I. In Which I Meditate On The Role Of Stuff In The Preaching Of The Gospel
Nutie stood on the porch, looking out on the sun-scorched grass. The sky was cloudless yet white, and the soft edged sun climbing in the East hid demurely behind a vapor partition. Small tree frogs amassed like activists in dew-damp sections of concrete, chanting, "Kwik kwik kwik kwiririk", demanding an end to the dry season.
"I don't think I'm going to bring my boots this trip," she said at last, announcing her decision with the conviction of everywoman making a wardrobe decision. But this was different. She was talking about rubber boots, because we were going down to the swamp, where fashion doesn't count.
Not like Nutie was adverse to fashion, however. Everyone else on the lower Wangki is content to wear the standard issue black latex footware that can be purchased in any general store in Waspam, but from the first time I saw her, Nutie sashayed through silt and slime with her feet wrapped in two sublime rubber rainbows which she had brought all the way from her friend Jenny's boutique in Makawao, on the island of Maui. They had become an extension of her personality, an object lesson on the essence of Nutie to assist the locals in cross-cultural interpretation. She, and her stylish boots, were the desperately needed rainbow of God's grace in a land that had barely emerged from The Great Flood by a matter of inches, where the promise of the Almighty not to destroy the collective human race again by deluge seemed maybe to allow for surgical strikes on a single people group like this one. Much more than a fashion statement, her boots were tools used by God to personally deliver, through the agency of Nutie, the Guarantee of the Rainbow to the very doorsteps of these villages for seven years, but finally the material gave out.
"Too much of life on the river is somber," she lamented, looking at the still-colorful boots. They had been her companions since the beginning; since David. David had died a boot's life ago. I was her husband now. I lovinglly put bicycle tire patches on them and they continued to bless for another year, but not as at first. Nutie's left foot would get wet each time she stepped out in them, and sometimes a frown would cross her face when the exhausted elastic of her sodden sock rounded the curve of her heel.
"I hate to have to throw them away," she said.
"Don't," was my one word reply.
So she gave them to Casilita, our downriver cook whom I had nicknamed "The Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands". They weren't any good for standing water, but at least Casilita could use them to walk across the muddy field to the outhouse a hundred yards from her crumbling kitchen and be reminded that God knew her name.
The Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
Last year Nutie tried out a pair of paisley rubber cowboy boots she had purchased on a blustery January day in Estes Park, Colorado. As it turned out, they weren't functional. They didn't go all the way up to her knees like the rainbow boots had, and water poured in over the tops of them. Since they had heels like cowboy boots, they didn't have the same traction when climbing the slick, steep river banks or crossing gullies on slippery log bridges. They were okay for walking on the rain splattered streets of Waspam, but that was the extent of their utility.
This would be the first time since I'd been a part of her life that Nutie would not carry boots downriver, but we were on a minimalist mission as we prepared our gear, jettisoning everything that wasn't absolutely essential.
"It's the height of the dry season," I said. "I don't think they will be needed."
Nutie packed a pair of Teva's instead. "We live so comfortably here in Waspam now," she said. "I think it's important that we live on the level of the people when we go downriver."
"I like traveling light," I agreed.
I stopped packing for a moment and stared into space, pondering all the things I'd ever been taught about the role of this world's goods in the preaching of the gospel. People's wide-ranging prescriptions, from those who held that Jesus' words to the twelve when he sent them out applied to everybody--“Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece"--to my teachers at Abundant Life School of Ministry who preached that wealth was a sign of God's blessing and a powerful, integral part of our testimony to the world. Wasn't it the Apostle Paul who wrote, "Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be do divisions among you."? That would be nice. But little heed has been paid to Paul's beseeching down the centuries; by the time I came along, I heard competing, discordant strains of doctrine that launched from every street corner, pulpit, and bible school, collectively defying the simplicity of the gospel like an an equation jumbled and miscopied on the blackboard, of polynomials needing reduction and crossing out on each side of an equal sign when they weren't really equal at all. If they don't agree with each other, how can they all be absolute truth? I tried to make some sense of it. The end of my ciphering left only a stray word from the old beat poet Fred Neil as I took off for the jungle:
Everybody's talking at me.
I don't hear a word they're saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can't see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.
I'm going where the sun keeps shining
Thru' the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone.
Shipwrecked in Central America. I remembered how it had been in the old days, before I met her. I would lay a towel on the concrete floor for my mattress, and a rolled up a pair of jeans for my pillow. In my pack I carried a single change of clothes, a bed sheet, a bible, and a mosquito net. Shivering in a t-shirt in drenching rain as we traveled on the river, I would look at Truman and the others, decked out in bright rain suits that Mike had brought them from the States. They were the Target Population. They had the air mattresses and the tents and all the gear. I wished Mike would bring me some. Even though I was born in the States, I had left no bridges back there, no one to go back to, and you couldn't just go out and buy REI camping gear in Honduras. It never escaped my attention that Truman and his crew deliberately placed my pack on the bottom of the pile, their own in the middle, and finally the Americans' on top, covering over the mound of belongings with a black plastic tarp so that when the rain rolled down into the bilge, the water sloshed unseen, to and fro with the changing speeds of the outboard, and my things were the ones to get wet.
It had bothered me that Mike, all the Americans … why were they so oblivious to our Miskito friends' visual construction of the social order? Was this the way of the gospel? To Americans I was Miskito, and to Miskitos, a Madaukra, a banana fallen off the bunch and left behind. Since I had recently come to Christ, I understood that my life from here on was supposed to be a process of abiding in the Vine, of reconciling my own bitterness and self pity with the mind that was in Christ, who being 100% God was forsaken by the Father, and being 100% man was scorned by men, yet for the joy set before Him had endured the cross. How was I going to be joyful about seeing my pack get wet every time, and the others' things dry at my expense? How could I accept the Americans' complacent ignorance, or the natives' predatory satisfaction at having moved one sadistic rung past me on the totem pole? I was irreconcilably selfish and had no idea how I was going to get through this. All I could do was bluff, not let on that it bothered me. Convince myself that I was tougher than all of them.
Twenty years later I look back and see with amazement how God not only restored my life but also relationship with those very friends--those who couldn't see and those who did me harm. It was the Lord who, after having rescued me from these and many other hands stronger than mine, brought me out into a large place, and then--irony of ironies--sent me back to work side by side in harmony with those same people, sweetening the pot by giving me Nutie, the kindest, rainbow-booted proof of God's lovingkindness! I had everything I could ever have asked for and more. Now, what was sleeping on the floor to me? I loved sleeping on the floor … with Nutie. Material things had nothing to do with it. For me, this trip was not going to be roughing it at all.
Reviving from my reverie, I looked around our little flat. "We live in a mansion," I exclaimed. "We live in a tiny mansion!"
"I am very grateful that I don't have to live with bugs biting me every day," she said. "Very grateful."
Two things I asked of You,Do not refuse me before I die:
Keep deception and lies far from me,Give me neither poverty nor riches;Feed me with the food that is my portion,
That I not be full and deny You and say, “Who is the LORD?”Or that I not be in want and steal,And profane the name of my God.
Dani left Waspam in the boat at around 10:00. We would take the truck and meet him in Kum, but didn't head out until noon. The grass in the villages along the road from Waspam to Uhri was a little burnt-looking, but once we got to Wasla everything was lush and green. The stretch of thicket between Kum and the river landing looked gnarly because of recent rains, but there was hardpan beneath the mud. The truck lurched and fishtailed its way past scrub nancite, mangrove, and hicaco, arriving at the landing a good half hour before Dani appeared around the bend in the river, so we killed time watching a child play with a homemade toy truck he had fashioned from an extra length of rough-cut 4 X 4, an old cassette recorder console, a vial formerly containing deep-heating rub, some wire, nails for axles, and for tires, circles cut from discarded slippers. Two canvass covered Mitsubishi's came and deposited loads which men carried to dugout batu waiting at the water's edge where the boy pulled on a length of fishing line, his truck rolling behind him. The rich life of a child from a village where the road ends. Here was his statement on the relative value of stuff: the toy, made from refuse tossed upon the ground, was priceless.
Finally Dani appeared in the batu. It was loaded with cement for the floor of the Moravian Church. Forty sacks, whose transport was our inter-institutional contribution.
From there the trip to Sawa was only two hours, which was long enough to get caught in an afternoon rain shower. Dry season in a rainforest is probably an oxymoron, but there is a difference. The river does not run chocolate anymore; the waterline is down twenty feet and the placid surface is emerald green, reflecting the vegetation on the steep banks. As we got near we began to see people we knew. Moving in and out of lush foliage, we spied one of our teachers, Lobres Ocenes, walking back from Andris, where he'd said his final good-bye to his father at the patch of high ground where the swamp people bury their dead. Beside a pocked bank of red clay we saw a group of heads bobbing and ducking beneath the water. They were catching crawdads. It was Leonardo Vanegas and his family. Leonardo used to be pastor of the Moravian Church in Sawa, but had been replaced after some struggle. Accusations and counter-accusations. Now Beres and his brother Elmo were pastor and co-pastor, and people were criticizing Elmo for smoking pot. Leonardo, shirtless in the river with his wet, matted hair and his sun-darkened skin, looked so ordinary, so … civilian. We'd given him pastor things like neckties when he was pastor. That's what he'd asked for. We greeted him warmly as we passed. We were glad to see him with his family and hoped he was walking with God.
 |
| Leonardo's Family Catching Crawdads in the Emerald Water |
Arriving,
we disembarked stiff-legged and scrambled up the incline, carrying
belongings on our shoulders. Nutie had her umbrella in her hand and
guitar flung across her back. I took her free hand.
To my surprise, the field in which our compound sits was worse than in the rainy season. A preponderance of the village horses and cows in Sawa belong to Truman, Dani, and Augusto, and these blessings from God bring the rest of the herd with them to pass the night there. Formerly there had been enough grass to dodge the pies of excrement; now, however, uric acid had killed everything green, and recent rains coupled with the pounding of a thousand hoofs had done well to emulsify dirt and dung. The whole field was a brown sea of slop.
We set up camp in the empty concrete structure and from the second floor balcony watched the spent sun slip beneath the tree line in Honduras.
"I guess you could have brought your boots," I replied, motioning toward the field. I felt responsible.
"The sky is so beautiful," sighed Nutie. The heavens slowly darkened. Nutie claimed the stars as they appeared until the humming crepuscular swarm chased her inside.
II. In Which I Consider The Gospel's Impact On Culture and Culture's Impact on the Gospel
To my surprise, the field in which our compound sits was worse than in the rainy season. A preponderance of the village horses and cows in Sawa belong to Truman, Dani, and Augusto, and these blessings from God bring the rest of the herd with them to pass the night there. Formerly there had been enough grass to dodge the pies of excrement; now, however, uric acid had killed everything green, and recent rains coupled with the pounding of a thousand hoofs had done well to emulsify dirt and dung. The whole field was a brown sea of slop.
We set up camp in the empty concrete structure and from the second floor balcony watched the spent sun slip beneath the tree line in Honduras.
"I guess you could have brought your boots," I replied, motioning toward the field. I felt responsible.
"The sky is so beautiful," sighed Nutie. The heavens slowly darkened. Nutie claimed the stars as they appeared until the humming crepuscular swarm chased her inside.
II. In Which I Consider The Gospel's Impact On Culture and Culture's Impact on the Gospel
The woman answered and said, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You have correctly said, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband. This you have said truly. (John 4:17-18)
To know the people, what's going on in their lives, and to say the right thing; to speak the words that bring freedom. That's what I want from life, from all the things we call programs and projects and ministry in this place. I'm as it were a Jew and these are Samaritans, but I want the gospel to impact the culture, not the other way around. Not the religious culture of this mountain, nor the godspeak of that city. What does "in Spirit and in truth" look like here in the jungle? I need to make sure. God does not require Miskito Indians to smile for their photograph, but He does want their joy to be made full.
The Holy Spirit knows everything, He searches the hearts. Although I have the Holy Spirit in me, I have to admit I know precious little. Miskito people are as guarded as Samaritans, never airing their own dirty laundry outside. God permitted me to live among them in Honduras for over thirty years, in a Miskito extended family, with with the duties of husband, son-in-law, resource provider. I suffered as a Miskito man. I know from experience the cultural patterns, roles, expectations, rhythms of life, common strengths and sins--many of the deep things that are kept in darkness. But now I am in Nicaragua and although Miskito these are not my family and I know precious little. Every person has his own secrets. I need to know more; I need to go deeper. Holy Spirit, speak to me.
Another voice also stirs; well, a lot of voices all hissing at once, harshly, saying bad stuff against the gospel. They say, "What gives you the right to go in and change this culture?"
I answer back. "I can't change another culture. You think I can?"
They say, "Christians use the name of God to tell a whole people group what they're doing is wrong and impose their own set of values."
I counter: "What, you mean like gender equity?"
"Huh?"
"All of the secular development projects, the United Nations and the rest, enforce gender equity in their hiring of local people and also with regard to participation in workshops. For example." I give it emphasis: "For example."
"So?"
"Well, the male Miskito leaders didn't decide that. That came down from headquarters in New York. It was a moral issue with them. They thought it was wrong that all the leaders were men. Now it's different; there's always women in the mix."
"But that's a good thing."
"So you agree it's a good thing to go in and change a culture for moral reasons? People who want to change the culture are called 'progressives'; those who want to keep the status quo are the 'conservatives'. Are you progressive or conservative?"
"Why I'm progressive."
"Why is it then that you and so many who call themselves progressive object to the gospel?"
"Why do so many people who call themselves "conservative" try to use God's name to maintain power and the status quo?"
"That's not the gospel you're talking about; that's the world system. The world system is selfish motives. People who mock God to gain constituency and remove the conservatives from power do the same thing. The progressiveness of the gospel does not come by force of self-will but by the power of the Spirit."
I guess that did it, because when I said those words the hissing voices talked among themselves in confusion and then got quiet. I had told them I am a progressive and it must have thrown them for a loop. But I am a progressive for realzies. I want to see progress from darkness into light. I see the world. It is broken and messed up; I'm not satisfied with the way things are. When my Miskito wife was a girl she was raped after class by a pastor who violated her with the stump of his amputated thumb, and then she wasn't allowed to graduate from the sixth grade because her father wouldn't give her ten Lempiras for her diploma. So she ran away to the capital city and fell in with the bohemians. She got into drugs, became an alcoholic. Things are messed up; I want to change things, but I can't change anything. I couldn't change my own wife. The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. Unfortunately, neither does legislation. Change occurs at a much deeper level. Come, Holy Spirit, speak to us.
We were happy to be back downriver so soon after our previous visit, and on the morn we got excited when Rosap and Maddy showed up at our camp with a bunch of bananas and some splendid news about what had taken place.
On our last trip we had gone looking for Rosap because he had taken a
sabbatical from his watchman duties in Waspam to build a kitchen and
work in his plantation, and then never returned. We missed him, so we
when we went down to Sawa we visited his house and saw that his wife
Maddy was still sick, not having fully recovered from the bite of the
"air snake". There she was, sitting hunched in a homemade chair in the
middle of the stark, dilapidated post-and-beam shack. Immediately I
recognized the situation: all the windows were shut to keep out the evil
spirits according to the traditional belief. Inside the house it was
dark except for eery shafts of bright tropical sunlight that streamed in
through spaces between boards of siding without battens. We prayed for
her, forbidding the evil spirits in the name of Jesus and speaking words
of healing over her.I took Rosap aside. "Evil spirits can go through walls," I confided. "That's what I believe. Shutting the windows doesn't do anything to keep them out."
Rosap looked very worried. But he was listening to me.
"After Jesus was raised from the dead, He came in to the disciples through the walls of the room where they were shut in. They felt foolish, all shut in like that, and Jesus walks right in and lets them touch him. Walls and closed windows are good to keep out drug addicts who want to break in and rob you, not for evil spirits. They can get in wherever there's fear. You need to open all the windows when you are here. That shows the evil spirits that you aren't afraid of them anymore. We prayed and the blood of Jesus covers the doors and windows now. You wife will get better if you do this."
With that, we read Psalm 91 to them and left, but I didn't really feel like we had gotten through. Still in the yard, I turned to Nutie and told her, "You know Rosap, the people here process things differently than we do. Explanations don't work very well with them. Rosap needs God wrapped in a concrete experience. A baptism in the Holy Ghost, like the Pentecostals do it."
"Mmm-hmm," said Nutie, nodding. The Pentecostal meetings with their loud, overdriven music and hellfire preaching style--lips pressed to the mike--didn't much appeal to her sensitive ears and her gentle spirit, but she was willing to concede that when these dear, rough river people go "Pente" something happens. They no longer live in fear of the evil spirits, even if they do twitch a lot and tend to boast the power to do things they never seem to be able to deliver.
"I really don't want to bring the whole cultural pentecostal thing down here," I confessed, "But somehow God has to break through. I wish they would just believe Him at His word and not have to copy all the other stuff."
Now, two weeks later, here they were at our camp. Maddy was well; they were glorifying God and bringing their offering in a bunch of bananas from their yard. The look in Rosap's eyes was one of astonishment. I was probably a little more surprised than he. I honestly don't know all the nuts and bolts of how healing occurs in an illness without medical cause, but the fear was gone, replaced by faith. We took their picture and told them we would check in on them later on.
Maddy healed, with Rosap & Nutie
Since we had only light administrative work--distributing school calendars, taking pictures of 10 or 15 kids each in four different villages and interviewing the same number in another--we were looking forward to making a sweep through Sawa with our team members, concentrating on involving them in ministry to spiritual needs. We felt they tended to slip too easily into support roles: labor intensive but routine logistical tasks, collecting reports, paying teachers, and investigating what smack people were saying behind their backs. They are loathe to upset the status quo, and become mere spectators when Nutie and I act foolishly, singing and playing with the kids or doing any kind of weird personal ministry. These things were outside their box. They were more comfortable distributing notebooks, proclaiming the benefits of work ethic, promoting Mothers' Day, and speaking out on the general evils of thievery and the drug trade. Doing the spiritual grunt work of the Lord Jesus was another story. In church what they were good at, what people sought from them as dignitaries, was leadership in organization, and contribution of materials such as cement for the concrete box where God was supposed to live. Yet outside the box is where heaven is; and a people are not transformed unless heaven gets into the box and eats the walls away from the inside, where guilt, fear, and perversion have dwelt in the safety of darkness.
We had a meeting with our team. We told them we'd purchased a digital projector with which we could show a DVD The Passion of Christ. We wanted to go house to house in Sawa, sharing the gospel, praying for people and extending invitations to a Saturday evening screening in which we would also show slides and video clips of the local children and adult villagers as well. Everyone liked the idea of showing a movie and reminisced in eager tones about the times when they had participated in such things. This is what had been done in the past: Americans brought a generator, lights, projector, microphones and speakers, and showed the Jesus movie. Everyone came. There were crowds. But the projector bulb burned out, and they took the equipment and stored it away. That was the end of revival. It never got past a motion picture show.
Truman said, "Now that we have a projector we can show the movie in every village. Not just Sawa and Klampa and Livinkrik. We can go up to Kiwastara. Every village can be a Seek The Lamb village!"
I was pleased with their enthusiasm but really wished I could find a way to get them to think in terms of objective. The objectives of a subsistence culture are self-evident: you plant, fish, hunt, and procreate in order to survive. It doesn't take much reflection, it takes action. All the rules for behavior have been figured out long ago and handed down from the ancestors. But the ancestors all sinned, and gave themselves indulgences, which in turn became the unspoken practice of culture. The objective I had in mind was not to show movies or expand our radius of influence but to cause radical change in this culture; to the way in which they relate to God, to each other, and to their environment. I was certain that inner spiritual change in the residents would do more to improve the quality of education in Sawa than technical supervision of classrooms, but we needed to really know them to help them. We needed to appear at their doorsteps and be of service.
We agreed to divide into three groups. The village of Sawa is a narrow string of huts running along the bank of the Wangki River. There is a footpath with a single row of houses on each side. Seventy yards in from the riverbank, the ground dips back into swamp and there is nobody to convert except howler monkeys, gators, and snakes. The village can be divided into three sections. The first, about 400 meters long, extends from the first clearing upriver where the shaman called Dineral lives, to the school and the adjacent Moravian Church. This is Truman's and Augusto's neighborhood. From there, a raised cement walkway runs three hundred meters to the Catholic Church. This is the center of town, so-to-speak, and the huts are built more closely together. There was originally enough cement to make a walkway the whole length of town but the bags of cement disappeared into people's homes and were lost without anything ever having been made with them. The stretch of village furthest downstream is the longest, around 500 meters, with shabby huts built further apart in the shadow of large trees so that this section appears darker than the rest of Sawa, physically and spiritually. Dani and Augusto would take upriver--kla sait--Onofre and Rodolio would take the middle of town, Sofia, Nutie and I would take the end downriver.
At Auristina's House
Indeed, an old woman named Auristina, grandmother to the children, sat on a raised porch with her bare feet dangling through the empty space of a missing floor board. A woman perhaps in her early 30's, her daughter, was dressed in black.
"She's sick," said Sofia, pointing to the daughter, who proffered a sweet smile and an absent gaze. It was evident she was mentally ill.
I asked her for her name. "Clementina," she replied in the voice of a little girl from long ago.
I turned to Auristina. "Her spirit is outside?" I asked, speaking the phrase which Miskito people use to describe schizophrenia. "Ai lilka latara sa, apia?"
"Au," the mother nodded.
"When did this happen?"
"Since she was a child."
"Did she see a demon?"
"Yes."
"Which one?"
"Liwa kum," she said. A water demon.
I called Nutie up to the porch and we laid hands on her, praying and asking God to have mercy on her. We proclaimed the name and the blood of Jesus, I spoke and told Liwa he or she had to leave (since there are male and female liwa), uttering the second person pronoun and the imperative tense of the verb in the most manly voice I could muster and even stomped my foot, which violently shook the rickety porch and gave us all a little adrenaline moment. I went through the whole repertoire I had learned from my Pentecostal training (well, not the whole repertoire--I didn't tell the demon he had to flee in seven directions) even as I remembered Pastor Randy's admonition against doing such things because of the passage in Jude which warns against "ungodly men" and "filthy dreamers" who have "crept in unawares" and speak evil of dignitaries even though Michael the archangel wouldn't bring a railing accusation against the devil but said, "The Lord rebuke thee.'
"The Lord rebuke thee in Jesus' Name," I tacked on the end of my rant. The truth is that I sincerely wanted Clementina to be okay and I believed God could do anything and I didn't think I was a filthy dreamer; I needed to just let fly and be ready to accept whatever criticism the Lord might have of my technique. I was so over myself and all my doubts. What would a psychologist do anyway, give her medication?
The face of Clementina smiled sweetly and the little girl from long ago thanked me for praying for her. "I go to church every Sunday," she said.
I invited them to the showing of The Passion and we moved on. There were a couple of cases of stomach ulcers, another old woman and her grown son Gregorio, who lived across the footpath from her, whose house we had visited several times before to pray for his daughter's malaria. I talked to him about anxiety and diet, and Nutie said, "Do you have any Bible references for him?"
I read Jesus' words about worry to him from Matthew 6 and Paul from Philippians 4, "be anxious for nothing", which he eagerly listened to, fetching his bible afterward in order to bookmark these passages. It was a great encouragement to us to be able to reason with a guy with his bible open before him and to know that he would go back and let God's words sink in, and perhaps be strengthened as he approached the mind numbing insecurity of living entirely off a land frequently submerged beneath the surface of the Wangki River in a time of climate change.
Baby Answers The Door
We had time to linger at one more house. I was sure the other two teams had already come in from their foray, and Sofia, who had no watch, was looking like she wanted to look at her wrist, if indeed she had owned a watch. Before us was an unpainted house of rough cut-pine that looked kind of like a Miskito duplex, whose doors on either end of a weathered front porch containing a single metal chair obviously lifted from school, were closed. A crude drawing made with colored school chalk adorned the wall, and sounds like a baby crawling were coming from inside. A pot dropping and the scolding voice of a female child. I climbed the chicken-ladder front steps fashioned from rounds of roble, the rungs barely two inches in diameter. When I was young I had run up this kind swiftly, confident of my balance. Now my ailing knee humbled me; I used my hand to steady myself.
The door to the left--the kitchen--burst open and a toddler came out crawling at high speed, but seeing me came to a sudden halt. She looked to be 14-16 months, old enough to walk, but she was crawling for pleasure on callused knees, being chased by a round-faced girl, maybe thirteen who also stopped short. The spirit of fun hovered guiltily in the air like a basketball player expecting to be punished for hanging on the rim.
"Jesmary," I said, "Good Morning. So … this is where you live?"
Jesmary, AKA Sodelma, nodded. We had her listed as Sodelma; Sodelma Colomer, the daughter of Mesac Colomer and Alejandra Medrano, and had given her a sponsor in the United States. There had been a mix-up: having taken and printed her picture, we wanted to give her a copy, but couldn't find her at school. The other kids saw it and told her, and here came Jesmary--she went by her stage name now--demanding her photograph. That year she vanished during the recess between second and third grade. We asked the teacher, Pablo Suazo, what had happened.
"Waitna brisa," he had said. She has a man.
The present Jesmary grabbed the toddler by the arm to restrain her.
"Did you ever get your photo?" I asked.
"No," she protested emphatically. "You never gave it to me."
"Yes I did … didn't I give it to you over at Sobaida's house that time?"
"No."
I was a little bit disoriented. "Well, check with Arnoldo. I gave him
all the photos of people we couldn't find." I paused, looking her over.
With her budding breasts, her tight, adolescent belly … could she have
given birth?I motioned to the toddler. "How's your baby?" I asked. I wanted to retrieve the question but it flew out before I could catch it. This body before me had never gone through the trauma of childbirth.
"She's my sister," said Jesmary matter-of-factly. For her, motherhood wasn't out of the realm of possibility. Pregnancy happens often to thirteen year old girls in a Miskito village.
Suddenly, a stout woman emerged from the other door, the sleeping quarters. Dark-skinned, she had the air of a creole woman, of a woman from the coast who had seen more of the world than is visible from this little bend in the river. She introduced herself as though it were natural for a white man not only to speak Miskito but to be traveling door-to-door in a remote village checking to make sure everything was on the up and up. I had caught her napping.
"I am Jesmary's aunt," she said; defensively, I thought. "My husband is the supervisor of all the Moravian churches on the lower Wangki," she said proudly. She was Pasin Maya, a parson's wife.
"Naksa, Pasin Maya." I shook her hand. "Are you Alejandra Medrano's sister?"
She nodded. "I came from Port yesterday."
"And the mother?"
"She's in Port."
"So you're taking care of the house for your sister." She nodded again without speaking.
"We're really sorry Jesmary isn't in school anymore," I began. "We think she ought to be, but the teacher said she was kicked out because she has a husband…"
"A boyfriend," Pasin Maya corrected. "She doesn't have a husband, she has a boyfriend."
"You mean they don't live together?"
"No. She's here with me."
"Jesmary got kicked out of school then because she has a boyfriend?" I asked incredulously. The teacher said she has a MAN. He said it like that: Waitna brisa."
Pasin Maya insisted that the girl was under her charge and that there was no man in the house.
The silent Jesmary standing there, listening to her case being discussed. I didn't want to take it any further.
"Would you like to go back to school?" I asked her.
"Yes," she nodded in agreement.
We invited them all to the evening's event and departed unsettled, with a dozen little question marks hooked like disturbing earrings into piercings in our minds.
In the dry season, deep, round ruts made by the hooves of cows are hard, and it makes walking along paths awkward in marshy places, especially when you have a torn meniscus. I try to look light on my feet. I keep asking, "Darling, am I walking normal? Am I walking normal?" For Nutie it's a little exasperating. She chuckles lightly to herself.
"Yes, you're walking fine," she says. She knows I don't believe her.
Back in Waspam in time for the "super moon." I brought up the case of Jesmary with Truman, Dani, and Augusto."Her auntie says she doesn't have a man, she has a boyfriend. Why can't she go back to school? What about the boyfriend? Why didn't he get kicked out also?"
"That case is a little complicated," Dani said in his usual studied manner. "They are family to me. I investigated it and it's complicated."
'Complicated' usually results in nothing being done. I guessed that after digging into the matter Dani had touched a nerve; a nerve most likely meaning a demonic resistance to justice on the part of someone who claimed rights to the child and whose own gratification would be threatened by any action taken to curtail it. This, in Miskito, means that everyone backs off, not wanting to bear the headache of making an enemy and perhaps being marked for spells of misbara, the malignant Miskito obeah in which putrid recipes might be put in a bottle and buried in the path where the intended victim is accustomed to walk.
"What did you find out?" I demanded. "What's going on and why is it complicated?"
Dani told me that Alejandra, Jesmary's mother, had sent her husband Mesac packing because of the feebleness of his support, saying that she could do better in life without him. According to her plan, she then gave Jesmary as a concubine to a married man, who regularly supplied her with provision in return for the child's favors. Although Mesac protested, he had already taken up with another woman who would never accept another woman's child.
"So Jesmary is a victim … she's just doing what her mother commands her to do, and our response as a Christian institution is to kick her out of school? How can this be? What do you think Jesus would say about this situation?" I was trying to moderate my crusader voice, mi voz alterada, which Dani and Truman didn't like very much, but I wasn't doing a very good job of it.
With wisdom or conformity, I wasn't sure which and thought maybe both, Truman explained that perhaps Jesmary wouldn't want to return to the same school after everything that had happened, and that maybe the best thing for her would be if her aunt could take her to live with her in Puerto Cabezas where she could make a fresh start. That, he said, was the solution we could be praying for. Frustrated, stuck, I set my burden down. I had to think; what else could be done? This is the Autonomous Region, a place where two overlapping, conflicting sets of laws give way to the inertia of tradition, in which these broke down behavior patterns are lamented but not contested. All the rules for behavior have been figured out long ago and handed down from the ancestors. But the ancestors all sinned, and gave themselves indulgences, which in turn were handed down tacitly, and became the unspoken practice of culture. There was no state agency to intervene … but what about the church? Everyone claims affiliation to some religious institution that calls itself iklesia, the community where God supposedly holds court and determines what must be done. In 1 Corinthians 5 the apostle Paul admonished the church to take a stand on such issues and apply the pressure of removing such a one from fellowship for the sake of repentance. Oh, that there would be a true fellowship in the gospel, one so pure and holy and attractive that it would have power to cause people out of fellowship to want back in, to desire the sweetness of it. This kind of church does not exist in Sawa. Holy Spirit, speak to us, empower us!
The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul:
the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart:
the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever:
the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold:
sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
Moreover by them is your servant warned:
and in keeping of them there is great reward.
Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me:
then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart,
be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
(Psalms 19:7-14)
