Unite, Ignite, and Spark a Light...

The trend of increasing work has proved true once again this week. Monday I traveled to Gracias to ask NGOs World Vision and PLAN for seeds for vegetable gardens. Preparing the required paperwork, I formatted my solicitation, signed and CASM-official stamped it. Unfortunately my proud efforts to make official documents were to no avail, but I left with contacts and a promise to work on it. 12 hours of Tuesday was spent in the office meeting with visiting CASM people. Their passion was great to see, but combined with a Honduran concept of time, it made for hours and hours of monologues that served to reinforce agreement about how the world needs to change. My bosses´ ability to agree while seeming to argue vehemently never ceases to amaze me. Wednesday we went to a new sugarcane processor and the monologues were stopped short by the mouth`s craving for hot, thick, sticky sugarcane. Then we had another longwinded meeting afterwards and we managed to make it out just after bedtime (9). Thursday I went to meet with SAT (high schoolers) and set up some worm composting. There’s something about worm composting that never fails to make everyone feel great inside. The thought of a million little plump, squirmy worms making fertilizer and dropping eggs night and day...well, me fascina.


The really exciting part managed to emerge from the least exciting part, the 12 hours of meeting on Tuesday. We talked about how we could work with church leaders in the communities and municipalities to think of organic as theologically correct. My idea was to try to have a meeting with leaders from both the Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church (gasp).


Here especially, it seems that the religious organizations are more of a divider than anything really. Basic preaching endorses the good Christian life, which boils down to going to church every time there is a meeting, giving offering, and abstaining from drinking, smoking, and dancing. From what I understand, this is the common theme for both Evangelical and Catholic churches, although there are huge chasms of lack of respect that divide them. My host-dad, a man who is a role model in this area, preached about how bad legalism is because look where it got the Catholics, they go out drinking, smoking, and dancing right after mass! Also, he preached about how we should call people brother and sister because we are a family in Christ, unless, of course, they don`t go to our church. A similar spiel comes from other churches, Evangelical and Catholic, in the area. Some communities have as many as 6 churches. The complexity of those divisions blows my mind.


En realidad, my scheme to unite Catholic and Evangelical leaders is something that scares me a little. I practically couldn´t get my idea out when I talked to my host dad Wednesday night. But that’s when you know it’s something that’s worth doing, because you know its right, it´s beautiful, and the feel of it stretching your comfort zone makes your heart skip a beat.

O Si Yo Se

This last week has been packed as well. There were two North American groups who came, one of 25 EMU people and another 12 from Oklahoma State University. On top of that, I was able to have two meetings with high schoolers to talk about soil, homemade chicken feed, the kingdom of God, and play a bunch of games. Oh yea, the youth wanted to learn a song in English, so I sang my favorite (Freedom is Coming, Oh Yes I Know) plenty of times until they could sing it with me. I also taught them in Spanish so they would know what they were saying. The meetings were wonderful to have and have helped me to see that what I want to do is possible. The irony was fairly severe as I realized that what I’ve managed to start doing, environmental education, is exactly the same thing that was on the assignment description back a year and something ago. I never would have guessed. It just took a while because I had to come up with the idea all over again then figure out how to make the necessary contacts and actually do it. (Sorry Amanda and Andrew)


On Wednesday, I made a contact to start working with youth in another community, then I went to Gracias to receive the EMU group. After some hugs, we went up to the Fuerte San Cristobal to get the colonial view around Gracias. Through much persuading I got 6 people to turn a turret into a concert hall (swords into ploughshares?). The chorus of angels descended, divine harmony danced around us, and we sang Freedom until after the Fuerte was closed.


We spent the next day touring La Campa, eating, and talking. It was wonderful to sit and hear reflections from culturally sensitive, gracious, and positive people. It was also exciting to dream about the Critical Mass that Harrisonburg will be having in late August. On that note, we could do a Goshen one too, that would be awesome! …Whats that, you want to do one in Elkhart too? Three Critical Masses in three weeks? I’m all over that. So if you are in any of those locations during mid to late August, don’t miss them!


Finally, I was hit by the iron skillet of irony this week once more when I looked at the tab on the EMU shirt that I was gifted that said Made in Honduras. I highly value them and am thankful for their visit and the shirt; however, I would feel a lot better about the shirt if it hadn’t been made during a Honduran brother or sister’s 72 to 90 (or up to 120) hour work week in a stifling warehouse in San Pedro Sula. The fault does not go back to this EMU group or even anyone else that anyone has ever known. I wish that we who profess EMU’s school motto to “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” would “first remove the log in [our] own eye” before walking out of the front door. Unfortunately that's next to impossible because stepping out of the front door is usually what helps us to see the log in the first place.


So as not to end on a sour note, I would like to reiterate that we are not our own enemies. Our enemy is the greed, the inhumanity, the system that leads us knowingly or unknowingly to support injustice, brutality, and arrogance here and between our brothers and sisters. I would like to invite you to sing with me, all the better if you know the harmony:


In English: Or in Espanish (reino means kingdom):

Freedom, freedom oh freedom Reino, reino o reino,

Freedom oh freedom, Reino o reino

Freedom is coming, oh yes I Reino ya viene o sí yo

Oh yes I know, oh yes I O sí yo sé, o sí yo

Yes I know, oh yes oh yes I know, Sí yo sé, o sí yo sí yo sé,

Freedom is coming, oh yes I know. Reino ya viene o sí yo sé.

We´re not in Kansas anymore.

This week I´ve been blessed with busyness. On Monday I was informed that I would be needed as a translator for a group of Americans. They brought 5,000 pairs of glasses to give away to people in this area. They say that almost everyone here has something called Ptridyum growing across their eyes because of high quantities of sun, dust, and smoke that they come into contact with. We´ve given away several hundred pairs of glasses in this area and I´m proud to say that I´ve diagnosed and given a few more away out the back door. Translator in this case means that I´m also a cultural liason, which has been tiring as well.

The rest of what made this week tiring was that from Tuesday night to Thursday morning, I was travelling with a bunch of campesinos. We were going on a tour almost to Tegucigalpa (long trip!) to see a cane sugar production plant. It was amazing to see their quick, superefficient processing techniques and to discuss them with the campesinos. The men I travelled with have their own sugarcane processing that they do, but it is not nearly as advanced and they don´t come out with brown sugar at the end. Even though 100 lbs of the stuff was only selling for about $26 with half going to expenses, ten men producing ten 100 lb bags of sugar a day is very lucrative.

Travelling with the campesinos, I got to share in their excitement at seeing another part of their country. I was surprised when a few of them told me that they had already travelled as far as Comayagua. Travel is not common here. We had stayed in Gracias the night before at a hotel, a foreign concept as well. Most had stayed up well beyond their normal bedtime (until 10 PM!) to kick off their boots and watch some TV. I shared a room with two campesinos from nearby San Manuel who were fascinated by watching Man vrs. Wild on the Discovery Channel. Actually, they probably related more with that man than with anyone else on TV since they both know their way around the wilderness. The anticipation was thick in the air just after 3:30 AM when we started getting ready to go.

During the travel, they pointed out plants that they recognized and asked each other about the things they didn´t recognize. On the way back, we stopped at Lago Yojoa to eat lunch. When we got off of the bus, I heard one man declare that this must be the ocean. I let them know that it was actually a big lake and they all went out and gazed at it while I answered a few more questions. Then we each got a very special big fish for lunch.

Though we spent many hours travelling that day and we didn´t actually go that far, we passed through many worlds. People rarely travel and because of that, you see plenty of regional variation. The people from one town do things that others don´t. They have thin tortillas instead of thick ones. They have paved roads with lines. They live on flat ground. They have a view of a huge valley. All of these things brought waves of excitement to the bus that are no doubt being relived and splashing new waves in the houses and villages of my travelling campesino friends.