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On our last day, as we were processing our experience, we climbed a volcano and had volcano fired pizza on top!
While we had fun and enjoyed connecting, we also learned about the grim realities of Guatemalan politics and economics. With a long history of corruption and exploitation, there is growing concern about the presidential runoff scheduled for Sunday, August 20. Many people asked us to pray for the country. Power and wealth and land ownership are consolidated in a very small circle, and the vast majority of people are excluded.
Most challenging were the stories of families dealing with desperate levels of poverty and hopelessness. We met one woman whose husband is now imprisoned in Arizona after a second attempt to migrate to the USA. He did so to find work to pay for their sick child’s health issues. Our group met the husband last October, and it was clear that he was a good and decent person, simply trying to save the life of his child.
We also learned that one of our scholarship students in Santo Domingo had left for the United States the day before we arrived, apparently sensing no reasonable future in Guatemala.
One of our speakers suggested we need to think of mission in new ways. This got me thinking about the Presbyterian Church’s Matthew 25 initiative, which encourages congregations to work on
- Building congregational vitality
- Dismantling structural racism
- Eradicating systemic poverty
Over the years, we have helped Guatemalans with housing, education, water filters, medicine, church leadership development, and more. All of this is great, but it seems to me that we need to start asking more questions about the root causes of the pervasive and systemic poverty in Guatemala and elsewhere, to not just treat the symptoms.
But getting to the root causes of social and economic inequality means challenging the power structures, which is complicated and not typically well received by those in power.
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