Here is the next letter from my friend who is in Guatemala. A recent graduate from Missoula - now working with NISGUA (Network in Solidarity with the people of Guatemala) a group that is "Working for Justice in Guatemala". (GAP = Guatemala's Accompaniment Project.)
Why is accompaniment necessary? In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan military combined urban repression with a rural counter-insurgency campaign that uprooted more than a million people – many of whom fled to neighboring Mexico – and led to an estimated 200,000 dead and disappeared. According to the independent Historical Clarification Commission, these actions constituted a campaign of genocide against Guatemala’s indigenous population.
In 1993, organized groups of refugees began returning home and internally displaced groups started to come out of hiding. Two years later, G.A.P. formed in response to requests from these returnees for trained international observers to accompany communities as they rebuilt after 36 years of violent civil war, which formally ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996.
What is accompaniment?NISGUA is one of many organizations around the world that employs accompaniment as a vital tool in the global struggle for the respect of human rights. In the Guatemalan context, accompaniment creates a non-violent response to the threats, harassment, and violence faced by survivors of Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war and grassroots organizations working for justice and human rights. To this end, NISGUA’s Guatemala Accompaniment Project (G.A.P.) places long-term volunteers side-by-side with people in rural communities and with organizations in an effort to deter human rights violations. The dissuasive physical presence of these volunteers, known as accompaniers, provides a measure of security and creates space for Guatemalan communities and groups to organize in defense of their rights. Accompaniers also monitor and report on the human rights situation and alert the international community to abuses. In the U.S., ten G.A.P. Sponsoring Communities are committed to immediately responding to abuses and providing ongoing support to accompaniers.
READ MORE AT THIS LINK:
http://www.nisgua.org/get_involved/join_gap/intro.asp
_______________________________________________________________________________
LETTER:
Dear Friends and Family,
I’ve had the thought a number of times.
It’s usually when I see the incongruous flashing television screen in a one bedroom, dirt floor home, or hear the trill of a new cell phone, or any other telltale sign of the remittances sent home from family working in the states.
And I think, wouldn’t that money be better spent on Lupita’s education, or perhaps a sustainable community project? I hear it echoed, too; Adriana, a Brazilian woman working with an Ixcán NGO told me of favelas near her home in Brazil where families slept exposed to the rain, their only reasonable piece of roofing set aside to shelter their television; and of a homeless man awakened on the sidewalk by his ringing cell phone…all the ways poor people choose to spend what little money passes through their hands.
But then I realize, wait – I have all these things, and I like them, too. Am I justified in having a TV and a DVD player just because I have a nice stand to set them on and quality roofing to house them under? Are fancy fixtures reserved only for those who can make them look less conspicuous among other fancy fixtures?
When fifteen year-old Marta told me she was going to make the trek from Cuarto Pueblo up through the Sonoran Desert and ultimately to Atlanta, provided she didn’t get caught along the way, I asked her why she was leaving. I was already forming my own romantic ideas about Marta’s noble decision to migrate; that she felt obligated to find a way to pay for her mother’s medicine, that she was going to help put Yoli, her bright little sister, through school, that maybe there just wasn’t enough food to go around…
“I want to be able to buy my own stuff,” Marta answered. She wanted new jeans. She wanted cold sodas. She was born in Mexico in the refugee camps and had seen Cancun, the hotels, the refrigerators. And she wanted some.
Initially, I was disappointed and found myself wanting to tell her to stay. This wasn’t the story of a young woman risking her life to feed her family. Marta wanted cds and electricity. I wanted Marta to stay with her mother and grandmother, to know her Mayan language and how to make tortillas. But I have my refrigerator at home, my cd player, and my jeans and I don’t think I’m ready to give them up. So who am I to hope these things for Marta? I find myself pleased to see young girls speaking Q’anjobal and weaving, to hear young men explain the planting and harvesting of corn. But I am dropping in on this world, peering into these complicated and changing lives, making my judgments and hoping my hopes, all the while knowing I will return to the many comforts of my home. And I love my home.
So I have to catch myself, to ask myself if what I want for Marta is what I want for myself. And it’s not so simple, because we do come from vastly different worlds. But I have to be careful of this tendency to enjoy cultural preservation for my own sake, for my own viewing pleasures, only to slip comfortably back into my home in the U.S., where I will enjoy all the things that Marta wants too.
P.S. I am now working on a new regional team in the Ixcán, centered on natural resource issues. I will be working in communities where mainly Q´eqchi is spoken and little to no Spanish. I am studying Q’eqchi this week, trying to learn a third language using my second, which is, well, kind of hard. It is a beautiful, poetic language: ¨How are you? ¨ literally translates to ¨Do you have happiness in your heart? ¨, ¨Ma sa sa’ laach’ool laa’at?¨
I said goodbye to Cuarto Pueblo last month, after nine months there. On my last night we ate with Andrés, the carpenter I wrote about in my first letter. He told me, "Anita, now when you go home, you tell your family about what happened down here, what we lived through. But make sure you tell them that we are happy now. We are eating three meals a day of good food. We are no longer in the mountains, stuffing our babies' mouths with leaves to keep them from crying, cooking in the middle of the night so the army can't see our smoke, eating tortillas made from ground leaves...we're doing pretty good."
"No es el tiempo que anda cambiando el mundo; es la humanidad," he said to me as I was walking out of his house, something that just isn't quite as beautiful or translatable in English: "It's not time that changes our world - it is humanity."
I hope you all have happiness in your hearts.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
"It was as if God had said, 'I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours.' I was not ready for a life of sorrow, sorrow deriving from knowledge I could just as well stop at the gate."
~ Annie Dilliard, "A Field of Silence" in Teaching a Stone To Talk...
~ Annie Dilliard, "A Field of Silence" in Teaching a Stone To Talk...
Monday, March 10, 2008
"revusion toward anything that chooses to call itself 'Christian'"
Here is a piece of an article by David James Duncan - a bit spikey as usual, but as usual quite entertaining and just simply good.
It is featured in the July/August 2005 issue of Orion Magazine.
The rest of the article can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom.
________________________
Most of the famed leaders of the new “Bible-based” American political alliances share a conviction that their causes and agendas are approved of, and directly inspired, by no less a being than God. This enviable conviction is less enviably arrived at by accepting on faith, hence as fact, that the Christian Bible pared down into American TV English is God’s “word” to humankind, that this same Bible is His only word to humankind, and that the politicized apocalyptic fundamentalists’ unprecedentedly selective slant on this Bible is the one true slant.
The position is remarkably self-insulating. Possessing little knowledge of or regard for the world’s wealth of religious, literary, spiritual and cultural traditions, fundamentalist leaders allow themselves no concept of love or compassion but their own. They can therefore honestly say that it is out of “Christian compassion” and a sort of “tough love” for others that they seek to impose on all others their tendentiously literalized God, Bible and slant.
But how tough can love be before it ceases to be love at all? Well-known variations on the theme include the various Inquisitions’ murderously tough love for “heretics,” who were defined as those defiant of the Inquisition itself; the European Catholic and American Puritan tough love for “witches,” who were defined as virtually any sexually active or humanitarian or unusually skilled single woman whose healing herbs or independence from men defied a male church hierarchy’s claim to be the source of all healing; the Conquistador’s genocidally tough love for the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans whose gold they stole for the “glory” of a church meant to honor the perfect poverty of a life begun in a manger and ended on a cross; the missionaries’ and U.S. Cavalry’s genocidally tough love for land-rich indigenous peoples whose crime was merely to exist; and, today, the Bush team’s murderously tough love for an oil-rich Muslim world as likely to convert to Texas neocon values as Bush himself is likely to convert to Islam.
Each of these crusader groups has seen itself as fighting to make its own or some other culture “more Christian” even as it tramples the teachings of Christ into a blood-soaked earth. The result, among millions of non-fundamentalists, has been revulsion toward anything that chooses to call itself “Christian.”
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/156/
It is featured in the July/August 2005 issue of Orion Magazine.
The rest of the article can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom.
________________________
Most of the famed leaders of the new “Bible-based” American political alliances share a conviction that their causes and agendas are approved of, and directly inspired, by no less a being than God. This enviable conviction is less enviably arrived at by accepting on faith, hence as fact, that the Christian Bible pared down into American TV English is God’s “word” to humankind, that this same Bible is His only word to humankind, and that the politicized apocalyptic fundamentalists’ unprecedentedly selective slant on this Bible is the one true slant.
The position is remarkably self-insulating. Possessing little knowledge of or regard for the world’s wealth of religious, literary, spiritual and cultural traditions, fundamentalist leaders allow themselves no concept of love or compassion but their own. They can therefore honestly say that it is out of “Christian compassion” and a sort of “tough love” for others that they seek to impose on all others their tendentiously literalized God, Bible and slant.
But how tough can love be before it ceases to be love at all? Well-known variations on the theme include the various Inquisitions’ murderously tough love for “heretics,” who were defined as those defiant of the Inquisition itself; the European Catholic and American Puritan tough love for “witches,” who were defined as virtually any sexually active or humanitarian or unusually skilled single woman whose healing herbs or independence from men defied a male church hierarchy’s claim to be the source of all healing; the Conquistador’s genocidally tough love for the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans whose gold they stole for the “glory” of a church meant to honor the perfect poverty of a life begun in a manger and ended on a cross; the missionaries’ and U.S. Cavalry’s genocidally tough love for land-rich indigenous peoples whose crime was merely to exist; and, today, the Bush team’s murderously tough love for an oil-rich Muslim world as likely to convert to Texas neocon values as Bush himself is likely to convert to Islam.
Each of these crusader groups has seen itself as fighting to make its own or some other culture “more Christian” even as it tramples the teachings of Christ into a blood-soaked earth. The result, among millions of non-fundamentalists, has been revulsion toward anything that chooses to call itself “Christian.”
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/156/
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Beer!
And one from another angle...
http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/why-we-shouldnt-fear-pope-benedict-xvi/
http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/why-we-shouldnt-fear-pope-benedict-xvi/
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Guatemala Accompaniment Project
Below is a letter from a friend who is in Guatemala doing an Accompaniment project.
She was one of the students that went on the 2 week educational seminar that i talk about earlier in my blog.
Her main job is supporting those Guatemalans who lost family in the genocide in the 80's...helping them safely testify without being persecuted by those in power who may not want to remember...
More information about the program can be found at
www.nisgua.org
Dear Friends and Family,
I visited a new community last month, an organized, hopeful place called Santa Maria Tzejá.
Twenty-six years ago today, one month before the army massacred the village of Cuarto Pueblo, soldiers marched into the nearby Ixcán town of Santa Maria Tzejá. Except for one woman, whom the soldiers raped and killed, all of the forewarned villagers had fled to the surrounding jungle, leaving the town deserted. Two days later, patrolling soldiers heard a dog bark in the jungle and came upon a pregnant mother, her baby, and two young boys. They opened fire on the family, and then threw a grenade on the remains. Soon after they came upon a second huddled family; another pregnant mother, her eight children, and their grandmother. The soldiers fired on the cowering group at point blank range, killing everyone except for the six-year old son, who witnessed the massacre from behind a fallen tree.
Artemio and Elena were hiding with their family in the rainforest when the patrolling army surrounded them. The terrified family fled and the military opened fire. Elena and her young children were captured; Artemio and the eldest daughter escaped and eventually made it to the refugee camps in Mexico.
In the weeks that followed, half of the village’s nearly 120 families fled across the border and into Mexico. Unlike Cuarto Pueblo, which was destroyed and completely deserted until the refugee return in 1994, forty families from Santa Maria Tzejá came under the control of the military and remained in the village. The town became a “model village”, a militarized community in which most males between the ages of 15 and 60 were forced to join civil self-defense patrols and daily life was tightly controlled.
After the military captured Elena, she was taken to the nearby military base and tortured. She would remain in the reorganized, army-controlled community of Santa Maria Tzejá for the next twelve years. She eventually remarried, believing her husband, Artemio, to be dead. Artemio, alive and in exile with the elder daughter, also thought his wife and children had died in the attack. An anthropologist traveling between the Maya Tecún refugee camps and Santa Maria Tzejá discovered that both had survived and carried tape recordings and photographs between the divided family.
After twelve years of separation and vastly different experiences, Artemio, along with the other refugee families, made the return home. He and Elena remarried. I don’t know what became of her second husband.
Today they have a young son and daughter and run a store in the reunified town’s center. Artemio keeps bees and Elena is active in the local women’s organization. An outsider, unfamiliar with Guatemala’s recent history, might never guess that this couple lived for over a decade believing that their fractured family and community would never be whole again. And in many ways, the community is still not whole; divisions and bitterness remain between those who fled to Mexico and those who remained under military control, the community cooperative is not the core it once was, and perpetrators of the massacre enjoy the impunity that reigns in Guatemala.
And yet, more than one hundred of Santa Maria Tzejá’s youth are studying at university, the elementary and high schools are completely staffed with local teachers, and Artemio and Elena laugh. A lot.
Once, after our meetings in Guatemala City, Kim and I accompanied Artemio on a buying trip for his store. We bused to what seemed like every market in the entire capital, loitering outside of storefronts and kiosks while Artemio smelled deodorants and held nail polish hues up to the light, two big sellers in the community. I stood in the bustling crowds and black clouds of bus exhaust, watching him haggle with the vendors, and felt hopeful.
She was one of the students that went on the 2 week educational seminar that i talk about earlier in my blog.
Her main job is supporting those Guatemalans who lost family in the genocide in the 80's...helping them safely testify without being persecuted by those in power who may not want to remember...
More information about the program can be found at
www.nisgua.org
Dear Friends and Family,
I visited a new community last month, an organized, hopeful place called Santa Maria Tzejá.
Twenty-six years ago today, one month before the army massacred the village of Cuarto Pueblo, soldiers marched into the nearby Ixcán town of Santa Maria Tzejá. Except for one woman, whom the soldiers raped and killed, all of the forewarned villagers had fled to the surrounding jungle, leaving the town deserted. Two days later, patrolling soldiers heard a dog bark in the jungle and came upon a pregnant mother, her baby, and two young boys. They opened fire on the family, and then threw a grenade on the remains. Soon after they came upon a second huddled family; another pregnant mother, her eight children, and their grandmother. The soldiers fired on the cowering group at point blank range, killing everyone except for the six-year old son, who witnessed the massacre from behind a fallen tree.
Artemio and Elena were hiding with their family in the rainforest when the patrolling army surrounded them. The terrified family fled and the military opened fire. Elena and her young children were captured; Artemio and the eldest daughter escaped and eventually made it to the refugee camps in Mexico.
In the weeks that followed, half of the village’s nearly 120 families fled across the border and into Mexico. Unlike Cuarto Pueblo, which was destroyed and completely deserted until the refugee return in 1994, forty families from Santa Maria Tzejá came under the control of the military and remained in the village. The town became a “model village”, a militarized community in which most males between the ages of 15 and 60 were forced to join civil self-defense patrols and daily life was tightly controlled.
After the military captured Elena, she was taken to the nearby military base and tortured. She would remain in the reorganized, army-controlled community of Santa Maria Tzejá for the next twelve years. She eventually remarried, believing her husband, Artemio, to be dead. Artemio, alive and in exile with the elder daughter, also thought his wife and children had died in the attack. An anthropologist traveling between the Maya Tecún refugee camps and Santa Maria Tzejá discovered that both had survived and carried tape recordings and photographs between the divided family.
After twelve years of separation and vastly different experiences, Artemio, along with the other refugee families, made the return home. He and Elena remarried. I don’t know what became of her second husband.
Today they have a young son and daughter and run a store in the reunified town’s center. Artemio keeps bees and Elena is active in the local women’s organization. An outsider, unfamiliar with Guatemala’s recent history, might never guess that this couple lived for over a decade believing that their fractured family and community would never be whole again. And in many ways, the community is still not whole; divisions and bitterness remain between those who fled to Mexico and those who remained under military control, the community cooperative is not the core it once was, and perpetrators of the massacre enjoy the impunity that reigns in Guatemala.
And yet, more than one hundred of Santa Maria Tzejá’s youth are studying at university, the elementary and high schools are completely staffed with local teachers, and Artemio and Elena laugh. A lot.
Once, after our meetings in Guatemala City, Kim and I accompanied Artemio on a buying trip for his store. We bused to what seemed like every market in the entire capital, loitering outside of storefronts and kiosks while Artemio smelled deodorants and held nail polish hues up to the light, two big sellers in the community. I stood in the bustling crowds and black clouds of bus exhaust, watching him haggle with the vendors, and felt hopeful.
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