2005
In October, 2005, a group from Heartland Presbytery visited the Maya Quiché Presbytery in Guatemala. Hurricane Stan had struck the country just before the trip, causing devastating damage to many areas. (How you can help). Our travels were limited to Guatemala City, Antigua, and nearby villages, as roads to Xela were impassable. Below are pictures from the trip.
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| Courtyard of Spring Hotel in Guatemala City | Vulture in Guatemala City Cemetery | Guatemala City Dump | Antigua Street View |
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| Courtyard of Lutheran Retreat Center in Antugua | Minding the store in Antugua | ||
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| Street scenes in Jocotenango, near Antigua, which had suffered flooding | Flooded bedroom in a home in Jocotenango | Walter Arreaza, CEDEPCA employee, guide, interpreter, and friend, with his nephew, who lives in Jocotenango | |
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| Families at a community shelter in Jocotenango. We bought supplies for the families staying at the shelter, and entertained the children for an afternoon. | |||
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| A group of women in Chichicastengo spoke to us of their experiences during Guatemala's civil war. They support each other and raise money through sales of traditional Guatemalan woven fabrics. | |||
A
TRUNCATED MISSION TRIP: GUATEMALA,
OCTOBER 2005
When
we left early on Oct. 7, we knew
Hurricane Stan had hit Guatemala and that the mudslides and floods were centered
in the mountainous region where we had planned to go.
We considered canceling or postponing our mission trip.
But we decided if we were truly friends of Maya Quiche Presbytery and its
people, it would be wrong to abandon them in a time of great stress.
Even while we were in the air, reports came in that things were much
worse than we could have anticipated. We
thought it might be a couple of days before we could actually get into the area.
We had hoped perhaps we could be of some actual help.
As least our presence there could have symbolic value.
Christians need not be "fair weather friends".
Hundreds
of people are dead. Some entire
villages had been buried in mudslides. The
highway to Quetzaltenango ("Xela") where we needed to be was
completely blocked and damaged bridges would not be opened for some time.
We would not be able to venture far from the Capital.
My wife got some news reports that there was rioting for food and water
in Guatemala City, and tourists were being targeted.
We saw no evidence of that, or any reason for it.
There were certainly food shortages in the damaged areas and possibly
riots. We took the normal
precautions of never wandering off alone and no one ever mentioned any sense of
feeling threatened. Of course, had
we left home a few days earlier, we would have been where we intended to be -
and marooned and probably hungry too.
As
it was, we experienced an aspect of life in Guatemala most of our mission groups
see little of. CEDEPCA is a
consortium of mainline Protestant and Catholic groups that does a lot of
education and activist organizing in the country.
They took care of us and itinerated us.
We did go into a village that had experienced flooding.
A mudslide dammed the river and as the water rose, it found another
channel right down a road through the village.
Our CEDEPCA driver had two brothers who lived in that area, and we
visited the home of one. His house was of two stories and they'd managed to move most
everything upstairs. Others
suffered much more. We were willing
to shovel mud but they were well organized and seemed to have plenty of hands.
We had a doctor and two nurses who were willing to use their skills, but
the health department had things well in hand too.
The health department was busy shampooing and de-licing refugees in the
village center where some sixty people were still living.
We did take the children outside into the plaza so the mothers could have
maybe three hours of respite. This
was all much appreciated. We also
bought some medical and other kinds of needed supplies for the center.
In
another village we met with half a dozen Mayan women who were part of a group of
twenty-some. They had all trekked
over the mountains with remnants of their families from the territory where we
had expected to be. This had
happened some twenty years ago when the government troops were fighting
guerillas in the area. They would
enter the villages, pillage them and maybe take away some people who were never
seen again. They would burn some
homes. The residents would flee
into the mountains but food was scarce and eventually, some would return to the
village area. Soldiers lurking in
the ruins would then kill them. In
the mountains, the Mayan sense of community would generally rule, so whatever
food they found would be shared and children would get priority .
Eventually, the remnants of families traveled the many kilometers.
They had to shed their traditional Mayan dress, which identified them as
quickly as they could replace it, and they definitely stayed away from the
roads. In this new location, they
could then blend with the population and be relatively safe.
All of them shared very personal stories that were similar to what we
have all heard from Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and other such places;
rapes, torture before actually killing; ripping the child from the body
of the live mother, then killing first the infant and then the mother.
Some 200,000 lives were lost in those years.
To
me it was different here in two ways. First,
we were face to face with a beautiful people in their beautiful Mayan dress.
They were sad as they told us what they had experienced, but now they
have a new life and a new hope. We
did not catch any tinge of desire for retribution.
When asked if they wanted to return to the villages they left, the answer
was "No. The
memories there were just too sad." If
yes, it would only be to properly honor and bury the loved ones they had left
behind because they were dead. Here
they had a new life; the children had opportunity for schooling, and they had
formed a new community out of the disparate remnants that had settled here.
This was home.
My
second reason was simply that the U. S. bears a heavy responsibility at least
for triggering the civil war in which these people suffered.
We helped depose a democratically elected president whose programs of
social security, minimum wage, and land reform mostly just reflected what we
take for granted. But Boston-based United Fruit Company did not want to release
its grip on the land and the people of Guatemala.
And neither Democrats nor Republicans are blameless.
We were sold on the idea that communism was poised to take over the
country and so we supplied the money and the weapons for the rebellion.
The Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect states in this hemisphere
from colonialism. It was not
intended to make these lands colonies of the U.S.
Today,
65% of the U.S. Gross National Product comes from wages, salaries, and earnings
from work. The rest comes from
interest, rents, and property ... in other words, investment.
In Guatemala, the whole is considerably smaller than ours, but there,
wages and salaries constitute only 25% of the GNP.
Most of the best produce of the country is exported and the investment is
also largely exported. A Guatemalan
living in the U.S. can send home more than he could earn there.
The worker at a McDonald's in Guatemala City can't afford to buy the Big
Mac meal he is selling.
CEDEPCA,
our wonderful consortium of the churches, has been burglarized three times in a
year. Some thirty such burglaries
have hit similar organizations in the city.
Money and such valuables are ignored.
What is taken are computer disks and memory. The powers that be don't want to see any improvement in the
lives of ordinary people and they can still intimidate. Life today for the average Guatemalan is better than it was.
The question is whether it will remain the same, improve, or revert to
previous levels. The CEDEPCA people
are determined. They believe the
role of the church is not merely to bind up wounds but also to prevent as much
wounding as possible. So do we.
Since so many of the wounds are a result of human inhumanity, much more
needs to be done.
Our
group of eleven was amazingly compatible. We
had a great trip, and when we felt we had done as much as we could do under the
circumstances, we came home. Five
of us had been there at least once before.
I think as of now, all eleven of us are determined to return, at least to
complete our original commitment to Xela. I
have failed to mention the obvious. It
is a beautiful green and mountainous country where some crops are planted on
what must be sixty-degree slopes. There
are also the Mayan ruins representing a very powerful culture that peaked in
about the ninth century. But it is
the people today that are the greatest attraction.
May they be at peace.
Don
Schomacker