The Hammock of Selfish Motivation

In Akron they asked us to think about what our selfish motivations were for doing a year of SALT service. What I thought of immediately was that I signed up so that I could go to the tropics to eat fruit and see the sun every day, never be cold, and that I could live life at a slower pace. And one reason to live at a slower pace was that I would have time to read plenty of books. So with a little bit of chagrin, I confess to you that I have been reading bastante. And in the meantime, I’ve sentenced my hammock to hard labor. But I thought I might be able to supplant my selfishness by sharing my list with you and making some recommendations, so maybe you can enjoy them :-) I know I’ve left out some books and if I remember them I’ll add them, but at the moment this is what I can remember.

Whats So Amazing About Grace? By Philip Yancey – One of the best books I’ve ever read. Plenty of fascinating explanations of Biblical stories as well as some modern ones. Challenges the church to be the haven of grace that Jesus calls us to be. Powerful and motivational.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – A truly inspiring book. About her family spending a year growing as much food as they can for their own consumption and buying the rest that they need from neighbors. Challenging yet exciting, it really makes you want to grow tomatoes and have chickens or something.

Kite Runner – Another excellent book, but pretty depressing at times. I related to a disturbing extent with the broken friendship that the book presents and it actually hurt to read it. It provoked some great reflection.

The Secret Life of Bees – Wonderful book about community, racial tensions in the 60s, dealing with personal past, and personal growth in character, spirit, and body. Very well written.

Preventing Violence by James Gilligan – A fascinating look crime and the reason behind it. Does a great job of breaking it down and making sense. Takes a good look at the US’ justice system and alternatives to punitive justice, such as restorative justice.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – Exciting story about a boy on a quest. It works with a very vague worldview and vague understanding of spirituality that sounds universalistic or animist. Verdict? Harmless.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond – About the history of people and why things turned out the way they did, with Europeans colonizing the world. Chalk full of fascinating research and insights. Its long and it looks heavy, but its definitely worth reading.

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti – Sassy author who explains different branches of feminism and the logic behind them. Full of enraging stories and statistics, but in the end encouraging and empowering.

Freedom of Simplicity – Paradoxically has possibly the most advanced vocabulary of any book I’ve read. Plenty of good thoughts and suggestions for simplifying life and therefore being more involved in life. Challenging in quite a few ways.

Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa by Walter Wink – Challenges popular nonviolence. Very helpful because it is insight from experience. It reviews violent and nonviolent conflict strategies and roadblocks that present themselves.

The Shack – Despite my initial skepticism, it turned out to be a pretty good answer to plenty of theological and spirituality questions. Unfortunately it is limited to a North American perspective, (almost) completely forgets about service as an integral part of Christianity, and tends to focus on sadness and regret as opposed to life and love. Still a worthwhile book to read.

Liberation theology – About the Latin American empowerment movement in churches and communities. Despite the subject matter I couldn’t get through it. Due to being translated from Spanish where sentences are written paragraphs at a time, it was difficult to keep a thought developing. I stopped reading it because it was so tough to read and I felt like it was repeating a lot of theology that I had already come into contact with through Mennonite connections and other books.

Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder – Another book I was excited about until I couldn’t read more than a couple pages at a time. Could have to do with sentences half the page long and a pretty elevated vocabulary. I couldn’t get very far, I’ll try again though.

Wild at Heart – A macho perspective on the world and a man’s soul. The author presents an opinion, gives a one-line explanation, then accepts his answer as the obvious, ultimate truth. Apart from how sickening most of it was, it had one chapter that I related to a little, but it really wasn’t very helpful. Completely leaves service out of Christianity.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri – I’m currently reading this, it is a bunch of short stories about broken marriages and people with serious issues. They’re good stories and its well written, its just very frustrating because it doesn’t ever resolve anything.

Now its your turn! : )

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.

¡La Feria del Fuego!

This last week my parents have been visiting me. Their visit coincided with the annually occuring biggest event in La Campa, the Feria. People had told me for months that the Feria is crazy, that thousands of people (tens of thousands by recent estimate), people from San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, descend on the 500 person town of La Campa. Food, candy, and clothing vendors had been throwing tarp over wooden frames and displaying their goods on tables for weeks in anticipation, catching diminishing hours of sleep as the people flooded in. Because of the impossible logistics of providing shelter and sanitation services for 40 times a town`s normal population, Feria pilgrims slept under their own small sheets of plastic, under their trucks, on the street, or they didn`t sleep at all. A large hole had been dug across the river for defecation, but since it was a few minutes walk from the party and one would likely have at least a couple of simultaneously squatting neighbors, many instead opted for unoccupied patches of grass or dirt around town.

Its been like this for a long time. Saint Matthew, the patron saint of the local colonial church, has been performing miracles for a long time too, the lore of which (and the photo-wall in the church!) attract people far and wide by the horse, truck, bus, and big truck-load. I participated in the march of Saint Matthew around town, where all of La Campa`s old women get together and carry half-meter wooden Saint Matthew on a litter all around the town, singing repetative, enchanting songs about him. The procession follows a ways back, regularly complemented by a home-made rocket flying crazily from a mortar then two pockets of gunpowder ricocheting sucessive blasts off the canyon wall. The walk is only 600 meters long, but walking reverently up and down the mountain at the pace of old women weighed down with San Matias keeps us going for about an hour.

Later on, once my parents had arrived, there were guancascos, when catholic and indigenous customs meet. I found myself being passed by one of these processions one day, headed up by an intimidating-looking masked dancer holding a stick with a wooden lizard hanging from it. At night, these masked dancers and their lizards met the toro del fuego (bull of fire) in the area in front of the church. A volley of the same unpredictable home-made rockets and several more elaborate fireworks announced the meeting as they were launched from the hands of a group of young men on the church roof. The toro del fuego was a guy with a long tent-shaped thing on his head who jumped around the meeting place with the masked lizard-dancers while more fireworks were sent off. A few minutes later the fireworks from the church roof had stopped, but the toro del fuego was dropping military-sized firecrackers behind him and daring them to blast him as he performed his frenzied dance around their burning wicks. Soon a sparkler lit up on the side of the toro and, to my parents` and my shock, proceeded to launch several rounds of rockets from the top of the toro into the starry night sky. The combination of extremes made it the most exciting fireworks show I have ever seen.

The next day, a Honduran cowoker let me know that during celebrations in her village, the children love making their own toro del fuego. Apparently its great, but I was told that they have to be careful, because it can be dangerous! Who knew?

the Culture of Ya

Ya is a fascinating word for any North American. It has to do with time. Used in a sentence, it can mean already or that something will soon happen. Or, when used with no as in ´ya no,´ can mean that it is no longer happening or that it will soon cease to happen. Used as a sentence in itself, it can mean that you´re done, you don´t want any more food, you want more food, or you´re ready to go.

I struggle with the usage of ya. Its such a wonderful word, but it can be so frustrating! For example, one day everyone from my office was driving out to a community. The community was probably about an hour and a half away and we had just left at about 8:30. My coworker got a call from the people in the community, asking if we were going to get there soon because people were getting impatient. Her response: No, no, ya llegamos. Which means, no, no, don´t leave, we´re already arriving. I thought that was ridiculous and I said so, saying that we should have planned to leave earlier if we scheduled the meeting for 8:00. Being at least half North American, I get very uncomfortable when I make people wait because I know that time is valuable and waiting is no fun. My coworker assured me that the villagers wouldn´t be annoyed.

Sure enough, we arrived an hour and a half later and within 5 minutes, you wouldn´t have known we had arrived 2 hours late. It blew my mind to pieces. How is that possible? How can you so easily forgive and forget that someone made you wait for 2 hours?

Sometime later, all of us had just finished eating lunch in a neighboring town. We had at least an hour drive to get back to La Campa. As we were paying the bill and the owner was looking for change, the same coworker decided to go use the internet. The owner came back with the change and we sat down to watch some soccer highlights. After a few minutes, the news came on, which we watched for a half hour. We then watched part of a telenovela, or soap (which are on constantly). Tired of the TV, we went outside and sat in the truck, listening to a very weak radio signal from El Salvador. After an hour of waiting outside, I decided I would make good use of my time and go take some pictures of the town´s church. That sucessfully used up about 10 minutes, and I returned to the truck to find that my coworker had not yet returned. Upon commenting to another coworker, all he could do was shake his head in disbelief. Nearing on the 2 hour wait mark, my coworker returned. ¡Ya! said my coworker whom I had been waiting with. And we made our way back to La Campa, acting as if we had only just begun to wait.

When I asked my internet-surfing coworker about why it took so long, she said that the guy at the internet cafe didn´t know what he was doing. Possible. But no one else even bothered to ask why we had waited for so long. They had tired of the wait as well, but why make a big deal out of it? We had begun our journey back to La Campa.

In North America, we would interpret that as a sign of disrespect and we would be angry about the lost time, the inconvenience. Here, we understand that she was not trying to offend us and waste our time, she was just trying to get something done and it happened to take a while. Since we value our relationship with her in the office and it would not do us any good, it would be foolish to get angry about the wait. Its better if we just get back to La Campa, where we all want to be and since that is now an option, lets get to it. Already. Ya. Brilliant.

Christmas all over again!

Recently I´ve been prepping for something to get started as far as my own work here. I met with my group of youth (anywhere from 12 to 30 and unmarried) the other day and suggested that they plant a vegetable garden to earn money for their group. I thought it would also be a great platform to talk about soil conservation, nutrition, creation, small business operation, planning, and whatever else I can think of. I´m meeting at the high school sometime soon and I´m hoping I can do the same kind of thing with them.

So today I went into Gracias to buy seeds for the garden and I stopped by the post office (where I only get to visit about once a month or so) and I had two Christmas cards! One from my grandma, and one with a million little notes from a lot of people at Prairie Street, my church congregation in Elkhart. Thank you all so much for the kind and encouraging words! In Honduras we call those kind of notes or speeches ´palabritas´ meaning words and with the ´ita´ suffix meaning small/short, cute, nice, or any other endearing word you can think of.

I went to my favorite liquado (fruit milkshake) shop and sipped something delicious as I read through the pile of palabritas. Thank you all so much for sending them, they were wonderful to recieve :)