Peter's message

The title of this little reflection is “Risk.” I’d thought about calling it “Faith,” but that’s something I know almost nothing about. On the other hand, risk to life and limb in Central America is something I fancy I know a good bit about. Maria and I lived there for almost 4 years in the 1980s.

When the group of us met last week to plan today’s worship service, one of us wondered out loud if we shouldn’t mention the risks that we had taken to travel and stay in Guatemala—the “intentional killing” rate there, for example, is 38 per 100,000 people, which is about nine times higher than it is in the U.S. Plus there’s a list of things like kidnapping, robbery, bad roads, bad drivers, malaria, dengue, and water-born illnesses that anyone with an unhealthy level of anxiety could brood over for a long time. But my immediate response to the suggestion that we talk about this, which in retrospect I see was a probably unsuccessful attempt at graciousness, was that I didn’t feel like I’d taken any significant risk.

When it was my turn to say what I thought was the most important thing to share at this worship service, I said it was the trip we took to Panzos. This happened on our first full morning in El Estor, the morning after we’d spent the night in the homes of different members of the Arca de Noe church. Some of us, including Jane, were giving a workshop on church leadership at the presbytery meeting, so only about half our group made the trip.

The trip took about an hour, following the northern side of Lake Izabal. Just as we reached the border between the departments of Izabal and Alta Verapaz we came to a dirt road leading off toward the mountain to the north. A man was waiting for us beside a gate, which he was already opening by the time our mini-bus got there. He hopped onto the bus and rode with us for the trip out to the community, which was only about a half mile.

The bus stopped at a house, the first house of 18, as it turned out, the house that was closest to the road. We piled out. The community was all waiting there for us. The sun was hot and bright. We were invited into the porch of the house, kind of a lean-to. This space was used to store two stacks of hundred-weight bags of chemical fertilizer that the people had managed to buy cheaply through a government program and which they were saving for the time when they actually had any land to use it on.

The space was maybe ten feet square, not room enough for everyone, but enough room for us, the visitors, to all sit down in the shade.

This territory was familiar to me. When I lived in Central America I often traveled out to rural communities of incredibly poor people, who showed me every kindness and all hospitality, and asked them to talk to me about what they were going through.

These families had been part of a larger community that lived right there until about 3 years ago when they were persuaded to move to work a big farm on the other side of the mountain range. Then, recently, 18 of the families decided to move back because the other place didn’t have a school. They didn’t really have a school in Panzos either, as it turned out. The kids (35 of them) now have to walk an hour and a half to school.

They said that they didn’t own the land. The land was owned by the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala, the IENPG, which had bought it to relocate families displaced by the destruction of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. There was a hold-up. They didn’t know what it was. The land had to be surveyed. There were questions about the title. Lawyers were needed for something. They were working through the Presbytery of El Estor to try to get things moving but they didn’t know where the process was. Whether it was a question of lack of resources, lack of commitment, forgetfulness, bureaucracy…. They didn’t know.

After our talk we sang some hymns and prayed and then we walked around the community for a while. People were in the middle of building their houses or carving out a flat space on the mountainside in preparation for building. They had some sweet potatoes and squash here and there. We loosened up a bit, talked about the great view and the nice breeze they had up on the mountain.

We were only in Panzos for about two hours but we went from feeling like Martians dropping in from a spaceship to feeling like the same people who come from very, very different circumstances.

Here’s the thing. Although we couldn’t have expected it or predicted it, our visit cheered them up enormously. Just showing up and listening to them say what they were going through made them feel a little more connected to the rest of the world.

They had testified, and we witnessed their testimony. If we accepted that what they said was true, which we did, then we became in some sense—a sense we haven’t yet defined—responsible for their testimony. That’s the risk we’re taking, the risk that we would go to Guatemala and get to know people and begin to feel responsible, before the God we say we believe in, as witnesses to their situation.