To all Doubting Thomi

 

I work with a global health organization that places its projects in the heart of great need around the world.  This is something I’ve understood by reading Medical Teams International’s mission statement dozens of times, ‘to demonstrate the love of Christ to people affected by disaster, conflict, and poverty’. But it’s easy to miss the world of human beings entangled within those words.  If I read fast enough I can briskly step over their meaning and form a complete sentence, sounding-off a catchy mission statement, rather than trip into the profundity of what they mean.

Sometimes statistics help me grasp the disparity, inequality, and suffering of the people our programs attempt to help.  But even that only portrays a ray of the spectrum of life unfolding within those words.  Stories and pictures can help too, and so I offer some here. 

But for me, like some others, we just have to go see for ourselves, and get close.  We need to feel the warmth of the lives these words reference.  The experience of sharing time with them and witnessing our common humanity, especially theirs which is worn thin by the heavy burden of poverty, can somehow free me from my indifference.  Their lives are embroiled in a daily struggle for bread, and it burns my heart.  This is the category I find myself in.  I have to see for myself.

Unfortunately, I think that makes me a Doubting Thomas. I have to put my hands in the wounds of their suffering to know, to believe it’s real and that it matters.  Not until my heart burns do I get that it’s real and it matters that I do something.  Only then do these words of the MTI mission statement take on flesh and incarnate the call for me to love my neighbor.

Recently, I had the joy of traveling to San Miguel, a community approximately 2 hours from Cobán on gravel, muddy mountain roads.  San Miguel is the most remote community in which MTI works.  It hangs high in the mountain clouds, over a mile above sea-level.  Fortunately for me, that morning the clouds had cleared and we could see the knuckles of the mountain range below cascading into the valley in which Cobán lives.

That day five of us were visiting a group of Mayan indigenous mothers to demonstrate for them how to build a huerto, a vegetable garden, for their families.  As we unloaded the truck we were greeted by a gaggle of short indigenous women in their traditional garb, a lacy, colorful top called a huipil and a long skirt, with their dark, thick long hair pulled back.  None of them were more than 5’ tall, some didn’t wear shoes, all had deep crow’s feet smile-marks creased into their skin from a life of high-altitude sun exposure, and the youngest half of the group totted their babies and toddlers in slings across their back that suspended from their foreheads. These women had been waiting for us all morning and were eager to learn.

I’ll let the photos below tell the story, but you can see a group of beautiful women laughing and toiling together to build this vegetable garden. You might be surprised to see some mothers clearing the ground and working the soil, with baby in tow.  

They sling their children over their backs suspended from their foreheads.  This is the local Mayan way.  The Mayan men and women haul large, heavy loads using a mecapal, which is a strap that goes across the forehead and is secured there by the weight of the load which hangs down their back – a baby, a sack of corn, a table.  The MTI medical brigades that visit these communities often get complaints of neck and back pain, and it’s because these people haul very heavy, large loads in this manner, suspended from their foreheads. 

All that to say, these are strong women with big hearts, bright eyes, and enduring smiles.  And they carry a heavy burden.  I hope these photos relay something of the strain and hope these mothers carry. 

As I was watching the women till the thick clay-soil, it occurred to me that God gave life and gives life through the soil. God breathed life into clay and brought forth the richness and dignity of human life.  And so it might be that there is something about our nature as humans, created in the image and likeness of One greater than ourselves, that tries to ply the material with the immaterial, the human and the divine, and bring forth life from earth.  

These women and this community struggle with the seemingly simple task of putting enough calories, protein, and nutrients into their mouths to feed their bodies and their children. According to the World Food Programme, 69.7% of children under 5 in this region of Guatemala are chronically malnourished. SIXTY-NINE POINT SEVEN PERCENT. Wow, my heart sinks.

San Miguel is not aspirating to nobly meld the material with the divine; they are simply struggling with the essential metabolic task of plying the material with the material, of putting food in their children’s stomachs. Poverty threatens my deepest hopes...how can this be?

On that crisp morning in San Miguel, Medical Teams técnicos taught a group of women how to build a huerto. They taught these women how to grow life from the dirt so that they can simply feed their community.  And yet, in this effort and activity of teaching and learning and sharing, something of the divine was plied with the material. These women learned to breathe life into dirt.