Dear Friends,

There he is again. It seems no matter what time of day I walk through town, he’s there. This little, old, gnarled man struggling down the street on his one crutch, his one good leg at an absurd angle to the crutch, his baseball cap drawn over his eyes, and the sign hung around his neck, bouncing off his chest. The sign says "Help me. I can’t work. There is no one else to help me. God bless you." He tries to cross the street—which is a challenge for an able man. I try not to watch. I don’t want to see him killed. There are a couple of things I’m having trouble understanding relating to this culture. One is the seeming lack of concern drivers have for pedestrians. Here comes a car traveling at a very dangerous speed even under the best of circumstances. Here is a truck belching noxious fumes that rob you of a semblance of a good breath. It only makes you want to breathe deeper and you do and you suffer for it. Is the old man yet alive? Yes, but it’s a mystery how he made it. But there he is with his odious sign. Well, I know fully well that giving a beggar money does absolutely no good. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The closest way this fellow will get to fishing is that if he is used for bait. But looking at his skinny arms, his narrow face, his bony body tells me even the fish would reject him. I go on my way. I can’t get too involved because there are problems everywhere, including the United States, and I didn’t come here looking to solve individual problems. I have a higher calling; I’m working with an entire indigenous group and all of them are needy. My calling is honorable, worthy, beyond individual needs, and I can’t forget what I’m called to do.

I’m nearing my bank. Yes, I have a bank account in Guatemala. I am approached by another man with a foot dangling on the end of his leg as he walks with the aid of two crutches. My attention is drawn to the dangling foot. It has a shoe but the shoe has a sole not only on the bottom but on the side. The side of the fellow’s foot hits the ground, and I feel pain wondering how his ankle can handle it. I suppose it can’t—that’s why he’s on crutches and begging.

I’m in the bus station hopping a bus for Guate (what we call Guatemala City). Outside the station, with his claw out, sits what appears to be a blob but is actually a human being. No legs, a talon for a hand. I try not to stare or even to look, but my morbid curiosity won’t let me turn away. Another beggar. Surely there is something better for this thing to do than sit and beg.

I return to Coban. There’s that old man with the sign again. How did he drag himself all the way over here? I could use an ice cream and there is plenty of it here. About 100 vendors in the park as well as dozens of ice cream stores. But there is that particular vendor pushing his little cart. His twisted body with his hips swinging up, down, sideways, legs all akimbo, ringing his little bell to announce his presence. He stops. I tell him what I want. He agonizingly screws his curled body around to allow himself to dig into the bottom of his freezer compartment. I spend a total of Q3. I’m happy. He’s happy, no beggar he. But what a way to make a living.

These people are all over the place. I can’t believe I’m overly sensitive to them. I read that nearly 4 percent of the population is lacking a limb. The numbers are cold but these people are real. There’s a man in the street, in the traffic, barely above hubcap level, on some kind of device he drives with his hands using inverted bicycle pedals and chain drive. No legs. One hand out. There is the old shine man, one of 100s, with hands so crippled by arthritis he continues to drop his brush as he shines my shoes. He picks it up. He drops it again. He slathers some brown goo on my shoe and tries it again and again and again. Mercifully, he finishes. There is the little girl in the village, maybe 7 years old, with a bright smile and shining teeth. But something isn’t quite right. Her eyes. One is completely occluded with a nasty, pasty-white film. I wonder the cause. The fact she lives in a village miles from anywhere in a thatched hut has nothing to do with it. They eat well here. I know because I choked down a couple tortillas. They have water. I’ve seen it. The river is about 100 yards that way and they can have all they want. But then I wonder if that was her brother I saw in the market in Coban. A young man with one nasty, pasty-white-film-covered eye. And there is yet another one, no make that two, who somehow have their legs behind them as they walk on their knees. There’s another one strangely with his legs at 90 degree angles in front of him who has rigged his bicycle to carry him in a kind of side saddle fashion. That’s fine for going downhill but how does he go uphill? I don’t follow to find out.

Maybe more disabled are the kids 6-, 7-, 8-years old who sell papers in the streets, shine shoes, hawk individual razors, brooms, because why aren’t they in school?

There’s that man again, sitting down this time in a niche between two stores. I pass him by. What earthly or even heavenly good can a few Q do for this fellow? Now I’m in a store and standing in the doorway is another old creature—filthy with dirt, a street person (there are a lot of them here). I look at him. He appears to have two hands but only one shoulder. How can that be? One hand hangs limp. He’s barefoot with the feet that have been unshod for a lifetime: toes separated by wide distances, good for digging into the turf of some of these rocky mountain valleys so you won’t slide completely off the side, cracked, callused, and swollen. Wouldn’t you know it, he has his good hand out.

I am reminded frequently by the things I read in the paper of the catch phrase "man’s inhumanity to man." I have friends now in Jerusalem, and they write of the horrors of war and the death and fear that pervades that area. I have no sense of fear and have never felt I was in danger. This is not the most stable time in this country, but no bombs are dropping nor are artillery shells being lobbed. I see beggars as people with no other options in this society. I don’t want to institutionalize begging and a good way not to do that is to support only those people with a job. But maybe that is their job. They work harder than most by simply dragging themselves through the rigors of their day. Maybe they are working for me, doing a job for me by reminding me of my humanity. They help us rediscover our humanity, make us feel more human, remove from us our need to be competitive and thereby instill in us a sense of community, that we are all in this together and that we need each other. I turn around and go find the old man still sitting in his niche. It’s good to be alive, to live in God’s world. I look forward to tomorrow with eager anticipation.

Roger