April 14, 2005
Dear Friends,
Jesus sat across the desk, clean-shaven and handsome, in my office
on the campus of the Colombia Reformed University. Not the resurrected
Jesus who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago (although He was there
too), but one of my former students. Jesus (pronounced “hay-SUS”)
is a common name throughout Latin America.
This Jesus studied in the Bible Institute in Urabá, which
many of you have helped to underwrite through gifts to the ECO
program. He went on to become a pastor and served in the small
mountain town of Saiza. I visited Saiza in May, 1999, and found
that in addition to many activities the church had already initiated,
they wanted to send the PC(USA) Hunger Program a request to fund
a project for raising pigs in order to help farm families add
more meat to their diet.
That project was never submitted because six weeks later Saiza
ceased to exist. Paramilitary troops broke into the village and
rounded up the men in the village square to be killed. But one
of the “paras” knew Jesús and came up to whisper,
“Pastor, don't just let them kill you. Make a run for it!”
Jesus said later it was like coming out of a trance. He ran, and
then everybody ran. The paramilitaries fired indiscriminately
but killed only 12 instead of the 70 they had anticipated. Jesus
hid out all that night, not knowing what had befallen his family,
while the frustrated troops set fire to the village.
Within days Saiza’s whole population, some 3,000 persons,
had come down from the mountains, another great wave of displaced
persons fleeing the violence. Your gifts to the ECO project for
displaced persons in Colombia help the church respond to this
continuing crisis. The presbytery felt that Jesus, as the one
who initiated the resistance in Saiza, would not be safe in the
area. He was placed in the Coast Presbytery as the new pastor
of our church in Cartagena.
Perhaps you have been to Cartagena on a Caribbean cruise. It
is a resort city with elegant hotels, beautiful beaches, quaint
shops, and fascinating sights for tourists, just an hour from
Barranquilla, where the university and the presbytery offices
are. But the Presbyterian Church of Cartagena is not in the tourist
sector. It’s in a poor neighborhood that tourists never
see. When Jesus arrived, still traumatized by his own experience,
he found a congregation weakened by divisions and a city overrun
by displaced persons from Urabá—a number of old
friends among them—and all over northern Colombia. In his
five years as pastor in Cartagena Jesus built up the church and
developed an important ministry among the desplazados.
But the past caught up with him, perhaps because of his ministry
with the desplazados. As he sat in my office a few days after
Easter, he shared with me the Calvary he passed through just before
Holy Week. First, anonymous telephone calls with threats. Then
a note: “We have your coffin ready.” Then the decisive
incident, a beating to his 15-year-old son: Unknown persons forced
the boy into a car one evening as he ran an errand for his mother.
They took him to an isolated beach, beat him up, and held him
underwater. After two hours, they left him there, bruised, bleeding,
and soaking wet. It was around midnight when a taxi finally took
him to his frantic parents. This was the message: “You've
been warned.”
“I’m leaving Cartagena,” Jesús told
me. He leaned forward and added, “but not with fear. I’m
leaving for the sake of my family and for the sake of the church.
Both my congregation and the presbytery are giving me wonderful
support. The local church has been drawn together through this
experience as they suffered together with my family. As for me,
I look on these threats as applause for the work I have been doing.”
Last year I asked you to pray for Mauricio, another young man
who dedicated his life to serving displaced persons. Your prayers
were powerful and, as you know, Mauricio was released from jail.
Today he is safe in another country. Now I ask you to pray for
Jesus and his family, twice displaced but still committed to Jesus
Christ, as they begin anew in another Colombian city.
I want you to pray also for all the pastors and church leaders
here, but I don't want you to think we live in an atmosphere of
gloom: there is caution, even fear at times, but there is also
irrepressible joy, a constant sense of the presence of the risen
Lord. We are grateful for the Americans who are with us as part
of the PC(USA) accompaniment program, reminding Colombians of
the many Presbyterians and other Christian friends in the United
States who stand with them in prayer.
Please pray for our university. Our founder and first president
is a brilliant man (a former student of mine), but not gifted
as a financial administrator or fundraiser. The board discovered
at the end of 2004 that we faced a major financial crisis—only
your generous gifts to the university ECO projects were keeping
us going. We now have a new president, James Schutmaat, a Colombian
architect and businessman, who has introduced major changes that
are moving us back towards financial health. (If that name seems
familiar, James is the son of PC(USA) missionaries Alvin and Pauline
Schutmaat, who served many years in Latin America. Pauline, now
over 80 years old, is still going strong as she directs the university's
School of Music.)
I wish you would pray for my computer too—I wrote last
fall that its problems were over, but that was just the eye of
the hurricane. I’ve been without a computer most of the
time since that last letter. I really do think it is fixed now.
If I owe you a letter or an email, please be patient. I’m
trying to catch up. Your support and concern are a source of strength
for me, and I love to hear from you.
Blessings on you!
Alice Winters
The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
48
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