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?

Easter in Guatemala

So yesterday was Easter. Tonight, Shelley is having a resurrection party with the kids in Santa Rita. It may sound strange to you to have it after Easter, but let me explain some things about Easter here. This is what happens in our small villages, and while similar to the rest of Guatemala in many ways, it is not exactly the same everywhere.

First, there is no such thing as Easter. There is no word for it. If you want to describe that particular Sunday you can say Resurrection Sunday, but it's not a special day and you'd better specify Sunday because most people don't know exactly what day He rose again. Here they celebrate Holy Week. That means that most people are off work and nobody goes to school (like spring break) so basically you have a lot of men sitting around with nothing better to do than drink.

There are special activities sponsored by the Catholic church during this time. On Monday, if they didn't do it the week before, the deaconess or priest goes around from house to house asking for money and in return will give a blessing. One day they take the idols/statues out of the Catholic church and parade them around town. This is usually on Friday, but varies with the schedule of the person who has the key. If that person is in one of the other villages they work in, it could be any day.

One extra special activity is the burning of Judas. About a week before Holy week, a man will appear tied to a tree. He is usually made of sticks and decorated with various items. Last year he had cowboy boots and a six shooter on his hip. This year he had a baseball cap and an empty bottle of whisky. He also has a piece of paper stapled to his chest that says, "Judas."

Also dependent on scheduling, the town gets together and lights this man on fire. It doesn't necessarily have to be after the crucifixion parade on Friday. This year in Santa Rita they did it on Tuesday. It is a big event, although nobody really knows why they are doing it.

After Friday with the big parade of Jesus on the cross, the partying stops. Saturday is quiet except for the drinking and Sunday everything returns to normal as people try to sober up or binge one last time before going back to work.

My saddest observation in all of this is that they are missing the Hope. Without the resurrection there is no hope. Everybody dies, but only one person was raised from the dead with the power to carry away all of our sins.

We're here to bring hope. And you can do that any day of the week.

Review: Food Sanitizer

Disinfecting your fruit and vegetables is a must here and has become second nature to us. I don't think we could go back to the States and not wash everything we bring home from the store at this point. The thought alone makes us sick.

So you have a few options. There are several kinds of chemicals you can buy at the stores here. They are supposed to be tasteless, but we always had a problem when soaking soft-skinned fruits such as blackberries (found once) or strawberries. You can also use bleach to wash your stuff, but the same thing with the taste issue.

Some friends of ours were planning their big move to Mali and told us about a product they had seen and were considering buying. It is the Lotus Food Sanitizer. It claims to sanitize using ozone (O3) which kills everything using that radical extra oxygen molecule. I can say that we haven't gotten sick from what we ate in our house in over a year of using it now. It comes with a spray bottle that you can use for 15 minutes after charging it to clean with, but it does not help with grease or anything else that plain water would have a hard time with. The problem is that there's no way to know if it's working, so we just go back to regular Lysol. It also claims to neutralize odors on things like dog beds, but in this heat our dogs are way more powerful than some stray oxygen molecule.

The best thing though is that there is no taste left at all. A con is that if you are water conscious, you have to refill the bowl each time you use it, which means 4-5 times for us after a once a week fruit and vegetable shopping trip. It also has to be pure water (I'm not sure why since it should technically make the water clean enough to drink) so if you don't have a filter for your water you'll be using a lot of your bottled water to do this when you can just use regular water for the chemical way.

Another recent use we discovered is that it is great for disinfecting baby toys. No soapy residue and no chemicals. After they dry they are good as new.

You have to buy cartridges which cost $5 each but last three months. We are glad we have it, but I would not say this is a life changing purchase like other invaluable products.

No Hay Luz

We have frequent power outages here in Petén. The main reason is that there is no redundancy, therefore we all share one long extension cord, and if anything happens along that cord, everybody afterwards loses power. We are constantly losing power because of something that happens in P0ptun, 45 minutes south of us.

Because of this you learn to cope, and you have to realize that after dark, things can happen to cancel your plans. Tuesday night, during the adult/teen Bible Study, the power went off just as we got to point/question 1 of 10. It was dark, but nobody made a move to get up. I turned my flashlight on and finished that point. Still, nobody made a move. Then I saw shadows towards the back and realized people where still arriving (late as usual). I was surprised, thinking that no power would be an excuse for people not to come, but I continued on. After another point I had the idea to back my truck up and use the headlights to light the place so I did that until the lesson was done.

Not wanting my battery to die, I turned off the lights and asked if there were any questions. Just so you know, there are NEVER any questions. For some reason nobody asks for any clarification. I think it is fear somebody will laugh at them. In the states everybody secretly hates the person that asks questions because it makes you go longer when you just want to go home, but Tuesday night in the dark it seemed everybody had a question. And not about the lesson. The first question was why God made people different colors...

So we continued that way in the dark for another 30 minutes. We might have to turn the lights off during question and answer time more often...

Funny Things We've Been Told Lately

This has been an interesting week for learning about people's beliefs. First we ran into our lab technician at the grocery store, who had done all of Shelley's blood tests during the pregnancy, and still hadn't seen the boys. So he left his cart and ran out into the parking lot to find her. He has 2 yr. old, twin girls and shared some interesting facts about twins. Apparently they have special powers. For instance, if you get onto your twin while holding them, the clothes you are wearing will turn very itchy, so itchy in fact that you can never wear them again. Also, if one of your twins wants something and you don't give it to them, the clothes you are wearing will tear into pieces and fall apart. I'm not sure what it is about clothes, but so far our twins have only been covering ours with various bodily fluids.

Then I was talking with another good friend of ours and she remarked on the lady in the market who gave us the money. She said, "I can't believe she touched your babies with her dirty hands. Babies and children are so delicate that I don't touch them out of respect." Now, this is a very educated Chilean woman, so I assumed she was talking about germs. She went on, "Adults just have such a strong energy that I think they take away energy from children and make them sick when they touch them."

Now, two bits of wisdom from a 15 yr. old Kekchi friend of ours. First I was asking him about the worms in my Zucchinis and what remedy he thought I should use. He told me that I had worms because I pointed with my finger at the first flowers that were growing. He said that that always causes worms.

Then later we were eating with him at Pollo Campero. My wife watched him take a piece of chicken, wrap it up in a napkin, and place it in his shoe. When we asked about that, he said that if you eat a certain part of the chicken it will take away all of your courage and make you afraid of the dark. (Placing it in his shoe was because that's where he keeps his trash until he finds a trash can.)

Name This Bug?

I am constantly being called to kill all sorts of interesting things. Most of the time they are hanging out in the shower, but this was on our suitcase as we were unpacking. It wasn't very big and I guess looks like a spider. Anybody know what it is?

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: