Learning English in the midst of Pentecost

At 50, the Rev. Luis Perez is taking English classes, blitz-style.

His temporary visa is allowing him classroom time. Mornings and afternoons he sits among other Hispanic migrants who are grappling with the language.

Most are hunting jobs in the already stressed U.S. economy, but not Perez. Perez is looking for insight. He wants to both speak and comprehend English, for sure. But what he is really seeking is understanding. And that is harder than putting tentative sentences together or perfectly enunciating syllables.

It may be no coincidence that he is here during Pentecost, where the fire described in the second chapter of the Book of Acts doesn’t just burn. It illuminates.

“Pentecost does help us grasp that we’re united through the Spirit,” says Perez, an almost lifetime resident of La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia, and the honorary president of the Joining Hands for Life Network there that is partnered with two U.S. presbyteries, San Francisco and Newark. “But it is the work of the Holy Spirit that touches us …

“It is how we understand each other. It is when one human being can recognize the human being in another.”

He admits that reaching such depth is harder than it sounds.

Perez isn’t a native Spanish-speaker.

His first language was Aymara, an indigenous language that is spoken in Bolivia’s highlands, as well as in Peru and northern Chile. He was jolted into speaking Spanish when his father moved the family from its home-village to the city of La Paz, when Perez was six years old. It was a humiliating clash of cultures, he remembers, full of mistakes and misunderstanding that left him open to ridicule by his schoolyard peers who’d already mastered the language of the Spaniards who conquered Bolivia centuries before.

Although he’s older and he has visited the Unites States six times before on church-business, he’s never been free to wander around downtown Newark or sit in classes with other Hispanics who are struggling to make ends meet, unable to afford cars or to speak enough English to hold down a job.

In churches, too, he’s been surprised by the emotion his words evoke, although few people comprehend Bolivia’s turbulent present. Its now-indigenous leadership is grappling with ways to decrease the nation’s dependence on northern models of development. That struggle is best epitomized by an indigenous effort to stop piping Bolivia’s natural resources, like natural gas, into more expensive markets abroad – and ensuring that it is affordable to Bolivia’s poor, the majority population.

“Speak the truth of Bolivia?” says Perez, with a whiff of incredulity in his voice.

When he’s mentioned chewing coca leaves — a medicinal cure among Latin America’s indigenous — eyebrows raise, drawing quick equations with cocaine-junkies, an illegitimate comparison. Nowadays, if the name of Evo Morales’ — Bolivia’s indigenous president — is mentioned, people here compare him with he’s compared to Chavez and Castro without blinking. Any questioning of President Bush’s economic approach to Latin America is also taboo, he’s found. Or, at least, it ruffles feathers.

“When you talk about Bolivia,” he says, pausing, “Americans want things to be fixed quickly. They don’t want to hear your history or your story … they just want to see how to resolve the problems that exist.”

Perez thinks you have to do both: Understand the history and the story, then address the problems. “For me, for understanding … we both need to have an exchange of experiences,” he says, adding, however, that simply visiting each other’s countries may not alone be enough. Richer North American will experience Bolivia differently than poor Bolivians and vice versa.

“This is an important time for me in the Unites States,” Perez says, adding that he’s grappling with the complexity of the society and its problems, shedding some of his stereotypes of what life is like here. “When we live together … we know who we are. (Then) we can think up concrete solutions.”

Perez says that his encounter with the mainline North American church has changed him and challenged his faith over the years. Social justice was unknown either as a theological or political category. Playing an instrument? A tool of the devil. Politics? It was of the world and, therefore, bad.

“Before embracing the justice of God, we just accepted that God made us who we are. If you’re rich, you’re rich. If you’re poor, you’re poor. God made you and you had to conform to who God made you,” Perez says in retrospect.

“But God’s justice is much bigger than I thought,” he says, adding that he’s re-thought the role of women in church and now supports their ordination. He’s more open to hearing the voices of children. He’s comfortable naming injustice, not just in the church but outside its walls. That is a giant leap in his theological worldview.

“I really have to be more open (than my old theology). I have to think beyond what I already know,” says Perez., adding that his ministry is stretching.