck, I thought.  How’s he ever going to be free?

He sat with his buddies in the shade while we ran baseball drills.  The younger kids laughed and shouted to each other for the ball, and every now and then, I’d see Carlos look longingly at us.

It rained that day—the first time it had ever rained when we were in Boquillas—and I can’t help but think now, looking back, that there was a message in that fresh rain.  Like any good author, God was reminding us that stories can change, and we were about to find out He was right.

That’s all for today! Thanks for reading, and make sure to check out the conclusion in two weeks.  Do you like these stories? A great way you could show your appreciation is by forwarding this email to someone else who might enjoy them. Or did someone forward this to you? Sign up here to get a story like this one twice a month. Thanks for your support!