Travels with Mom and Dad

That´s right. My mom and dad came down to Guatemala last week and we had ourselves an adventure. We headed straight to Antigua when they arrived and spent a few days there enjoying the colonial city in all its goodness: Good food, ruins, a few museums, ziplining over a coffee plantation, Lenten festivities. From there we headed to Santiago on Lake Atitlan (called "the most beautiful lake in the world" by Aldous Huxley and a whole lot of other people) for a few days. We enjoyed the weather, played cards, rode horses up to a ridge and overlooked the whole lake, my dad and I sunk a kayak in the middle of the lake and got rescued (not that we weren´t gonna make it safe to land on our own, but it would have taken a long time) by some local fishermen in their clapboard boats. Adventuresome, simple, good, luxurious. We spent our last night in the capital at dinner with my host family. Both moms cried about the awesomeness of the other. It was a good time. Very nice to have some time off and see parts I hadn´t been to before. Here are the pictures from my camera. My dad will send some more soon.

Lent is a big deal in Latin America. Here is a vegetable design on the floor of the main cathedral in Antigua. They do stuff like this the whole 40 days.

All vegetable.

They carry these massive floats all through town. They´re so heavy that they have to trade carriers every block. They sway back and forth and side to side when stand in one place because it´s too darn heavy to stand still with it. See video below.

The guard.

The biggest float. I think I counted something like over 60 carriers.

My dear friends Dave and Jessi Lueck happened to be in the country as leaders on a youth group missions trip the same week! We met up on their last day in Antigua for lunch. It was inexpressably relieving to see these people.


That was last week. This week I´m working, and then next week... more vacation! Yep, pretty much the whole continent will be on vacation next week for Holy Week. I plan to go visit some caves/waterfalls with some friends from Church, go to my host family´s pineapple farm for a couple days, then go to the beach for a couple days with some other friends. THEN... the home stretch. But let´s not start counting just yet. More photos and updates to come soon.

An update and the latest thoughts on lawyering, etc.

Lots going on lately. The pace here is picking up in life-giving ways. A climbing gym finally opened a week ago. It´s right on the way home and has given me back one of my favorite activities. Hanging out with people from church more, and finding more to do in the evenings in general. I’ve recently gotten into Lost, and am eating any negative words I might’ve said about it before. Season 1 is just full of genius. Maybe I’ll get frustrated later on, but for now it’s a great escape when I need one.


Pretty much every day I sit at my desk and am overcome by the feeling that I really ought to be playing music somewhere. Hopefully I can make this a reality sometime down the road. Big recent contributors to this feeling include: Chris Thile/Punch Brothers, Yonder Mountain String Band, Ray Lamontagne, Crooked Still, Justin Townes Earle, The Hot Club of Cowtown, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Son Volt – all pulsing through my earbuds. For now I’m going it alone and working on music as much as possible with my ample (though lately shrinking, thanks to the mentioned above) free time. I’m working through some flatpicking DVD’s by Steve Kaufman, two (or three?) time National Flatpicking Contest winner at Winfield (i.e. heaven on Earth, more specifically, in Kansas (where else would you look?)). I’ve been writing as much as I can, and am now working on charts for that fantasy band that I’ll surely form soon after returning to the states. I expect to make some demos in the next month too. Maybe I’ll put something up here for you all when they’re done.


I’ve been struggling with work lately. As in any internship, it has taken a long time to find my niche and figure out how I can contribute here. As I’ve finally found it (and indeed I have, I’m busily contributing in real ways these days), I’ve also determined that as much as I believe in the ends of this work, the means are mostly frustrating/boring/unchallenging/uncreative to me. It’s good to learn more about what I do and don’t like to do. And I guess that’s sort of part of the intern’s lot: do the tedious stuff that needs to get done but that no one wants/has the time to do. I’m okay with that for now, but looking forward to moving on to greener pastures. I now know how important it is to me that I work in smaller organizations that allow me to fill a more dynamic, creative, interactive role. Getting outside would be pretty great too. This is all good revelation. A big reason for coming here was to figure out if I wanted to be a lawyer, and now I know. If anything, this has been confirmed for me by some recent reading and interesting insights in Luke.

The National Revised Standard Version has Luke 11:46-52 like this (underlines added):


“46And he said, ‘Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them. 47Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. 48So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors; for they killed them, and you build their tombs. 49Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, “I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute”, 50so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, 51from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation. 52Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.’”


Now, I don’t by any means intend to indict all lawyers, but Jesus is being pretty direct here, especially in that last verse. “Taken away the key of knowledge”? That sort of characterizes the legal system, doesn’t it? We have lawyers because the system is so complicated, senseless, and unnavigable without them. This often works to the disadvantage of the poor, who rarely have the means to challenge this system in a dignified, successful way. This is also why it’s important that organizations like IJM exist. We have lawyers committed to working against the tilt of this system to seek justice for the poor. They work within the system to overthrow its evil (wording too strong for you? go back to Luke) disposition.


I understand the necessity of organizations like IJM, but at least for me, in the ways that this and the following verses have spoken to me, I think Jesus is calling me to live according to another way of life – to see the Kingdom come and not engage with corrupt systems. Here’s Luke 12:11-12 and 57-59 (underlines added).


11When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how* you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; 12for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.’


57 ‘And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? 58Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case,* or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. 59I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.’


In 11-12, Jesus tells us to hold to God´s justice, and in 58, he tells us to avoid litigation.
Granted, of course, all of these verse could be applied to the support of IJM’s work, and I don’t mean to take that away. I have, however, felt a personal call to read these verses as I’ve stated. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve even felt this here at the mission. As I see the organizational inefficiencies and the usual bureaucracy that are bound to occur in any giant corporation or organization, I’ve felt a lot of resistance to simply towing the line.

I guess I’ve always been pretty independent. In some ways, that can be a bad thing – like if it were to keep me from being effective here at the mission, or in school, or in the church community, or whatever. I’m aware of the necessity of curbing the independent spirit for the sake of community. But in other ways, I’m seeing how this is a good characteristic that God has put in me for a reason. I need to listen to that tug toward independence, and make myself as free as possible from participating in corrupt systems. For a long time I thought that maybe I could be that advocate to stand in the gap and navigate the corruption and senselessness of the legal system for the typically underrepresented. As much as I believe that that should be done, I’m now learning that instead of playing by the system's rules for the sake of the Gospel, I personally am called to, as much as possible, live by a new system according to the Gospel for the sake of the system. Similar ends, but very different means - a path, I think, that fits me much better.

Not that I’ll never work for another organization, or fight corruption directly, or live in community, etc. But rather, I want to form community, work with organizations, and live a life that models the Gospel’s alternative reality and avoids as much as possible engaging in the world’s broken systems. There are signs that this is possible, though my own version is yet mostly unformed. Here are some clues and outlines: Catholic Worker houses, Jacob’s Well, local food and goods, home gardens, veggie oil engine conversion, solar power, clandestine urban chickens and bees, forming relationships across socio-economic divides, front porch folk music. I’m just reaching for little pieces of this alternative vision. I know that´s vague, but I have a feeling many of you get what I´m saying. I look forward to working for this kind of life with all of you.

El Salvador

Hey folks. We´ve begun the crazy month of travel that my March promises to be. It all started off in February, actually. I left Guatemala on the 26th and took a four hour bus ride to San Salvador, El Salvador where my dear old friend Jennifer picked me up. Jennifer and another friend, Sally, have been living and working in El Papaturro and Suchitoto, El Salvador since October. They flew through Guatemala and I got to see them at the beginning of their time in Latin America. They are finishing up their time, and I wanted to see what they´d been up to living up there in the campo (countryside).

It turns out they´ve been having a really richly meaningful and growing time, and I got to experience a bit of that over the best five days I´ve had down thisaway. Jennifer and Sally work for a U.S.-based organization named Sister Cities in conjunction with a Salvadoran organization named CRIPDES. Both organizations were formed as a response to the Civil War fought between 1980 and 1992.

The war was basically waged by the urban-based elite and wealthy against the leftist ideas (and guerilla army) taking root among campesinos (country people, almost exclusively wretchedly poor) as communism took hold in Cuba. Of course, the campesinos had a reason to latch onto leftist ideas. My first night in the country I sat with an older man named Don Pablo who had lived through the whole war. He said that before the war, campesinos lived in tiny pueblos (villages) without water, electricity, or schools. They worked on plantations owned by the wealthy, paid just enough to survive and given rancid food and water during their short lunch breaks in the middle of 12-16 hour workdays.

Don Pablo said that as word of communism spread, they asked the soldiers who had begun coming to the communities what it was. It was, of course, characterized as an evil system that would really serve no one´s interests. Fidel Castro was described to them (literally, like not as a joke) as a devil with horns and a tail who ate children. After a while, one of the villagers talked to someone from the budding leftist party and learned the truth. That the party would be concerned with redistribution of wealth and just wages and conditions for the poor won this particular villager over. Don Pablo recounted how horribly mutilated this man´s body was found after voting for the leftist candidate in a regional election. This signaled the downward slide into gross human rights abuses (rape, mutilation, property destruction, mass murder, etc.) by the government and military, much of which, by the way, was financed by our very own U.S. government. We were so afraid of the spread of communism that we financed (i.e. $1 million a day) the terrorization and slaughter of peasants young and old (over 70,000 dead in El Salvador. About 200,000 dead in Guatemala in a similar situation).

Many of the campesinos fled to Honduras as refugees while the guerrilla army fought it out with government forces. When the war finally ended and the revolutionary army was recognized as a legitimate party, the refugees came back to their villages and reorganized them in just ways according to a land redistribution set up by the new government. The day we visited Don Pablo in Cinquera, El Salvador was that community’s Repopulation Day, and they were celebrating with joy and remembering what happened lest it happen again.

And it very well could. The day I was in Cinquera, the mayor´s record was being examined per charges (proved that evening) that he had stolen $30,000 from the community’s treasury. This particular mayor was from the right-wing Arena party, elected in the leftist stronghold of Cinquera through some devilish maneuvering similar to gerrymandering. What if he had gotten away with it? Further oppression of the poor. Obviously, the struggle is far from over, which is why it´s so important that organizations like CRIPDES and Sister Cities remain funded and active. It is equally important that we pay attention to the role that our own government is playing throughout the world. I didn´t know this story until I walked into it. What else don´t I know about the past? Or the present? I was so blessed to learn this story directly from Don Pablo and many others who lived it. Here are some pictures from my visit.


Martyrs from the Civil War.
"I don´t believe in Arena." I saw this sticker in more than a few places.

Names of victims from Cinquera.

LtoR: Jennifer, Sara (staff from Sister Cities), Sally, sitting at Don Pablo´s house. It´s filled with revolution posters and artifacts from the war.

People dancing like they mean it at the repopulation party.

Jennifer on a Suchitoto morning.

"Communities in Resistance against Neoliberal Politics"

One day we hiked up to this farm to meet one of Jennifer and Sally´s friend´s boyfriend. He was super nice and the view rocked way more than this picture.

The town of La Bermuda also had their repopulation party while I was there. To celebrate, they had a big horse race/competition. See the video below.

After the horse race, we went to this woman´s house for lunch. She works for CRIPDES and served as a nurse for the guerrilla army during the war. She told us her whole story.

We also celebrated Angelita´s (left) birthday by making empanadas over her woodburning girl in her backyard. They were soooooo delicious.

Jennifer frying.

Angelita´s backyard.

I tried to get involved, but I´m a boy, which means they mostly wouldn´t let me. Angelita´s daughter "helping" me fry.

Folding them up.

Wholeness

Been thinking more about oneness/wholeness. About past and future and present/presence.
If I feel desolate sometimes these days, I didn´t before, and won´t always.
I was electric, proud, hopeful.

I am still ten years old, grassy soccer knees and unstoppable smile, exhilarant. I am still seventeen, wild hope. I am still twenty that first summer in New Mexico – the whole world changing and opening before my eyes from the tops of ragged mountains. I am still here, newly twenty-three and feeling displaced and emptied but still possible and so grateful to be learning.

Even if now can feel no good, it is still one with what lies ahead and what lay behind.
Nothing is lost or ruined. I still contain that electricity, pride, and hope. That never changed, and never will.
It´s in there, feeding new roots somewhere deep.
Thank God.

Does that make sense? I feel fine.

---

Also, we just had an earthquake. Shook is the wrong word. I was sitting here writing this and it felt like I was suddenly in the wave pool and then suddenly not. Everything and everyone is fine, but I feel a little dizzy. Weird.

Also. I love Cat Power lately. Is she out of my league?

One

Lately I´ve been reading Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault, which focuses on the contemplative tradition in Christianity and its relevance for our current day and individual lives. Centering prayer is essentially the practice of surrending thoughts and sitting quietly in the moment, seeking God´s presence and relinquishing thoughts gently as they come to you. It is helpful to have a single word to bring you back to your practice when you notice yourself thinking (which happens very often at first). I´ve been experimenting with this method as part of my larger attempt to spend more time with the Divine and from a real need to center myself daily in my deeper identity and in God´s being before I head out into the chaos of living here and doing what I do.

I´ve also been in the practice of going to yoga every Monday and Wednesday morning from 6:40 to about 7:40 for some prework exercise, wakefulness, and meditation. Today as I laid down for the final part of the yoga practice, savasana (a short meditation and stillness), I started counting my breaths (one, two, one, two) as I tried to quiet down. I quickly grabbed onto "one" as my meditative word, and had a little something of a realization (which is, ironically, not actually the point of centering prayer as a specific meditative discipline, but whatever) that what I want to tell you about.

As I breathed in and out, letting thoughts go and returning to the word when necessary (often), the word swelled and became something much bigger and more meaningful than I expected. As I tried to relax, my mind slipped to more peaceful settings I have known. Specific mountaintops at Philmont, the shade of specific trees at Shawnee Mission Park, etc. filled my mind, and it all seemed like a quick round the world flight (in my mind. I had no illusions about actually be transported. And I might seem a little weird to be saying all this, but come on, I´m not that weird). As I noticed myself thinking, again and again I came back to my word "one," and some kind of sense was made of everything when those very visions in my head collided into a mess of formless color and beauty.

Whether or not the lesson was meant to be this literal (or even a lesson at all), I felt as if I saw the oneness of my life and this world. Where I am now is not as beautiful or peaceful or easy as where I have been at other times, but it is absolutely one with them in some fundamental, ineffable ways. The implications of this are, of course, big - calling me to a deeper presence in my current situation, a stronger rootedness in the oneness of my being, of God, of this world - rather than some kind of overwhelming attachment to a particular home or group of people. In saying all of this, of course, I´ve not only fallen far short of explaining anything like the actual reality, I´ve also changed it a little bit. But what does T.S. Eliot say?

"Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "

(Four Quartets, East Coker, V, l. 3-18)

Perhaps he is one of the few who has conquered by "strength and submission" that which simultaneously evokes and evades description, but I am not. Hope some of this has made at least a little sense, though. Much love to you all.

Monterrico

"We gotta get out of here. It´s been too many weeks in the city." We say that occassionally. Living in this city of four million (planned for less than a million) feels a little bit like you´re constantly on the run: racing to get to work, to get into line, to get off the street before dark, to stay safe, to get work done despite myriad infrastructural and organizational roadblocks. Though there are certainly good things about the city, they´re mostly people related - so when you can bring those people along with you (in this case, friends from work Kelly, Kimberly, and Kati), it can be a real relief to get out of the city. I guess this is just big city life, but I don´t remember feeling spiritually exhausted by New York City or Chicago or Denver or KC. Guatemala City is just tough to live in, and we feel the weight after enough time here. So this last weekend we planned/improvised a trip to the beach town of Monterrico. Here´s how it all went down.

There was no first class bus, so we rode the fabled chicken buses all the way there. 3 bucks for a 4 hour ride, but three to a seat plus people standing in the aisles.

We stayed at a place called Eco Beach Place run by a man named Luis and his family. We met his soon to be daughter-in-law, a girl from Virginia who happened to stay here one weekend on break from language school in Antigua and never left. She gets married this coming Saturday. We ate lunch as soon as we got there. (LtoR: Me, Kati, and Kelly).

Then we napped.

Then we went and played on the beach.

Down the beach was the weekly baby turtle race. Contestants buy a baby turtle for 10 Quetzales (about $1.24) and cheer them on as they race from the rope to the line.

It was a beautiful Pacific sunset.

The beach was steep so the undertow was really strong, but I went in up to my waist to play for a little bit after the race.

That night we went dancing at a club down the beach. I guess we don´t have any pictures of that. The next morning, we got up at 5 AM for a tour of the nearby mangrove swamp. I tried to take a picture when we started, and this is what came out.

And then it got lighter.

And lighter.

Etc.

That´s Kim in front.

We took a boat across the river to another town to take a different, quicker way back to Guatemala City. I guess they take cars across too.

That´s a bucket of fish in the foreground. It sat in the sun for a least two hours. I´m pretty sure the lady who brought them intended to sell them. Ugh.

Packed again on the bus back. We made it home on time to see the Superbowl, complete with Spanish commentary.

The Flower Debacle

As some of you may remember, shortly after returning to Guatemala I made a list of ways that I wanted to change the ways I live and think about life here. Point five on that list was all about searching out and creating beauty wherever possible. In the weeks since then, I´ve done a pretty good job of bringing beauty to my bedroom, my desk, and even my car. Yesterday, I accidentally (and in the end, fortunately) stumbled into an opportunity to spread some life and beauty throughout this entire windowless office.

It was 7:55 and we were just a few blocks from work. As we passed a big market on the way, I pulled into a parking spot I´d parked in before to buy some flowers for my desk (having previously bought a vase for $6 at a nearby antique store). The first time I did this there was no problem. Bought the flowers and went. This time, for some reason, a vendor had left a significant amount of flowers (exactly 12 vases-worth) wrapped up and on the ground in that parking spot. Of course, I didn´t see them until I saw them under my back tire. I got out and offered to buy them all - which seemed to confuse the vendor. I think she expected me to argue or something. She kept acting mad until a fellow vendor said "He just wants a price and then he´ll buy them all and go." Oh. So we settled on 140 Quetzales (about $18) and I went on my way.

Not sure what to do with all these flowers, we knew couldn´t leave them in the hot car all day. So carrying the flowers into the office, I impulsively offered a couple bunches to a shop/restaurant named Willy who is just one of the nicest guys I´ve ever been acquainted with. He took them and put them out on his dining tables. Boom. Beauty Bomb number 1. Then coming into the office, I arranged, with our office manager/maid, to get a vase together for every female member of the office (plus me at my desk). Everyone was really excited about their flowers and very thankful. There was even enough leftover to bring back home at the end of the day for my host mom´s birthday. How ironic that I was going to buy flowers and ended up running over them. What was at first frustrating turned out to be quite a blessing for the whole office (and Willy, and my host mom).

The whole cache. Proof that I made good on the beauty goal at the office, complete with pictures of friends, a Kansas calendar, a Rilke poem, a few photos of St. Louis sent from an old friend, a paper crane sent from Spain, a drawing of some old guy carrying wood up to a cabin, and of course, the flowers.

Bea.

Delmi.

Miriam.