October 08

Las Mamacitas
Cindy went down to Estela’s house tonight. She wasn’t sure if she should go, because her throat was already scratchy and she might have already been catching whatever Charlie had this week.
I told her she ought to go: if she wasn’t sick already, she’d certainly come home that way. Estela’s house is down in the Basurero community, which borders the city dump. So the environment, even in a well-kept house like Estela’s, is thoroughly contaminated, and it can get into your sinuses pretty quickly.

Once a month, Estela invites teenage mothers to come to her house, where they get a night of fun and free babysitting (left - some of the girls at Estela's house). It’s the only time these girls have to be away from where they live (invariably in a crowded one- or two-room shack) and to be with other mothers. They play silly games, they sing, they laugh. I’ve never known any of them laugh, except in pictures and in stories I hear from Rebeca and Estela. I’ve always wanted to go and see for myself, but I’ve never worked up the courage. I’d be the only guy around, and although I like holding babies, I’m fairly sure I’d end up having to hold eleven of them.

Cindy went. She came home – getting sick, sure enough – but smiling. I asked her how it had gone, and she told me about the silly games, the singing (Rebeca deserves some kind of award for bravely leading the first few songs all by herself, before the girls finally joined in), the babysitting (Estela’s daughters, up in the loft of Estela’s little house). I knew Estela would be giving a talk of some kind tonight, but I almost didn’t want to ask Cindy about that part. There’s no shortage of talking in that community - lots of outsiders (like me) descend on the neighborhood to talk. It’s listening that’s rare. Estela, on the other hand - along with Fito, and Sandra - lives there, right in the middle of it all, and lives purposefully, intentionally, out of love. She listens. She’s spent countless hours out on the streets and in the homes of these girls. This strikes almost everyone around her, including much of her extended family and most of her neighbors, as an extraordinarily foolish way to spend her time, not to mention the obvious dangers involved in being out in the alleys and streets of this community. But out she goes, into their houses, into their lives. She’s well aware of the absurdity of what she does, and she struggles with the sense of futility that accompanies any time spent with the poor. But she keeps on going to them, keeps inviting them into her home, keeps listening, keeps being silly. When she talks to the girls about the love of Christ - as she did tonight - they’re ready to listen.

(Right: Estela in footy PJs and a wig, trying to get a laugh out of the mamacitas.)

I’ve tried to say something like this before, and forgive me if I’m not able to come up with a new way to say it: I’ve never personally seen any clearer examples of men and women living out Christ’s outward-facing love, his upside-down, relentless concern for the poor, for the “last, the lost, and the least.” I get to be a part of Rebe’s, Fito’s, Sandra’s, and Estela’s lives. I get to be with them in the beauty and mystery of their lives in this very difficult community. I’m so grateful you’ve made it possible for us to be involved in their lives, and in the Basurero community. I hope, reading these stories, that you sense your own involvement in their lives as well.

Baseball
Parker and John started baseball last week. Guatemala isn’t a baseball country, and this thing they went to isn’t anything like what I did when I was a kid. There are no uniforms, no leagues, and these kids don’t even qualify as a team (there are only seven of them). But a first grade mom found a guy who comes for an hour on Wednesday afternoons, and he’s not very expensive, so a few families signed their boys up, hoping we could at least get our boys a little exposure to the game.

There are actually a few baseball diamonds in our part of town. They’re on the main road going to all the other parts of town, so we pass by them every time we go anywhere. On Sunday mornings we can see what look to be league teams playing softball. It’s as busy a street as any in the city, so the noise and the diesel fumes are pretty thick. More than one parent has expressed concern over the proximity to the street and the associated kidnapping risk (this being Guatemala), but at least one of the kids is always accompanied by an armed bodyguard, so the general concensus seems to be that we’re probably OK. I went this afternoon, to see what it was like, and I ended up sitting in the dugout with the moms and a few squirmy younger siblings. Having no clue how to produce sideline chatter in Spanish, I was aware that my yelling “Attaboy, Parker!” and “Get in front of the ball!” in English would call attention to the fact that I’m not from here. (Although, to be fair, it’s not as if people don’t already know, even before I open my mouth: you can spot an American from fifty yards, just by the way he walks.)

And sure enough, the question came. “Where are you from?”

East Tennessee. It’s in the south, near Nashville, which is where country music comes from. (Plan B, if they’ve never heard of country music, is to tell them it’s the state where Elvis Presley lived - everybody gives a knowing bob of the head at the mention of Elvis Presley.)

“And what do you do here?”

It’s called Vida Joven, it’s a mission to teenagers. Sometimes this is all people want to hear: “there are loads of foreigners here doing vaguely helpful things with the poor people,” they think. “He’s one of them.” I’ve gone through the same thought process a hundred times when meeting someone.

“So, what exactly do you do?”

We spend time with them, on their turf, on their terms, and on their time (a nice phrase I borrow from a friend). We help them stay in school, we have a small scholarship program, we provide caring relationships. All based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. There’s a cold war going on between catholics and protestants here in Guatemala; we in Vida Joven are conscientious objectors. We’re made up of Roman Catholics and all sorts of protestants types, and we want to avoid any unneccessary muddling of the message of Christ’s love.

“Do they want to be helped?”

I’m sorry, do they want what?

“Do they want to be helped? Will they receive the help you give them?”

That, I can tell you, is question worth asking, and not just on a Wednesday afternoon at the noisy baseball field. The answer of course is yes and no: some welcome us. Some don’t.

Lupe
There’s Lupe. Her father is a drunk and an abuser. Her mother works and keeps Lupe and more or less fed and defended from their father, but she sometimes leaves for days at a time, and Lupe and her two younger sisters have to fend for themselves. This year, their mother just left. The journey up to the US must have presented more problems than she had anticipated, and she came back after a month or so, but it had been disastrous for Lupe and her sisters.
(above: Olga, Lupe, Joselyn, Rebeca)
We’ve known her for years; when Rebeca began to volunteer with us, Lupe was one of the first girls she met. She was 17 then, she’s 21 now. They’ve spent countless hours together by now, and Rebe hears everything – all the mess that passes through Lupe’s life. I only hear what everybody else hears – the common knowledge of a community where just a sheet of tin or cardboard separate one house from the next – and what I hear is bad enough. I’m not sure how Rebe is able to bear everything she hears.

And yet. Even with all of that, Lupe has somehow managed to stay in school this year (after so many years of forced and voluntary dropouts, she’s finishing up 4th grade at age 21). Her tuition is paid out of the Vida Joven scholarship fund, which is to say her tuition is being paid by you who give. Sandra, who is on student staff with Vida Joven, waged a one-woman war against the governmental bureaucracy in order to get Lupe registered. Some government office had mixed up Lupe’s paperwork, and Sandra and Lupe had to compete in the photocopier/mindless government regulation olympics to make sure she got enrolled. The two of them were even mugged one afternoon on their way to the government buildings, but Lupe got enrolled, and it looks like she might pass this year.

Lupe’s life is a mess. It has been her whole life, and surely it will be for some time to come. Rebeca says that Lupe will be a great leader in the community someday, when she stops selling drugs. She says it with a wry smile, but she means every word of it. Rebeca is talking and living out of a fierce and ragged hope. Lupe’s decisions are for Lupe to make, of course; but there is at least the option to live out a different sort of life than the one she’s known til now, and a friend she can look to for direction.


Kevin
Then there’s Kevin. Long time readers of these letters will know the name; I’ve been writing about him since he was just a kid. He’s 17 now, and he’s starting to get into the kind of trouble a 17 year old in this city can. Fito , who has seen so many Kevins come and go that he knows what the odds say about Kevin’s future, shakes his head when we talk about him. We’re not giving up on Kevin, but there’s a time to respect a boy’s decision, and that’s whatwe have to do. We’re still friends, Kevin and all of us with Vida Joven. We’ll continue to offer our friendship and love, even as we watch him choose his own destruction. Kevin was who came to mind when the baseball mom asked me if they wanted help. Some do; some don’t.



El Recuerdo
One of the great gifts of this job is that we occasionally get to introduce teams of people from the US to our Guatemalan friends. All of us at Vida Joven look forward to the weeks when workteams come down. (It looks like our schedule is full for the winter and spring, but next year might be a possibility if you’re part of a group that’s interested in coming down.)

We hosted a group of folks from the Chicago area in June, and besides getting lots of hard work done – floors and roofs for familes who desperately needed them – they helped us open a new Vida Joven club in the Recuerdo neighborhood. El Recuerdo lies in between the Aguilar neighborhood (where we started in 2003) and the city dump. It’s a step or three down the socioeconomic scale from Aguilar, which is hardly imaginable. Sandra, who is completing her second year with us as a volunteer and her first year as a student intern, has spent untold hours walking the alleys of the neighborhood, getting to know the kids, and she thought it was time to start something regular for them. We started Vida Joven Club there in June, with the help of the Chicago folks, and the neighborhood has been enthusiastic ever since. Pray for Sandra, Rebeca, and Fito as they spend time there. Pray for more (and brave) volunteer leaders to spend time with kids in this difficult place.


Friends,
thanks again for being here with us. For supporting us, for praying, for reading these letters. We’re grateful for you.

Brady


------

This ministry is supported entirely by friends like you – Thank you!

For those interested in supporting Vida Joven Guatemala-
Checks can be made payable to

YOUNG LIFE
with a note to:
X364-GUATEMALA

and mailed to:

Young Life
PO Box 520
Colorado Springs CO 80901

April 08

6-April-08

I. Estela
Estela Ambrosio has been a friend to us in Vida Joven for years. She lives with her family down at the bottom of the great long staircase that leads into the Anexo Aguilar. Last year she began volunteering with us, focusing on the teenage mothers in the neighborhood. Shamed, abandoned, and forgotten when possible, these girls lead lives that are as dark and hopeless as any I know of. Estela has begun the radically counter-cultural work of actually seeking these girls out, spending time with them, and helping them with basic necessities. She has begun a small discipleship group, but she has a list in her mind of many more girls who need help and friendship. Estela has kids of her own, though – four of them, ages 22 to 7 – and a full time job to help feed the family. Her husband, Luis, is a good friend of ours as well, but they can’t make ends meet with just his job as a mechanic. Estela loves the ministry, but the family needs to eat. For some time, we have wished we could offer Estela Ambrosio a part time job, but perhaps the time just wasn’t right.

Then, a few weeks ago, a thoughtful donor provided us with enough money to pay Estela on a part-time basis for a year. We offered her the job, and she starts this week.

I’m thrilled to get to work with her, as I am with Sandra and Fito – all three were born and raised there in the neighborhood, and they can go places the rest of us can’t. (Well, we physically go there, but I don’t know how much good we are able to do.) Girls come to Sandra. Boys trust Fito. Young mothers know they are loved by Estela. In a culture where most people’s concern for others goes no farther than their own front door (and often not that far), these three are radically different.

Fito has put together a soccer team of misfits, wanna-be gangsters, ex-criminals, and boys who don’t have anything better to do. They play in a local league, and they’ve even won a couple of games.

Sandra is the queen of El Recuerdo, a neighborhood as tough as any I know. The level of violence and disorder there is astounding. And into it all walks Sandra, just about every day, looking for “her girls.” Or they come looking for her.

Estela actually pays attention to some teenage mothers and their little babies. This is most unusual for the neighborhood and certainly for the mothers themselves.

All three are known to be odd, in that they actively seek the friendship and well-being of others. They move into people’s lives in love, rather than in violence or greed. They are certainly well known, possibly a little famous, and for the right things. We’re so lucky to get to work with them. I’m so lucky that I get to see God moving in them and through them. I thought you might feel that way as well.

(Rebeca Aguilar, also on staff with Vida Joven, spends lots of time training and encouraging Sandra and Estela. This is vital work. Would you pray for all three of them as they walk together, and for me as I spend time with Fito?)

Thank you for being with us in this.


II. Scholarships

For a number of years, we’ve wanted to start a scholarship program for some kids we know. There always seem to be one or two who really want to study, but who just can’t pull the money together. (Public education is not an option for these kids. There are public elementary schools, but after fifth grade, kids either find a cheap private school or they just don’t go to school.) This year, thanks to some generous gifts, we were able to do it. Kevin, Susy, Kari, Lupe, and Elías all received scholarship money and are studying this year. Short of going seriously into debt, none of them would be able to study were it not for the program. We picked the kids who really wanted to study, who we thought showed good potential, and who were willing to agree to our terms (rules regarding grades, studying, etc.) Things are generally going well (read below for details), and of course it’s very exciting for us to see these kids studying and interested in a future beyond the life that surrounds them in that neighborhood.

Thanks for making all of this possible.

III. One more story, if you’ve got the time:

Kevin lasted all of five days in his school. Didn’t even get his uniform. We actually did go to the office to buy him one – Maritza, Kevin’s mom, and me. I had gone with Kevin to see his new school, I was goint to wait around until Maritza got off work, and she and I were going to buy his uniform. They were both very proud of the school and the fact that Kevin was studying there, and they wanted me to see the place, maybe meet the director, buy up the last of the stuff he needed for the semester.

We didn’t buy anything, but we did meet the director.

Maritza and I went to the office in order to see about buying the uniform, but the director asked us over to her desk. She asked Maritza if she could speak freely in front of me, as I was obviously not the father or any other sort of family member. Maritza had explained that I was helping with the money. “Ah,” she said. “Then this will be of interest to you as well. Did Kevin tell you why I asked to speak with you?”

Of course we had no idea what she was talking about – Kevin had told us nothing. He’d been caught bringing pot to other students.

Kevin had been good friends with German, the kid who was shot dead some time ago. Last year, Kevin’s father landed in prison, making it necessary for Kevin to drop out of school to find work in order to feed the family. Somewhere during the process, Kevin was befriended by the neighborhood drug dealer, Freddy, and he started delivering, using, and maybe selling. Freddy was shot dead the week between Christmas and New Years (You can pray for his wife and children, notably Nestor, who is on Fito’s soccer team). But whoever coordinates the drug trade in our neighborhood put a couple of new guys in his place, so it was for them that Kevin was bringing stuff to his friends at school.

I was particularly excited about Kevin going back to school. He is an exceptionally bright guy, and he has had such a hard time of things. He was excited to get back to school, and in fact for that first week, every time we met, he had done all his homework and seemed to be enjoying classes. Maritza thought he had finally turned things around.

He still says he wants to turn things around, and I hope he does. The director at the school graciously returned $40 we had paid in entrance fees, even though she kicked him out. We let Kevin and Maritza use the returned money to sign up at another school, but we won’t be paying any of his tuition this year. Six weeks into the school year, he seems to be doing OK. He’s still studying, not into any trouble yet (or he hasn’t gotten caught yet), and he finally did get his uniform for this new school.

A decent private school costs very little; a little over $500 pays for Kevin’s entire year. A good school, where a kid can graduate with some real opportunities, costs a bit more. It’s about $1600 each to send Elías, Susy, and Kari to a middle-class school where the kids go on to university. We think these three especially have great potential and should be planning to go to a good university. The tuition is much more than either of their families can afford, and indeed there has been a little culture shock – these kids are from a part of town and a culture that are mysterious and maybe a little unwelcome in the experience of the other students. But they are working hard, surviving, and they’re learning how to operate in a different world than what they’re used to.

Kevin lasted five days before he fell back into the temptation of quick money. Elías has lasted six weeks at this new and challenging school, but just barely – he’s pretty close to failing. Lupe was just barely accepted into school at all – the city government had mixed up her paperwork, and it took a well-placed $25 by our staff woman Sandra to get everything in order on the last possible day. This whole business seems very tenuous; the scholarships, the kids’ chances for success, their chances for surviving growing up in this neighborhood with anything like real life, real relationships, real love. It’s all so shaky. Just when I think I’ve gotten used to it, the director of the school politely tells me that she’s kicking my kid out for selling drugs, or I pick up Elías’ report card, or I hear about Lupe’s battle with bureaucracy, and I realise I’m not used to it. I want the sure thing! I want something to be easy. I want Kevin to wake up, I want Elías to go to university and get a job that lets him be creative. I want Kari to study in the US. It may happen; it likely will not. We act as if we were sure it will. That’s about all any of us knows to do. Thank you for being with us in this. We’re grateful to have you as friends and partners in what’s going on down here.

-Brady

------------

We’re supported by friends like you – Thank you!

For those interested in supporting Vida Joven Guatemala-
Checks can be made payable to

YOUNG LIFE
with a note to:
X364-GUATEMALA

and mailed to:

Young Life
PO Box 520
Colorado Springs CO 80901

As always, we’re grateful for your support.

November 07

6-November-07

“I’m just so glad we could have this talk, Chepe,” Walter told me tonight. “It means a lot that we can talk like this.” “Yeah, me too, Walter.”

Walter was out-of-his-mind drunk. If I had to guess how much our conversation will mean to him in the morning, I would guess somewhere around zero.

I had gone down the stairs into the dark alley looking for Elías after Vida Joven club tonight. It was late and I was ready to go home but he and I needed to go over a few details for our big meeting tomorrow. I found him, we sat down, and started pulling papers out of a big manila folder when Walter showed up.

I’ve spent a lot of time in that little neighborhood, but I don’t remember ever meeting Walter until tonight. The first thing he did was apologize for being so drunk. It doesn’t bother me, I told him, and I guess that was a lie. It might have been more to the point to say that I had no intention of adding to his shame – all the drunks I know down there seem to me to be lost in a world of shame, and they are either busy apologizing or they are busy trying to pick a fight. The roots of that shame are buried so deep and it’s all so dark and twisted down there that I don’t really carry around a lot of hope that I can help in any significant way. At least not tonight, not with Walter, not in the half hour we spent together.

As often happens when guys are stumbling around like that, Walter took great pains to communicate how much and how deeply he loved and appreciated me and my friendship. But there was that little muscle spasm, that little twitch that flicked underneath his left eye when I was beginning one of my sentences, and his mind, dulled with all that alcohol, couldn’t quite get hold of where I was going with the conversation. The twitch said that the slightest little change in direction might cause him to explode. The force of all that shame and anger might just make it to the surface, and what then? I don’t think I was scared of anything Walter could have physically done to me tonight – He probably wasn’t capable of doing all that much harm. I just didn’t feel like I had it in me tonight to follow Walter down some strange drunken path, into that anger and shame and suffering.

“I know about suffering!” he said to me, over and over, pulling up his jeans and pointing to his badly scarred knee. But surely he doesn’t mean just the knee.

“The Chaca,” a guy named Carlos, a mean, dirty, wiry little man who lives nearby and works in the dump came down and sat with us. He’s known to have beaten the mother of his children mercilessly, and although he’s always ready with a foul word or an obscene gesture, for reasons I can’t fathom, he’s always been civil to me. Tonight he had a crazy metal apparatus poking out of his jacket sleeve - Fito had told me a couple of days ago that Chaca had shot his own finger on Sunday, messing around with Freddy, a neighborhood drug dealer.

“What happened man?” I asked him.

“I hammered a nail into my finger,” he said.

“When?”

“Saturday.”

“Man, you didn’t go to work on Saturday.”

“I shot myself.”

“Well then I guess you’re lucky, ‘cause it was just a finger, huh? Did you lose it or is it still there?”

He pulled back the sleeve a little but all I saw was wires and gauze.

So we sat there – Walter with “just two beers!” sloshing around in his belly and pickling his brain, Carlos “the Chaca” with his absurd wire contraption and his barely-hanging-on finger, Elías, and Chepe the gringo.

-

There are times when being in that neighborhood, when being with kids there, feels productive in some way. There are times when we drive away and are able to say to ourselves, that was good. It felt right. Maybe God even used us just then. But surely it will not be surprising that much of the time – maybe most of the time – I wonder, what possible good can be coming of this? How can sitting here with these boys and these men be productive in any way? Or if I want to think of it in religious terms, how can this be fruitful?

-

On my way home, I thought about Elías, the whole reason I ended up sitting on those steps in the first place. Tomorrow morning I’m taking him to a private high school, where we’ll be paying the initial fees – an unthinkable amount of money for that neighborhood – and completing the paperwork and procedures to enter him into his junior year of high school.

Elías has until now attended a really lousy school, but he’s a bright kid who works hard and I think he has a chance of leaving the culture of poverty. I told him he should go to a challenging school, a middle-class school, and he said why not?. He can’t pay of course, but some of you have generously covered his tuition. If he does well at this new school, he has a good chance of going to university.

A few other stories I could write pages on:

-We offered a part-time job to Sandra, one of the first people we ever met down in the neighborhood. Sandra and Rebeca are working to open up a new ministry in the “El Recuerdo” neighborhood where Sandra has been working as a volunteer for a year or so. Sandra comes from a horrible neighborhood and is now working in an even worse one. Of course Sandra will be able to minister to girls in ways that none of us outsiders can. Part of her Vida Joven salary is tuition money so that she can get her GED, and then go to university.

-Rebeca and I met with Estela a few weeks ago to offer her the chance to serve. Estela is in her mid thirties, mother of 5, the oldest of whom is twenty or so. We have been concerned for some time about the young girls in the neighborhood who become pregnant. Typically they move in with the boy who got them pregnant, both she and the boy drop out of school, one of them gets a job, either in a factory (if it’s the girl) or in the dump (if it’s the boy), and from then on she only sees the light of day if she’s hanging out the was.

Rebeca has long wanted to find a way to walk alongside these girls, and then one day she thought of Estela. Estela has been a good friend to Vida Joven since we first stumbled into the neighborhood four years ago. She’s a caring woman in a very difficult area. We asked her to think about starting something with these girls, to think about how we could love them well. Having been a very young mother herself, Estela was excited to try.

After a week or two of making contact with the girls, Rebeca and Estela took them out for coffee last week while some of us took care of all the babies. In between the invitation and the actual date, one girl had been made a better offer by a boy who would pay for her baby’s milk. She left the baby’s father’s house and moved in with the other guy, in another neighborhood, so she didn’t go. Another girl didn’t make it on time, so it was just two girls, Reina and Carolina. They didn’t know each other.

The girls had never been to a restaurant before and were nervous with the whole experience. Reina – the mother of Chaca’s children, incidentally – started talking about the trouble she was having with an old boyfriend who wouldn’t stop coming around. Carolina, who was 13 when she became pregnant and whose father was killed just a month or two before the baby was born, said “what did you say his name was? The old boyfriend's name.”

Reina told her.

“That’s the guy who murdered my father.”

Estela and Rebeca are taking them out again tomorrow afternoon. We’re hoping to be able to connect other mature mothers with more of these girls, in order to provide them with a loving relationship and a picture of Christ’s love for them.

-Fito continues in his extremely difficult work of trying to help boys from this neighborhood stay alive and be alive. Fito and I meet together once a week to discuss his life and ministry, and I’m grateful to be able to work with someone who is so faithful in the middle of such agonizing circumstances.

-Kari and Toto, two young girls who have been in a small group with Rebeca for the past year or so, were overheard a week ago saying that they wanted to be Vida Joven leaders someday. Music to my ears…music to my ears.



I said earlier I don’t carry around a great deal of hope that I can make a big difference in the lives of everyone down there. Sitting around with Walter, the Chaca, and Elías seems like the very definition of futility and absurdity.

But!

There is this thing with Elías tomorrow, and the fact that he is actually thinking about college now. There’s Sandra. There’s Fito. There are Kari and Toto. There are the “mamacitas,” the young mothers. There’s dear Estela. The fragile beauty of Elías’ story, and the others, doesn’t make our presence there any less absurd. It doesn’t make me feel any more effective or productive (although I am greatly encouraged by it). But it does cause me to live and to work and to minister as if there was real hope for these friends of mine, and for me, and for the world. It is teaching me to choose, as much as I am able, to believe that God’s justice and mercy will one day be fulfilled here on earth as it is in heaven. Not now, not today - at least not fully - but someday. I don’t expect to understand anymore how or why or when God moves. I am profoundly grateful, though, that I get to be around sometimes when he does.

Many thanks for making it possible for us to be here.

-Brady, for Cindy, Laura, Rebeca, Fito, Sandra, and all the rest.

------------

We’re supported by friends like you – Thank you!

For those interested in supporting Vida Joven Guatemala-
Checks can be made payable to

YOUNG LIFE
with a note to:
X364-GUATEMALA

and mailed to:

Young Life
PO Box 520
Colorado Springs CO 80901


As always, we’re grateful for your support.

Introduction

This site is for folks who (a) want to keep up with Vida Joven Guatemala and the Greene family, and (b) would rather do that online than over email. It's pure speculation on my part that such people even exist; it just seems that blogs are currently the way lots of people pass information.

I'm no blogger. I should make that clear at the outset. I don't write very often (there is the business of being part of these stories, after all), and I have a hard time keeping it under 1,500 words. I'm not able to make it as professional-looking as my sister's blog (I would suggest you check it out, but I don't know how to make the link appear.) But if you can sit in front of your computer long enough to read these things, then here's to you! Thanks for taking the time.
-Brady