Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part X)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

Part X:  The Good News

When Jesus first started His public ministry, He was given the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah. He chose to read the section that spoke of the good news for the poor.

FFP Videographer Ian Wood with some new friends

This trip was not lacking in good news for the poor.

We visited a thriving animal husbandry project (pigs and chickens) for widows. We played with the children of El Chulin Feeding Center, having bought the food at the market earlier and helped in the kitchen to prepare this special meal for them. We visited a successful tilapia-farming project for a community of 75 homes, both funded through the generosity of our donors. Here we were treated to freshly caught, nicely seasoned, fried tilapia. We were also treated to a delicious meal at the “pelibuey” project. Pelilbueys are a special cross-breed between goats and sheep, and the community had already increased their stock from 50 to more than 80 animals.

But there was also good news that was more intimately connected to the emotional content of our trip. Besides bringing food, clothing, shoes, mattresses and hope for the families we visited, our local partners in Guatemala managed to procure land for all those we visited who were renting from others. This means that, again, through the caring of our beloved donors, we will begin to build homes for all families visited on this trip. In particular, Catarina Sacrohope owned the land by the cliff, but we could not build there. However, during our visit, a kind neighbor decided that she would give Catarina a piece of land further up the mountain and away from the edge of the precipice.

The greatest gift that we can share with the poor is our gift of presence. It comes with a feeling of brotherhood, of caring, of walking the extra mile, of coming out of our very comfortable worlds daring to understand their world of suffering and sorrow – it comes with an offer of love and hope.

THE END

 

Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part VIII)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

 Part VIII: A Widow on the Edge

We then visited Catarina Sacrohope, a 27-year-old woman with four young children. At first sight, Catarina’s predicament has much in common with many of the other destitute families we had visited: she is a widow; she is very poor; she lives in a cramped, wretched hovel; she and her children scavenges for food at garbage dumps; she has no means of support for her family; her children are malnourished (the youngest did not stop crying until we gave him some food); their clothing is ragged and threadbare.

Angel with Catarina and her family

Yet her sadness was different for the others we had seen – it was more distracted, more desperate, more urgent; more intense. As we walked down the treacherous, slippery, rocky, narrow pathway that sloped sharply downhill towards her house, I understood why.

You see, Catarina lives with her family on the edge of a cliff, literally one foot away from a hundred-foot drop down a ravine that people use to dump their useless garbage, debris and human waste. There is slow but chronic erosion, as the shack is directly in the path of frequent mudslides caused by the heavy rainfall and the area is further afflicted by earth tremors.

Catarina is a woman who lives in constant fear – not only of long-term consequences of malnourishment, contaminated water and other scourges of poverty, but of an instant and immediate danger to the life of her children and her own. She is a woman living on the edge of a cliff that has her teetering always between life and death, robbing her of anything even remotely resembling peace of mind.

To be continued...

Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part V)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

Part V:  Juanbi

While we were visiting Josefa Morales, I received a wonderful gift – a surprise.

Five years before I had met a young man, Juanbi, who helped 15 widows with a pig-rearing project in that area. Although he only spoke Quiche (one of the four main Mayan languages) I immediately felt a fatherly affection for him. He was so hardworking and he treated the pigs like pets, naming each one of the ten. He was orphaned from a young age and now he found himself responsible for the care of his three younger siblings.

Whenever I visited Guatemala, I would always try to see him and three years ago, when my wife and I vacationed in Guatemala, we took him shopping for clothes. I was amazed that for someone who had little, he had great dignity, refusing many of the pieces of clothing or shoes that we offered to buy for him. I often commented to him that my one regret was that we could not communicate without a translator.

Aloma with Juanbi

Pastor Chan, one of our partners in Guatemala, arranged for Juanbi to come and see me during our visit to Josefa. It filled me with joy to see him. He said, through Pastor Chan, that he had a surprise for me. Suddenly, he started speaking to me in the most beautiful Spanish that one could imagine. I hugged him and he started crying and so did I. I was moved that he credited me as his inspiration for learning the language, but I also thought that practically this would open job possibilities for him.

I invited him to dinner with us and I marveled at what he told me. Having learned Spanish at the Mayan Institute (a free school for Mayan descendants) he was able to get a job in construction from Monday to Friday. On Saturdays he continued to study all day and had just finished grade school and was about to begin secondary school and had ambitions for going to college. On Sundays he would study and play soccer with nine friends who lived in his tiny village of nine homes.

If this sounds amazing to you, please understand that he walks five hours each day to get to work and back home, and four hours on Saturday to get to school and back. What a great example of discipline, tenacity and will. What a great surprise!

To be continued....