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.