March 2004
San Salvador

Dear Friends,

When we left our jobs in Oregon in 1997 to come to El Salvador, we hoped we would be able to serve for at least ten years, knowing development work takes years to truly be effective within a community. We hoped to learn from people who have dedicated their lives to the disenfranchised poor just how to animate positive changes on a community scale. In these “six plus” years we have found some spots, some glimmerings, some moments where this is occuring.

Ah, but life is full of surprises! We just found out that our work in the housing project in El Salvador ends at the end of April, next month! We had previously understood we would be doing follow-up work there through August, when we are programmed to go on home assignment in the States, doing mission interpretation for three more months.

So, that time frame may be bumped up, and we are looking around us to see what must be sold, packed, given away, but we have no clarity yet.

We have not been able to connect with people doing impactful participative development work to the degree we had hoped. It turns out that empowerment work, designed to sustainably benefit a community (as opposed to an agency), is a very tall order, difficult to find, difficult to quantify, difficult to fund. It is not “sexy” enough for abundant funding sources.

North American agencies sometimes fund more measurable projects like the building of clinics and churches, which may stand empty within a year or two as the human resources to staff them have not been nourished and sustainable operating funds and salaries are not available.

There is little room for those committed to fundamental changing of unjust systems, because in the current economic system there are always losers, the folks at the bottom of the heap who are not prepared to compete, who can’t afford schooling, who have no funds to invest and lack the know-how to bootstrap themselves to sustainable income in a global marketplace. Meanwhile the successful, educated people are expanding their businesses and profits.

And just as the early church was seen as a threat to the established oligarchy, so transformational work is considered today (by the established oligarchy). Any organized effort to purify the rivers and aquifers, for example, to provide clean drinking water for the population implies the possibility of foreign-owned factories leaving one’s country, because increased environmental controls on their factory effluent would increase their operating costs and reduce their profits.

We are disappointed but wiser now.

If we do not find other jobs in Latin America, we know we would very much enjoy being closer to our family by living in the United States and would hope that from wherever we live we can continue to support the transformation for which so many of us are praying: a world restored to the glory from which it has wandered. The prophets have seen that this will, indeed, come to pass.

In Christ lies our hope, our inspiration, that God’s kin-dom may come to Earth, and that one day may we all truly come home.

We appreciate your prayers.

With love,

Julie and Bob

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 132