April 2005 Mission Trip to Guatemala
On
April 25, 2005, members and friends of Fourth Church left
for an eight-day trip to Guatemala. Participants in this trip were involved in a community development
project on the outskirts of Antigua, and joined hearts and
hands to work side by side with Guatemalans in a mission
of compassion and respect. Antigua is a charming city, nestled
among volcanic mountains. Its charm, however, cannot dispel
the widespread poverty existent in Guatemala. In response
to this great need, Fourth Church partnered with Common Hope,
a nonprofit organization focusing on community and family
development. This organization works in partnership with
Guatemalans to address systemic issues in their society,
seeking to improve the lives of Guatemalans through education,
health care, and housing initiatives. Through Common Hope,
an attempt is made to break the chains of poverty, empowering
the Guatemalans to live healthier and happier lives.
Each day of this trip was filled with a variety of activities,
including stove, water, and house-building projects, gardening
projects, and time with the children of the Common Hope School.
Opportunities to learn about issues facing Guatemalans today
were also included.
Here participants
in the trip share their experiences in pictures and
words and invite us to join them in their journey.
Mission
Trip Participants
Thomas Coke
Barbara Dillard
Courtney Hye
Carl Leigh
Laurie Leigh
Linda McCarty
Paul Meyer
Joseph Pixler
Nancy Jean Quast
Morris Ritchie
Brenda Liz Rivera
Callie Stein
Donna Stein
Building Relationships with Neighbors across
the Globe
Linda L. McCarty
How do we begin to capture and share the host of feelings that
well up on mission trips? After we have experienced worlds that
are so different from our own, after we have responded to God’s
call that beckoned us to reach beyond our comfort zones and absorb
another’s culture, another’s joy, another’s pain,
how do we answer the questions that come concerning how, or whether,
we are fully living into God’s purpose for us in our lives?
Thirteen of us are sitting with these and other questions after
having recently returned from Guatemala, a country full of love
and life, full of violence and despair.
We were privileged to work with Common Hope, a community development
project that began twenty years ago with a focus on education.
The program soon realized, however, that children cannot learn
when they are hungry, ill from parasites in the drinking water,
abused by alcoholic parents, when there is no roof over their
heads. So Common Hope expanded its focus to address the systemic
issues
of poverty: home construction, clean-water and stove projects
to improve health conditions, chicken and gardening projects
to encourage
self-sufficiency, social work visits to support entire families.
In these and countless ways, Common Hope seeks to live out God’s
call to love God and neighbor in tangible ways always with humility
and respect.
Those of us who participated in the Fourth Presbyterian Church
mission trip to Guatemala in April were blessed to enter into
Common Hope’s work on a multitude of levels, witnessing firsthand
the pain and despair of deep poverty, an overwhelming experience
as we struggled with conflicting emotions. Yet in the sea of despair
we also were overwhelmed by the Guatemalans, who, while living
in conditions beyond our comprehension, received us with grace,
hope, and promise in spite of their daily trials, teaching us,
giving us, more than we could possibly give or teach them. Every
step of the way, we felt God’s presence in the encounters
nudging us, prompting us, holding us.
We don’t yet know what this trip will mean for each of us
in the future. But we know we will never be the same after seeing
Dona Olga’s tears as we dedicated her home, after holding
baby Tomas close knowing his future is uncertain, after seeing
the pain in Sylvie’s eyes as she spoke of the death of
her youngest child.
God called us to Guatemala for a reason—each of us somehow
knows it. Now our task is to be open to the Spirit, the Spirit
that was so present with us in Guatemala, so that God might use
our experience of Guatemala to grow us and challenge us, that we
might seek with humble hearts to live into God’s purpose
for us, that we might seek ways in which to participate in building
God’s kingdom on earth each and every day, knowing that
God will be there with us every step of the way. We have been
truly
blessed.
Seeing
Hope
Joe Pixler
Little things mean a lot in Guatemala. For example, whenever
you walk past people they greet you with a “Buenos
dias!” in the morning, “Buenas tardes!” in
the afternoon and “Buenas noches!” in the evening.
Women balancing baskets on their heads and men with concrete
blocks strapped to their backs will exchange greetings with
you, then continue purposefully on their way up the hill
or down the cobblestone street. It’s exhilarating to
the point where you can hardly wait to greet the next person
you see.
Outside, surrounded by the highlands’ eternal springtime
and the people’s hospitable spirit, every day seems
good. But the streetscape is lined with walls soiled by diesel
fumes and dust, and behind those walls life isn’t always
so good.
One of the experiences that Common Hope provides visitors
is the opportunity to accompany its social workers as they
call on the homes of people who use the family support services
provided by “el Proyecto” (the Project), as Common
Hope is widely known. One morning I walked with Jaime as
he made his rounds in the village of Santa Ines near Antiqua.
Our first three visits were mundane. A young woman talked
about her skin rash. A mother fretted about her son’s
failing grades. A man with no job said he was fine. The final
stop, however, would be more dramatic. We knew that the father
we were visiting at this stop was an alcoholic with a history
of violence.
Jaime knocked on the door. A portal opened and a face peered
from behind bars. Jaime explained that we were visitors from “el
Proyecto.”
The man greeted us warmly and motioned for us to sit. Three
beds offered the only seating in the
room, so I chose one by the door and our host
sat
next
to
me. It
was
11:00 a.m. and he reeked of beer and sweat.
His wife entered with a toothless smile and sat at her sewing
machine surrounded by a colorful pile of half-finished purses.
Jaime asked how they were doing, and for the next
45 minutes the father poured out a torrent of tear-streaked
emotion. He waved his arm at his wife and toward the corner
of the room where his son sat on a bed and said that if he
drank it was because his family did not give him the respect
he deserved. His son responded that they did not respect
him because he drank. The father spat on the floor
and there was painful silence. Finally, Jaime made a suggestion:
If they could learn to respect each other they could live
as “una familia.” In this shadowy, airless room
the alternative was clear.
As Jaime told them of Common Hope’s family counseling
program, a little girl paraded into the room holding a plastic
bowl on her head, playing as if she were taking avacados
to the market. The father called her over, then turned to
me and asked if I had a camera. I pulled it out and took
a photo of his daughter. The family gathered around me and
admired the image on the tiny screen.
It was a good time to go. We all gathered outside the door,
trucks roaring along the street behind us, and wished each
other “Buenos dias!”
I wonder now if my Guatemalan family is learning how to live
together, but I know that they have an opportunity to learn.
There is hope in mission.
Bittersweet Chocolate
A poem by Custer Ritchie
When you first take a bite out of Guatemala.
You can taste the sweet, then the bitter aftertaste,
Like the women who are all ten to fifteen years younger
Than their tired smiling faces.
When you first get a whiff of Guatemala
You can smell the mountain air, the wood smoke, the tortillas.
It’s only later that you smell the fear—still
just below the surface,
Like some encapsulated infection that has not healed.
It’s the aroma of gun metal and disappointment.
When you first see the Mayan people, you remember
pictures of New Mexico pueblo people from the 1950’s.
Happy native faces in grainy black-and white.
But when you get behind their walls, inside their huts, and
really see the plight of these
People—the romantic vision turns as stark as La Guernica.
At first I was almost angry at what had been taken, and never
done.
I wondered how that many decades could go by without someone
noticing,
a rich Ladino or two becoming compassionate.
Then I heard the crying of a young mother because her teen-age
daughter
Was becoming unruly, and I thought again of how universal
was the human
condition, even on dirt floors.
It takes time to understand Guatemala, like a good story
unfolding
with new meaning as it is read again.
It will take time to heal Guatemala, to make the field of
play level,
or at least without potholes or landmines.
Someday I will return to Guatemala, and I expect things will
be better—
I expect to smell the wood smoke, taste the strong coffee,
but see a lot less razor wire strung along the tops of the
walls.
Maybe the women will even look their age.
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