Equal in the Sight of God
A Manhattan Work Team in Honduras

Making the Trip
Appearances Are Deceiving
Community Dialogue
Returning Home

We woke up to the crowing of roosters and the barking of dogs soon after daybreak. We heard no traffic. We saw no white jet trails overhead. We lived without electricity and without telephones, computers, or television. The only lights at night were the stars, our flashlights, and the glow of a city in El Salvador over the mountains.

We didn't know what to expect when we left New York City. We were making the trip under the guidance of Church World Service, but the volunteer office in Louisiana could tell us only a few facts. We would be in a rural village that had been hit by Hurricane Mitch. We would help build houses. And it would be cold at night because we would be nearly 6000 feet above sea level. Many of us came on the trip because we felt an urging from within, but we didn't know why. We came with a question. We trusted God to provide an answer.

We learned that mud is more than a disdainful annoyance that we scrape off our shoes. Mud is God's gift of life. In this ooze, rain is soaked up, seeds are given life, nutrients are passed from animals to plant roots and back to animals, and mountains are built. Mud can be fashioned into sun-baked bricks, clay pots, mortar for cement, or roof tiles to keep the rain out.

When a hurricane whips up this same mud, dumping several feet of water on it in a very short time, it can become deadly. A landslide can wipe out a whole lifetime of work and all the members of a family in a matter of seconds.

Making the Trip

Our team was made up of 15 people from St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church (SPSA: one church, two saints). The oldest team member was 68. The youngest, my daughter Bekah, is 9. We had a few youth, a couple of young adults, and four married couples—most nearing or over the age of 40. We brought a nurse, an artist, our pastor, a professor of political science, a church-agency executive, a teacher, a social worker, an accountant, a computer engineer, an editor, a missionary, a theater administrator, and three children, ages 9-14. We were joined by two college students from Central United Methodist Church in Detroit, Michigan.

In Honduras, Church World Service (CWS) and the General Board of Global Ministries, through Mission Volunteers and the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), work with an ecumenical agency, the Christian Commission on Development (CCD). Our team was assigned to Portilla del Norte, a small village of 35 families in the state of Intibuca.

United Methodist missionary Paul Jeffrey met us for orientation at Monte Carmelo, a CCD retreat center where our first night was spent. Earlier, we'd had several required orientation sessions in the United States with Don Reasoner, one of our covenant missionaries, who later joined our team as an ace translator.

Paul filled us in on some of the political and social history of Honduras. With multinational corporations owning much of the arable land, the small farmers had to move up into the mountains to make a living. In order to grow food, they cleared the native forest by the slash-and-burn method. So now, without a spongy forest floor to soak up rainwater, the rain runs down through the crops, taking the good soil with it. Then more forest must be cleared to get any kind of crop yield. This practice left the mountains vulnerable to the landslides brought on by Hurricane Mitch.

It took us about four hours to travel to Portilla del Norte from Tegucigalpa. The coordinators for pastoral care and agriculture, Marta and Omar, went with us. After the final hour's ride over a dirt road, the vans carrying our crew, tools, and luggage stopped on a hillside. A group of men were moving a large load of corrugated zinc up the hill, a few sheets at a time. The view over the mountains was breathtaking. "This is it," said Omar. "Your home. They built it for you."

Perched on the hillside was a fresh adobe-brick hut with a roof of clay shingles. "They didn't have any place for your group to stay, so they built you a house," Omar explained. "They'll use it as a chapel and meeting place after you go."

The only way to fit 22 people into the one common room of our casa communal (communal house) was to lay the small mattresses side by side on the cement-and-dirt floor without space between them. That night, the wind howled and the rain spattered, but we stayed dry and kept each other warm.

After breakfast, we divided into three work groups to build houses of adobe bricks—made of mud baked in the sun. The first step is to dig the foundation of the house and pour cement. The first row of adobe is set with cement, the rest with lodo (mud). Our first task was to go and get sand to mix with the cement. We were working with Saul Mejia and Tomas Lorenzo from the community. We merrily picked up the bags Saul passed out and followed him down the path.

I'm not sure our team would have followed our Honduran hosts so eagerly had we known what was coming. When they asked for some volunteers to do woodwork, a few of our men willingly took their hammers and followed. Halfway up the mountain, they figured out that woodwork meant hiking to the top of the rain forest, hacking down trees with machetes, and carrying the logs back to the site so that they could be cut into beams for the roof or frame.

In our present case, we walked along one field and down another, up a muddy slide, and around a bull, wondering where the drop place was for the sand. Then Saul stopped along a steep path next to what looked like a cave, dropped to his knees, and started scraping the sides of the cave with a pick. Sand began piling up around his knees, and he filled our bags, one by one. I have a four-year-old daughter at home whom I occasionally carry on my hip. She weighs 42 pounds. My bag was heavier than that.

Appearances Are Deceiving

After the first night, we wondered if we were really rebuilding houses destroyed by Mitch or if we were building for people from lower-lying areas who had been resettled. We couldn't see any damage. We also wondered why CCD had a food-for-work program here when the hillsides were thickly planted with corn, beans, potatoes, and other lush crops. Don invited some of the community leaders that night to talk with us.

All the people we had been working with had been living in this valley for several generations. They had suffered much damage in the hurricane. We couldn't see the landslides because they had planted them over already. The next day they took us back into the hills a bit so that we could see some of the ravines carved out by the water, along with the landslides that were too steep to plant. Huge trees were strewn about, uprooted.

"We are very thankful we didn't lose anyone in the hurricane. There were no deaths. But we lost all our crops and most of our animals," explained Guadalupe Rodrigues. "After three days of powerful rain, we stayed inside and prayed it would pass. Our houses can survive through storms until the water eats away at the first layer of adobe. Once that goes, the house settles in and the walls break open. But it kept on raining for eight days. The water flowed through my walls."

"The children sat in the puddles in the house. We couldn't go outside," Nola Perez Reyes told our work team. Her house was one of the 14 our team was helping to rebuild. Her husband had been ill and unable to work. She had eight children to care for. But she was at the cookhouse preparing breakfast for us at 5:30 every morning and was still there at 7:00 p.m. cleaning up after supper.

After the hurricane, officials from the municipality came to the community to assess the damage. Meanwhile, the people gathered up whatever grains and food had survived the hurricane to send off with the officials. "Those in other areas suffered more. We sent what we could," Rodrigues said.

On the question of land, Rodrigues hedged a bit. "Most of us own about an acre, where our houses are," he said. One of our CCD visitors prodded him, asking: "Who owns the rest?" He admitted that most of the lush hills we saw were owned by one man. The visitor filled us in. "The owner is an absentee landlord who lives in La Esperanza. The people plant and harvest the crops you see and they are sent for export to the United States. The owner pays the workers very poorly. Some of them have to rent land from him to plant their own gardens so their families have something to eat."

Hearing the truth was not exactly setting us free. Our conclusions had been completely wrong. After all the effort US church groups expend to raise funds to take trips as mission volunteers, do we take the time to dig deeper, ask questions, and make every effort to understand the lives of those we come to help?

Community Dialogue

During our week's stay, we lugged adobe, laid bricks, put on a roof, shoveled in a dirt floor, and pulled trees out of the rain forest. But these things community members could have done themselves. Dialogue was what they wanted most from us. They needed us to tell the wider world that their lives and families matter.

The last evening the Delagados de la Palabra (delegates of the word, or lay pastors) led a worship service for the community. Our friends, Benigno and Ernesto, read Leviticus 25:35: "If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on you, you shall support them; they shall live with you as though resident aliens." In Portilla del Norte, the families that lost their houses were living with other families in the community. Later, Benigno urged: "We should all view ourselves as equals in the sight of God."

Returning Home

As we packed up to go, I looked at the faces of those who had come at six in the morning to bid us farewell. We were the first team they had received from CCD and for now the only team scheduled to work with them. I wished I could send them another team from our church the following week. Our time was so short. They wanted contact with the outside world. We hadn't finished the houses. We should have planned a trip of ten days instead of seven.

What we brought back to New York was another question, rather than an answer. The people we had met knew how to make steep hillsides yield crops. They loved their families. They studied the Bible and then tried to live it. They sought abundant life.

If only they could keep what the land produced, their lives would vastly improve. Our world, not theirs, produced their predicament. Their lives are lived very close to the source, measured by seasons. Our lives are lived in mythical numbers on a page, measured by profits. US companies have been showing an elite group of Hondurans how to exploit natural resources to fuel North American consumption. Our friends in Portilla del Norte suffer because someone in La Esperanza tasted our way of life and decided it was good.

Now it is our turn to live the Gospel.

Christie R. House is associate editor of New World Outlook. The SPSA team expresses deep appreciation to Don Reasoner, the missionary and ace translator who is the author's husband and who helped team members hear the stories of Portillo del Norte.