Guatemala Bound!

Xan is in Guatemala ahead of the rest of us, having gone down there a couple of weeks ago for a language school. She will be finding her own way to San Lucas, probably by bus and boat launch. The rest of us gathered at MSP airport at about 5:30 a.m. for our 7:00 flight to Charlotte, then onto Guatemala City. Four of us have been to San Lucas before—Xan and Eric three times, Russ and Ann once. Correction: I think Wayne was there about 40 years ago. It’ll be interesting to get his impressions. Brad and Jennie are making their first trips to Guatemala.

A quick word of welcome to Jennie—she’s just moved to town. Her furniture just arrived yesterday afternoon! And she hasn’t officially begun her ministry here at First Church as Associate Minister. That will come on August 15. And yet here she is already, on the fifth annual First Church trip to San Lucas Tolimán. Welcome Jennie! We’re glad you’re here. Jennie also got another quick entry into the life of the community—and this is something that probably weighs heavy on all of us right now. Just this past Wednesday evening was the collapse of the 35W bridge over the Mississippi. We put together an impromptu prayer service at noon the next day, and I’m grateful for Jennie’s participation in that, again before her official start date.So much is still going on back home at this point—still searching for the missing, still trying to figure out what happened—even on a personal level for perhaps all of us, just coming to terms with this horrible turn of events. Others may reflect a bit about this in these pages because it is background for us on this trip. I may later, too. I know I am in my own personal journal. It takes a lot of re-telling the stories just to start to come to terms with it.Just one thought here—at least twice in the past 5 years in the area around Lake Atitlan there have been terrible mudslides that have buried villages or settlements. And immediately and then for days afterward people from the surrounding villages have gone to the site with hoes and shovels and their bare hands and have tried to help, to dig through, to find the dead and to try to save whomever might still be alive. In at least one of those cases the villagers wouldn’t let the army help because of the killing that the army had inflicted on the Maya during the civil war (1960-1996).By almost total contrast, within 30 minutes of the bridge collapse, civilians (meaning non-rescue workers) were being kept away from the site. There’s no hands-on work we can do. The rescue work is highly specialized because of the nature of the collapse of a major highway bridge into a river that is so much more dangerous beneath its surface than we can see from above. (But with all the cordoning off it’s almost impossible to see the site right now, even though it’s right in the middle of a major city).It took days to get government aid to the communities affected by the mudslides, minutes to get it to the bridge site. Communities pitched in for probably most of the work at the mudslides and we are kept away from the bridge collapse. You could go on and on.The contrasts are staggering.

And there’s also some kind of closeness or bonding—of identification of one community with another perhaps—Guatemalan and American, Maya and Minnesotan—because of these vastly different events.