Tag: Guatemala
0 Check Out Laina’s Final Thoughts on Guatemala
As many of you know already, Laina Schneider was Aldersgate’s mission intern this summer, serving in Guatemala with the Association of Highland Women (AMA). Here is her final reflection of and thank you for her experience.
The women giggled as I knelt, plunged my arm down into the hole and grabbed at the black clayey loam. I rolled the soil into a ball in my hand, recording notes about the color, moisture and texture. The breeze knocked my hair into my eues, stronger on the face of this hill in Chiquisis than down in the valley. The young ladies standing over me were wrapped in sweaters, and smiled as Kirsten made jokes about how much I loved dirt. Even after my somewhat silly display of enthusiasm, they showed me patience as I bumbled through the rest of the interview in Spanish, trying to pin their words to my clipboard as I wiped soil off on my jean leg.Â
  This episode repeated itself many times in the first few weeks of my summer, as I conducted site assessments and interviews with women’s circles in Quetzaltenango and Santa Catarina as a part of my internship with AMA and HSP. The hope was to lay the foundation for agricultural programming and collect initial information about potential sites for greenhouse projects.Â
  Directly engaging with each circle allowed me to connect with the women and learn the distinct qualities of each community. Just like the unique patterns and colors of their huipiles, each community has different hopes and dreams for the future, for their children and even for a greenhouse project. Being able to hear those aspirations provided me with inspiration for my own project and future in agriculture.Â
  As an agriculture student at Virginia Tech, this process lent me fieldwork experience as well as the opportunity to connect the importance of soil quality to the livelihood of those it supports. I even discovered a new field, ethnopedology, which allowed me to align Western soil classification nomenclature with the traditional folk classification of Mayan farmers.Â
 Click here to read the rest.Â
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0 Check Out the Video of Aldersgate’s Team Building the School Kitchen in Guatemala
2 Check Out the (Finished) School Kitchen Aldersgate’s Mission Team Built!
Last week our 30-person mission team built a kitchen for the primary school in the village of Chikisis, 11K feet up in the Mayan Highlands. Previously, women of the community cooked indoors over large open-pit fires to prep lunch for 300+ kids, many of whom might not eat any other (healthy) meal in the day. The fires were both inefficient and, because of the abundant smoke, harmful to the health of the women and the kids.
Our team managed to build the walls and put in the forms to pour the concrete. Our local mason, Don Pauli, finished the kitchen after our departure.
Thanks to the many at Aldersgate and in the Ft Hunt community who helped raise the funds for the project.
Next up for our volunteer teams- a health clinic/community center in Chikisis.
0 If You Can’t Be Alone, You Can’t Be In Community: Bonhoeffer and Guatemala
You might think, when you have a group of 30 friends, acquaintances or just fellow church members all crammed together, sleeping/snoring/farting, eating and working on top of each other, that there would be little opportunity for solitude on a mission trip.
There might even be some part of you that suspects the terms ‘mission’ and ‘solitude’ don’t belong in the same theological conversation. Those kinds of Christians do mission. These kinds of Christians do solitude, the little theologian in your ear might whisper.Â
In fact, mission settings do provide surprising chances for solitude, to be alone:
The quiet, unhurried rhythm that you and a work partner settle into when you know both the task and your partner so well that you no longer have to fill the moments with chatter.
The silence around the morning table, everyone chilled from the mountain air, the only sound the steaming coffee being poured or a whispered ‘dias’ from our hostess.
The solitude of a group hike, the thin air leaving no spare air for conversation.
I guess it could be hard to understand unless you’ve been here but it’s somehow the experience of living together- even living on top of each other- that allows me to notice and appreciate such opportunities for solitude. There’s something about living together in community that makes me better at being alone, paying attention to my thoughts, my body, the world and people around me. It sounds counter-intuitive perhaps but a week spent in community is somehow the best training there is in how to be solitary. I haven’t tried it but I’d bet that if I just went out into the woods by myself for a week a la Into the Wild I’d soon be crazy bored and my mind would never stop racing. I’d be alone, but I’d bet solitude would be about the last thing I was experiencing.
It works the other way too.
Somehow these solitary moments stolen during the day make me better for the community.
In Life Together, Bonhoeffer says it’s only in being alone that we learn how to be a true, contributing member of community and it’s only in community that we learn how to be authentically alone.
So here’s the question I’m struggling with: why is Bonhoeffer’s insight so easy to (almost tangibly) experience here in Guatemala and not back home in church?
The easy answer: It’s because we don’t have time for solitude here. Our lives are too busy, too hectic, too over-scheduled so that both our solitude and our community suffer.
The more challenging (and likely true) answer: It doesn’t have anything to do with the pace of our lives. It’s because our churches seldom reflect genuine Christian community. Maybe even the un-solitary pace of our lives reflects just how badly churches do community.
I mean, the kind of deep, honest relationships that are unavoidable when you’re crammed together and living on top of each other for a week aren’t possible when you treat church simply as a place where you passively receive religious services and maybe make a few superficial relationships along the way.
According to Bonhoeffer- and Guatemala, it’s only by forging a deeper bond with the community that the quiet and solitude we all claim we want more of in our lives becomes possible.
0 Sharing Means Caring: Bonhoeffer and Guatemala
On many nights here the dinner hour and the worship hour we’ve scheduled blur together, the dinner table becoming the communion table.
Just like it was in the ancient church. Just like it should be, I think.
Because the mountain village where we’re working this week is so remote, we’re not lodging or eating in the city below as many volunteer teams do. We’re here in the village, housed and fed by the same people we’re serving.
I can’t really describe how it feels (humbling? unnerving? indicting?) to be fed by people for whom the sound of an empty belly is as present a daily reality as the barking of the wild dogs at night. I eye my portions, trying to imagine what they look like through Mayan eyes. I clean my plate because, well, there are children starving in Guatemala.
Every meal time I feel like the categories we’ve brought with us as do-gooders from the States are upended. I mean… we’re there to serve but then there at the table we discover we’re the ones being served. It’s at the table I realize how fluid is the distinction between who’s the servant and who’s the served. It’s when that same dinner table transitions to the communion table that I realize this fluidity is exactly how it should be.
In his book Life Together, Bonhoeffer, says:
‘Christian community at the table signifies our obligation. It is our daily bread that we eat, not my own. We share our bread. Thus we are firmly bound to one another not only in Spirit, but with our whole physical being. The one bread that is given to our community unites us in a firm covenant. Now no one must hunger as long as the other has bread…as long as we eat our bread together, we will have enough even with the smallest amount. Hunger begins only when people desire to keep their own bread for themselves. Could not the story of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 with two fish and five loaves of bread also have this meaning?’
1 Alien Righteousness and Community: Bonhoeffer and Guatemala
Our mission team this week is using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to guide our worship and reflection in Guatemala. It’s a short little volume that Bonhoeffer wrote in 1938 after the Nazi’s closed the Finkenwalde Seminary and Bonhoeffer responded by starting his own underground seminary. Life Togetheris Bonhoeffer’s account of what constitutes authentic Christian community. I think it’s as timely a book for this century as it was for the middle of the last because Bonhoeffer was attempting to think through how Christians formed faithful community while living in the midst of an empire.
I’m hoping that it will prove a helpful book for our group because creating a sense of community amongst our mission team participants and building Christian community with the people we serve is, when you get right down to it, why we do mission. It’s certainly what I, as a pastor, hope our mission program provides.
Life Together begins with Martin Luther’s concept of ‘alien righteousness;’ that is, as sinners there’s nothing within us and nothing about us that justifies us before God or naturally connects us to God. Any connection, relationship or righteousness we enjoy before God, Luther says, must be an ‘alien righteousness.’ It must come from outside us.
Luther used this idea of ‘alien righteousness’ to emphasize our intrinsic sinfulness, the futility of trying to justify ourselves by our deeds and the importance of the preached, converting Word. That’s all fine. But the way Luther lays it out usually leads to very individualistic understandings of the Christian faith. What Bonhoeffer does with ‘alien righteousness’ is more interesting, more life-giving and, I think, more biblical.
Bonhoeffer says alien righteousness is the root of all Christian community. Because there’s nothing within us that naturally connects us to God that connection has to come from someone besides ourselves: other Christians, Bonhoeffer says.
‘Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth. They need other Christians as bearers and proclaimers of the word of salvation. The Christ in their own hearts is weaker than the Christ in the word of other Christians. The goal of all Christian community is to encounter one another as bringers of the message of salvation.’
Our life together as Christians in community becomes something much more profound in Bonhoeffer’s formulation. It’s not that it’s in the context of Christian community that we journey towards salvation in Christ. It’s not that we’re primarily individual believers and community is an optional, additional activity- the way so many think of it today.
Authentic Christian community, Bonhoeffer says, is salvation. Our life together, as Christians, is the experience of salvation in the here and now. Just as God’s grace took embodied flesh in Jesus Christ, so too does God’s grace continue to reside and get transmitted through flesh, through ordinary people.
Luther’s notion of alien righteousness tended to imply that we’re saved by hearing an abstract, disembodied ‘Word’ from far outside us.
Bonhoeffer closes the loop by showing how the righteousness that must come from outside us more often than not comes from the person next to us.
Not only do our lives literally depend on one another, our life together is a gift made possible by Christ; therefore, Christian community should always be marked by joy.
It’s this giftedness and joy of community that I think people most often discover in mission settings. Far removed from the minutiae of church budgets, church committees, church programs and all the rest, mission work offers Christians the chance to rediscover what the saints meant by the believing community offering a foretaste of the heavenly community.
3 Seeing Guatemala Through My Son’s Eyes
Our mission team arrived in Guatemala yesterday afternoon. Among the 30 team members are high school students, college students, 20 and 30-somethings (thank God I’m still in that category), adults and retirees.
And one rising first grader.
Ali and I first met Gabriel- he was first ‘delivered’ to us- here in Guatemala on Easter morning when he was just 15 months old. For me then, Guatemala always will be the place where I saw my son’s tears turn smiles and laughter for the first time, the place where I changed my first dirty diaper, the place where he fell asleep against my chest for the first time and the place where I referred to myself as ‘Daddy’ for the first time out loud.
Ali and I brought Gabriel back to Guatemala when he was 2 1/2 as part of a service team from Aldersgate. That summer we took the very boat ride we did this morning across Lago Atitlan to tour an indigenous-run coffee farm. Lago Atitlan is the largest, highest lake in the Americas. Surrounded by volcanoes and mountains it’s a beautiful place that belies the poverty the scenery hides.
Back when he was 2, I had to hold Gabriel close to me in the boat to keep his dramamine-heavy head from snapping back and forth to the waves. Not so today. Already much is different this time around. Now, Gabriel’s here knowing this is where he came from, a fact that makes him proud- proud to be from a place that has volcanoes and steep mountains, where ‘indians’ still exist and where boys can carry hundreds of pounds of wood on their head up a mountain.
This time around Gabriel knows this is the place his Dad goes to several times a year for weeks at a time. He understands and can even tell you that the Mayans we’ve met here are a people to whom he also belongs. He knows why our team’s here, the projects we’ll construct and why we do so.
It’s his understanding of his connection to this place that makes it different this time. Not simply a toddler on my back this time, he notices everything. It’s as though he’s discovering rooms in his house he never knew were there before.
As his dad, it’s like Christmas morning for me, getting to see the wonder in his eyes as he opens a secret that this new place has gifted to him. I’m delighting in seeing his delight that a place in the world could be so different that you have to do something different with your toilet paper after you’ve done your business.
I’ve read a lot of articles on parenting and fatherhood recently that emphasize the importance of rites of passage for boys’ development. I brought Gabriel with me this time because I wanted to start building such a rite into our family, but now that we’re here together I realize that, more than that, this is just a place he and I share together. And always will.
0 Headed to Chiquisis
Aldersgate’s second mission team left for Guatemala this morning. A mixed-group of 30 students and adults will be constructing a school kitchen in Chiqusis, a remote village above the highest point on the Pan-American Highway. Thanks to everyone at Aldersgate and in the community who helped fund this needful project.
Aldersgate has served in Chiquisis before. In the first picture you’ll see the school above where we will be working:
0 Check Out How Our Youth Are Doing In Guatemala
A group of 32 Aldersgate youth is building wood-stoves in the community of Llanos de Pinal near Quetzaltenango, Guatemala this week. The stoves not only address the immediate problem of respiratory disease from open-pit, indoor cooking, the stoves also provide Mayan women the time away from home to be trained in vital new skills.This is the fourth year in a row Aldersgate has returned to this community to serve. The team is working with the help of a community organizer, an Aldersgate intern Margaret Corum and AMA staff to build 16 stoves for families active in the women’s circle.
0 News and Pics from Guatemala
As some of you know, Aldersgate has a mission team serving in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala this week and another team set to leave Saturday, over 60 in all.
You may not know that Laina Schneider, church nerd and agricultural student at Virginia Tech, is interning for Aldersgate this summer in Guatemala. She’s been doing site assessments and soil studies for village women’s circles to develop their own greenhouses. She’s been blogging during her time there. I think you can see through her words and pictures not only the important work we’re doing there for others, but also the deep impact such work has had on Laina and hundreds of others at Aldersgate.
Check out her Wanderlust blog here