What do you do with a Gringo after you grab him?

My wife already wrote about this HERE, but I'll provide my perspective. Last weekend (the weekend before Holy Week) there was a town meeting and I came up again as a topic. Somebody asked if I was was still coming in the village (they had seen me several times) and the town council acted as if that was an impossibility. Of course I wouldn't come back to get my things, even though I asked this specifically last September and was told I could come and go as long as I didn't hold services.

The town council didn't want to be held responsible, and is also in the habit of just telling people what they want to hear, so they said that they couldn't form a party and grab me, but the town should take its own responsibility and grab me the next time I came in. There was also talk of closing the gates so that I couldn't come in. Sounds like a lot of effort just to keep out a missionary right?

What I can't figure out is: What do they do next? I have a hard time believing that anybody would do something without their beer muscles (except for the crazy druggie waving his pistol...but he's not even who they were talking to). I know that mobs do horrific things in Guatemala, but this is so personal and I know these people so well that I find their ignorance humorous. Just to back myself up on this, I'll share the response I got today with a Mennonite friend who was born and grew up here. I told him what they said about grabbing me and he responded with a smile on his face, "You should go in there."

I want to be careful here to not sound like I am taking this lightly. It is a serious situation and could be dangerous without the proper precautions, but the part of me that does not care about my family or personal well being would very much like to test the waters. I would like to go talk to the president of the town council again or even show up during one of the town meetings just to see people's reactions. Fortunately, reason sets in and I realize that the person who called to give me the news was one of these guerrillas (now a new man with a new life) and only called to warn me not to go in. I'll take his advice seriously. These are ex-guerrillas who preferred to be called "guerrillas living in peace time" and still have all of their weapons after all.

I'll end with this conversation I had with New Horizon President Limas last September:

Limas: I'm sorry Yimi, but even if I wanted to I can't help you or change what was decided. The people made the decision.

Yimi: But you are the leader of the town. You have to have some control.

Limas: We just have to do what the people want. This is a Democracy. They decide and we do it. Do you understand?

Yimi: Yes, I understand. You are ruled by the mob.

Limas: Yes, exactly. The mob rules.

Not exactly the definition of Democracy, is it?

Missionary How To: Make it Unsafe to Return to a Village

Since we were no longer allowed to have services inside the community, we decided we should have them outside the community. You can read about our Micro HERE.

The only other thing we needed after getting the bus was a carport/roof (to have the services under) at our house. Since we weren't using the building in New Horizon for the foreseeable future, I decided the cheapest thing to do would be to take down the lamina (sheet metal) and the wood from there, bring it to our house, and have our albañil (construction worker/mason) put it up here. The only thing I would need to buy would be wood for the columns and to pay the workers. So we took down the lamina that I had purchased, and left covered the house with what was already there when we took over.

I have to interject that the house was offered to us for a period of 5 years, maybe more if they guy went to the states. The owner is the bodyguard for the governor of Cobán and so doesn't live in the village. He said we could build or do whatever we wanted to the building and wouldn't have to pay anything since he was loaning it for the Bible Studies. He doesn't believe in God, but his mom told him to do this. The house had three rooms, a roof over most of it and no floor. So we tore down the back room and made the entire thing much bigger, closed it off and poured a floor. Total we spent about Q75,000 ($10,000) after installing electricity and putting on the big roof. It didn't seem like too much since we would have it for the next 5 years, and I was confident that after that time we could arrange a payment or something for rent if he really wanted it back.

Before doing this, I spoke with the owner to let him know what was happening. Our goal was always to get back into New Horizon eventually, so in my mind we would be returning all the lamina and the building would go back to normal when we were allowed to start up again. The owner asked me to leave the doors and bars on the windows so that his sister could stay there, and while I wasn't happy about somebody staying in "our" building, I didn't want the sister and her baby to be out on the street either.

After taking down the lamina, the owner showed up at our house. Now he wanted us out completely, despite the fact that we still had 3 years left to our agreement. I told him that I would need to get my doors and windows and the rest of my stuff out of the second room and he seemed fine with that, although he would have preferred for me to just go ahead and give him the $1,000 worth of steel and work. When he left he was in a good mood and was grateful that I wasn't going to charge him half of the floor and walls that I had put up...so I thought.

He left my house and went straight to the building where he and two other men proceeded to curse my name that the lamina was gone. This was shocking in and of itself since the lamina was never talked about in a negative light, but the people with whom he was talking was the scary part. One of the men is known as "El Loco." It's never good to be called "Crazy" in Latin America, let alone have that be your nickname. He just recently arrived in the village because he is hiding from the police. He caries a big gun, only smokes marijuana, and sells the same. Why he was there talking bad about me, I'm not sure. It was probably just one Chapin getting another all riled up. Later I saw a teen from New Horizon with a black eye. He had been pistol whipped by...you guessed it...El Loco, for what he said was not smoking marijuana with him and for what another said was stealing his cell phone.

I would like to mention that my treating of somebody in a kind way and "covering up" his crime of stealing a cell phone is against the morals of the community, but harboring a fugitive who smacks around their kids and sells them drugs is perfectly acceptable. And don't get me started on the sexual abuse of their own family members...

We've had people upset with us before, but never waving guns while they did it, so lately we've been a little on edge. I went Wednesday and took down our doors per our agreement from Monday morning. He wasn't in the building, but he had ripped down our sign, stolen some chains and tried to hide the wire and light bulbs that I had left up for his sister (I say tried to hide because he put them in a gutter, not realizing that I'm tall enough to see in the gutter while everybody else needs a ladder.)

I left the wire and bulbs, but while the metal guy was cutting down the doors the owner's mom came by and threatened to call the police for stealing from a house that wasn't ours. The problem with that is that I am the only one with the receipts for anything. It was all a bunch of fluff and when presented with the facts she got mad and left.

So now we decide where to go from here. If we shake the dust from our feet and continue to other parts of Petén, is that because of our own personal wounds, or because it's a safe decision. Or do we continue on and risk being shot at by some drugged up loser after God had clearly tried to tell us that He was shutting this door. There has to be a balance between the two that doesn't involve us getting swallowed by a whale...

Here is the house as we first received it:

The next two show what it was like when we finished it.

And here it is showing how much of the roof we took and what it looks like now:

Missionary How To: Get Kicked out of a Village

So we've been kicked out of New Horizon before, but that was a long time ago so I'll just write about how we got kicked out this time. For those of you who know the story, here's a refresher so that I can give you the juicy new details in a following post.

So you should know that New Horizon is a community of ex-guerrillas (about 500 people) that stated as one of their by-laws that no churches (besides the token Catholic Church) were allowed to exist within the community. When we arrived and inquired about attendance at the Catholic Church we were told that the priest came to the village every three weeks and 4-5 people attended. We were granted permission by the town council (and the next one after that) to hold Bible Studies in the town. Since that time a group of people in the village have vehemently fought to make us leave. There have been many lies spread, but the only time somebody would talk to me directly and tell me they wanted me to leave was when they were so drunk they could barely stand up.

Last September I came back to Petén after being gone a month to check on our house, dogs, etc. I needed to make sure that the system we had set up was working and could continue for an additional four months. My first day back I went to visit some people in New Horizon. As I was leaving I stopped at the store to say hello to the mayor. She pulled me aside to talk to me about Quincho, the guy staying at and guarding our house.

Quincho was accused of stealing a cell phone from a certain group of people from our town 10 minutes from New Horizon. In Guatemala, accused means absolutely guilty no matter what the facts are and deserving of death. Because of this, that group of people had come into the village several times looking for him to kill him. Over a cell phone. Yeah.

So the mayor was concerned that somebody innocent would be standing next to Quincho when this drive-by happened and would also get killed or injured. They were having a meeting the next day to inform the town so that people would know not to stand around Quincho. She assured me that I was not being discussed in the meeting (therefore didn't need to come) and they would not be kicking Quincho out, just giving out the information.

I told Beatrice (the mayor) that I thought I could find the people from whom the cell phone was stolen and work something out, and then Quincho would pay me back for the cell phone from what he was earning. I told her my belief that people should be held responsible for their actions (something these guerrillas never have been), but that the most important thing right now was to stop anybody from getting killed. She thought that was a good idea and thanked me.

So instead of spending the next day varnishing my cribs or fixing things around the house, I went in search of the people. I can't give you any more details than this to protect the innocent (mainly me) but everything was worked out. I arrived in New Horizon to give them the news and realized the meeting had just ended. I talked to several people there including the mayor and the president of the town council to let them know that nobody was going to die over this anymore and everybody was very nice.

It was not until later that I learned (because these hardened ex-guerrillas suddenly become tongue-tied chickens when the white fat gringo shows up) that not only had they kicked Quincho out, we were also prohibited from continuing our activities in the village (mainly Bible Studies.) The mayor accused me of treating Quincho with kindness and trying to cover up his crimes. This is obviously against the morals of the community (as stated in the letter I received) and therefore they had no choice but to ask us to leave.

I hope you can see the absurdity in all of this. Since we have been back I have learned that the rumors have degraded even further. Now the story is that I was the real mastermind behind the cell phone caper and an accomplice in the crime. From the States. Yeah.