1982 Caracas and Charallave

1982  Caracas and Charallave. Preparing for Venezuela, Our People The Amish and Mennonites of Ohio, Puerto Rico with Jan Gleysteen, Pennsylvania German Weekend; Jerry and Audra Shenk; farewell in Scottdale and Holmes County; Eastern Mennonite board of Mission and Charities orientation; Venezuelan neighbor families: Hurtados, Diaz, Taylors, Sarmientos; Adelmis Blanco, Alexis Rivera, Ricardo Ochoa; Caracas, Harry Satizábal; our children deal with change; New York Philharmonic concert, rhythm of life in Charallave.

     

By February we knew we were heading for Venezuela; missionaries José and Agdelia Santiago organized a Mennonite church council in 1979 and had begun several small congregations and a Bible institute. The Santiagos had returned to Pennsylvania, and Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities (now often called EMM) wanted personnel to represent of the North American church and be part of the new mission, assisting in coordinating the overall work, teaching at the institute and pastoring a new congregation at Charallave. EMM was the mission agency of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Conference but also included some neighboring conferences and personnel. 

We were intrigued by Venezuela, the oil rich country on the northern coast of the South American continent, although we knew little about it. We already knew of José and Agdelia Santiago from our Puerto Rico days, and it seemed like an appropriate fit for two years; we wrote the confessional statements of Christian faith and doctrine for the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities, were accepted, and planned to leave in July.

But before leaving, I had a few projects to finish. First, there was a little book project which I used to call “The Plain People of Ohio.” Tourism was beginning to grow in Ohio, especially in the Holmes County area, and almost all the literature was based on the eastern Amish and Mennonites, especially the Lancaster Pennsylvania community. So I proposed to do a booklet on the Ohio communities, also motivated because of a need to explore my own Amish and Mennonite identity; it seemed a natural development. The Publishing House at first felt that a regionally based booklet would simply cannibalize their existing publications, such as the John A. Hostetler booklets. But eventually and somewhat reluctantly they signed onto the publication, especially when Hostetler, David Groh, and Peter Wiebe gave their blessing to it. I secured help from photographer Bruce Glick who had moved back to Holmes County and provided all the graphics for the booklet. We had an interesting parallel because about the very time we were leaving for Venezuela, the Bruce and Helen Glick family was heading to Bolivia to serve with Mennonite Central Committee.  

Between January and March, I visited the various communities of what eventually became Our People: The Amish and Mennonites of Ohio.  I thought I knew the Holmes and Wayne County communities quite well, but I sought informants to help me in other areas which I visited between January and March of 1982. Because I did not give individual credit to these people in the booklets, I’ll mention them here. At Bluffton I listened to Howard Raid, Jim and Roberta Moore, and J. Denny Weaver; at West Liberty, Ohio, John L. Yoder and Gloria’s cousin Dennis Huffman were guides; at Belle Center my cousin Levi R. Schlabach; at Plain City and Rosedale I visited Walter Beachy, Fannie Peachey, Henry Troyer, and Andrew Farmwald. I stayed with Levi Millers, the Kalona, Iowa, Levi, a Mennonite educator who eventually became treasurer of the Conservative Mennonite’s mission board; we often referred to each other as the other Levi Miller. 

At Geauga County east of Cleveland, I visited with Uria R. Byler, the Amish parochial school historian, and Roman Yoder, my Mennonite guide. Finally, at Archbold my main informants were Lawrence and Marjora Miller and Esther and Edward Diener, the later couple a restaurateur and pastor duo, Esther having perpetuated an Archbold version of the urban legend of baseball star Reggie Jackson. I finished the manuscript that Spring, and gave it to the editors, and the Our People The Amish and Mennonites of Ohio came out in the Spring of 1983 while we were in Venezuela.

A second project was a visit with our neighbor and friend Jan Gleysteen to Puerto Rico.  Gleysteen had established himself as a traveling Anabaptist slide lecturer with the Mennonite Publishing House serving as his patron and benefactor. We had received a Mennonite Mutual Aid fraternal grant for this travel, and I was to serve as a guide and translator and also to write some articles regarding the Puerto Rican Mennonites. So in March, I spent two weeks in Puerto Rico with Gleysteen attending conference and congregational sessions and doing interviews for article commissioned by Gospel Herald, Christian Living and With. Jan Gleysteen with Carol Glick translations showed his slides at the schools and churches, and also took a lot of photos, documenting the island’s church and cultural life. 

The visit was a homecoming for me and also a reminder of how much the conference was coming of age; the missionary era we had known in the late sixties was largely gone, and a young leadership was in place, headed by Luis Elier Rodriguez and Daniel Schipani. The visit also reminded me of our friends David and Naomi Helmuth whom we had known in Puerto Rico and then David had worked for Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries during the seventies while I was in publishing. Helmuth was always a good conversation partner, but now he was leaving the congregational ministries board. I never saw much of him after that, although he was always a friend.

As a part of finishing Laurelville Mennonite Church Center commitments, I helped Arnold Cressman and Willard Martin plan a Pennsylvania German weekend April 2-4, giving an address on themes and values of the art and literature on Sunday morning. Gloria led the music, and we had made a songbook Dietsche Lieder for the weekend. Merle and Phyllis Good of Lancaster came out and made a presentation on Pennsylvania German art, and I remember my brother Paul and Carol came over and joined us. Ernest Gehman, a German professor of Eastern Mennonite University did the devotionals. The surprising element of the weekend was that a bus load of Pennsylvania German speakers from Ontario came down and enlivened the weekend with their humor and joke telling. The Ontario speaker was Ed Berringer, and they had a whole repertoire of Canadian Dutch jokes. It may seem strange that I was celebrating my Pennsylvania German ethnicity at the same time I was heading for a Spanish Venezuela, but I always thought languages and cultures were mainly complementary—if going in opposite directions.  Spanish was growing in usage while Pennsylvania German was becoming extinct except for the traditional Anabaptist communities—the Amish and Old Order Mennonites. 

Several other projects needed a transition as I finished up my work at Mennonite publishing. I also finished my work with the Allegheny Conference News which I edited for three years; this was still in the day of galley sheets which the children Jacob and Hannah would cut out by hand and help lay out the pages. We planted twenty Scotch Pine trees in the lot across the street that spring and hoped they would be growing by the time we came back in two years.

The biggest transition still looming was finding renters to live in our house until we returned, and sure enough that Spring we discovered that Jerry and Audra Shenk with their little children Joel and Jill were moving into the community where Jerry was going to go into the hardware business with his father Charles. The Shenks were open to renting our home for two years, and it was a good fit. We never had one worry about our property while we were gone, and the neighbors talked fondly of the young Shenk family years later. Brother Paul took care of our finances and property; we put all our furnishings in the one room and stacked some in the upstairs of the Provident Bookstore.

The Kingview Mennonite Church had a commissioning service for us on June 20, and in the afternoon a picnic hosted by Maynard and Jan Brubaker.  On June 31, 1982, I wrote in my journal: “Tonight is our last night in Scottdale for the next two years, at least. We have cleaned out our house and are going to Venezuela. I hope my motives are sound and acceptable to God in making this move. I have tried to think what moves people to accept an assignment to teach and build up the church: to build up the Kingdom of God; invite others to Jesus and his church; experience another culture; have adventure; and promote the message of peace and reconciliation.”

We spent several days with our families in Ohio, and on July 3 attended a 20^th anniversary reunion of my Waynedale High School class at Ramada Inn at Wooster. I took creek walks through Salt Creek and stalked through our woods where I had spent my boyhood days. On July 7, Andrew and Mattie drove us to Canton, Ohio, where we got the Amtrak which took us to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I noted in my journal that this trip is probably the last train ride we would have, thinking that American passenger trains were near the place of the nineteenth century steam ship or the stage coach. I must have thought that last passenger train with each train ride for the past fifty years, yet on the year I write this 2012, Gloria, Elizabeth and I have just taken our grandchildren Aaron and Sadie on the Capitol Limited to Washington DC and back, complete with breakfast in the dining car and Appalachian woodlands outside.

An orientation for new mission people was at the Salunga, Pennsylvania, headquarters of Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities followed by a larger missionary retreat at Camp Hebron. One Sunday morning we met with the East Petersburg church and had lunch with Carl and Ellen Steffy and family; they had served in Mexico, and he was now a pastor. Ellen is the daughter of Elmer and Esther Yoder of Holmes County, Ohio. On another Sunday I spoke at the Old Road Mennonite Church, July 18. The orientation leaders were Ken and Elizabeth Nissley and Miriam (best known as Mim) Book, and one was struck at their interpersonal skills. At the missionary retreat at Camp Hebron, we had speakers such as Don Jacobs (intercultural issues), Paul Zehr (Anabaptist biblical themes), Joseph Shenk, (missionary roles), and Enos Martin (handling stress). One morning Don Jacobs took us on a bird hike and soon identified a Baltimore Oriole, Indigo Bunting, and a Red-eyed Vireo; the children had many activities, and it was a good experience.

Amzie Yoder spoke on church planting in urban centers, reflecting on his experience in San Pedro Sula in Honduras. I suppose I found this session especially interesting because this person was the same Amzie Yoder my father had admired and published in the Amish Mennonite mission newsletter in the early fifties when I was a child. One of last surprises for us at the orientation was the last night before we left. Millard Garrett came to us and said that it would be good if I would be a licensed minister for the assignment, and wondered it would be okay to give us an examination that night. He mentioned it matter of factly as though this were simply some final documents to be signed. I remember Gloria looked a little perplexed, but that evening the Lancaster moderator Paul Landis spoke to us and asked some questions for about fifteen minutes. He prayed for us and said the certificate would be forthcoming to us from the Allegheny Conference.  

Venezuela was a land of recent immigrants or transients. In the town of Charallave where we lived about an hour south of Caracas in the Valley of Tuy, our Escimar apartment building had a number of Portuguese families who owned many of the stores and bakeries in town. Our neighbors a floor above us were the Hurtados, a Colombian family which gathered each evening for the meal with the father Enrique at one end and Elena at the other; along the sides sat Marta, Yolanda, Carmen Sofia, and Joanna, and sometimes Marta’s friend Alexis Rivera. Enrique and Elena and their family came to Venezuela for economic betterment. Enrique was the manager of a bed springs factory, and Elena managed the household, as well as occasionally doing retail sales. We got to know them over the next two years and cherished their friendship.

Several floors up from them were the Carlos and Elisa Diaz family, ex hippies from Spain who arrived in Venezuela in wanderlust and had simply settled there for a while. Carlos was an artist and musician but with two young children had taken on sales for a cement and stone factory called Aliven. Elisa worked as an aide at one of the schools where their children attended. Because she was not a Venezuelan citizen, she could not be employed in the public schools.

Directly above us lived the Mike and Fanny Taylors and their large German Shepherd guard dog who occasionally would bark loudly. Mike was a British citizen and an airplane mechanic who  was married to Fanny a Venezuelan, and they had Carolina, Pachito, and Jon together. What with cultural and linguistic differences, communicating must have been a challenge. Sometimes, we would hear vigorous discussions -- he in English and she in Spanish—with the children and the dog joining in a family symphony and cacophony. The apartments had open windows, closed by bars alone, so we could all hear each other’s affairs. I’m sure the Taylors would also have their own version of their strange North American neighbors below. Taylor would regularly remind me that he had once visited Wichita, Kansas, for a week-long Cessna airplane seminar. Unlike Dorothy, however, he had no desire to return to Kansas; if he got sick, he did not think the hospitals would take care of him.

Below us on the second floor lived the Sarmientos, Luis and Patricia, who seemed as gentle as the Taylors were tempestuous. Each evening Luis would bring out the guitar, and he and Patricia would gather their children Viviana, Marcela, and Veronica to sing Christian songs and choruses together at bedtime. The Sarmientos and Patricia’s mother Odilia Villagran were from Chile, exiles from the General August Pinochet repression in Chile. After the overthrow of Salvador Allende, many Chileans often with advanced training such as engineers came to Venezuela with its fairly tolerant democratic ethos. The Sarmientos had relatives in nearby Ocumare del Tuy, and fellow Chilean church members, the Valencia family of Rolando and Eva.  

Let’s grant it, first of all, that there is something natural that foreigners should find each other. But I think it was more than that. At this point in time, Venezuela was a welcoming and growing country, a safe haven for political refugees and for persons looking for economic betterment. Venezuela had moved to a democratic government and after the Second World War a number of German, and especially Portuguese, Canary Islands, and other European immigrants found their way to Venezuela as a Latin American land of opportunity. After the fifties Venezuela was considered a fairly stable oil rich democratic if somewhat corrupt country. The socialist candidate for president was Teodoro Petkoff; that’s right, born in Bulgaria. Our churches were primarily congregations of immigrants; we went with the idea of friendship evangelism, and these families were our immigrant friends, partly inherited from the Santiagos who themselves were Puerto Ricans and Americans. 

Were there any Venezuelans? Yes, they were by far the majority of the seventeen million population of Venezuela. I’ll name them; nearby in a small urbanization lived Adelmis Blanco and her Spanish husband Francisco or Paco along with their three sons Javier and the twins, generally simply called los morochos. Adelmis a hard-working and loyal young wife and mother, and devout Christian. She worked and prayed for her family and also was a good influence on other young Venezuelan women who had married Europeans ex-patriots in Venezuela. At that point Venezuela had a number of foreigners often working as technicians or engineers with the German Siemens Corporation which had projects in Venezuela and engineers and technical people came who ended up marrying Latin American wives. One of Adelmis’ best friends was Julia Duchen, a handsome Dominican woman married to an Austrian engineer Roland Rhyner. Paco was a chef and eventually when we had special meals at the church, outside or inside, turkey, beef, pork, or whatever, Paco would prepare the finest dishes. Fellow Spainard Carlos Diaz, one of his fellow church attenders got him a job with Aliven, his gravel and stone business.

Two other young Venezuelans were a part of the fellowship, young men in the last year of high school. Alexis Rivera who was baptized the week after we arrived and Ricardo Ochoa a bright young student who was always present to enliven every family and church event. Rivera eventually married a young American, and last I heard was living in California, and Ochoa went on to become an economist, married a Charallave Anabaptist woman and he himself remained faithful to the church tradition. Ricardo and Yanet and their family gave us an enjoyable visit in 2010. I could name Aquiles Figuera, the painter and guitarist who came to church and a good number of other Venezuelans and immigrants, but this listing has gone too long already.

Dear reader. I confess this naming of people you never heard of has probably become pure tedium, if you are still reading at all. But somehow the whole Venezuelan experience was mainly these people who shared with us their hopes, fears, loves, friendships, faith and joys. Many of them we met during our first year in Venezuela and many were the core of people with whom we experienced church life and evangelism for our two years in Venezuela. They were and are Venezuela to me although I’m thankful the church is greater than human relationships, and in some mysterious and divine way has grown beyond our human efforts.         

The head of the church, Bible institute and about everything else associated with the Mennonites was a Colombian named Harry Satizábal with whom we lived in Caracas in August when we arrived. When José Santiago was ready to leave, he simply handed everything over to Satizábal’s leadership, and I can understand why. Satizábal was intelligent and talented, a theatrical man who got attention in any crowd.  The church building, actually a large converted residence, was in the part of Caracas called San Bernardino and across the street from a hospital. There was a special ministry for people who came to the hospital, but also visited the church for prayer and healing.

The missionary apartment was on the second floor of the church building with the name of Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Jesucristo Puerto al Cielo (Evangelical Mennonite Church Jesus Christ Door of Heaven). Satizábal as pastor lived in a small apartment built on the third floor (actually on the roof) of the church building, and it was assumed that the single pastor would take his meals with us and had full access to the complete building.

Satizábal was recently separated from his wife and child, and I suppose it is understandable why he felt he needed considerable attention. Aside from needing to provide a kind of domestic service for the pastor, the missionary apartment also was de facto part of all church services which were held about every evening of the week. These services were led by various groups such as women, youth, men and prayer leaders but all had common elements of ecstatic singing, high-volume musical instruments, simultaneous praying, and loud preaching until late in the evening. The church toilet was also the family bath on the second floor apartment, and all the family rooms served as Sunday school rooms on weekends. This usage pattern developed over the months when the apartment was empty, but it was hardly amenable to our family life. The church office was also on the first floor.

On July 26, 1982, I wrote in my journal that the children “are amazing in adapting to this new and difficult situation.” Elizabeth (age 3) stayed especially close to Gloria. “Hannah [age 7] loses herself in the nineteenth century frontier of Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She sits and reads for hours and blocks out all the foreign sounds. Jacob [age 9] reads baseball magazines and memorizes the statistics of all the players as if his life depended upon it. In a sense it does.”  One day, the children set up mailboxes in our rooms and office, and they wrote letters to each other and to their parents; copies are still in my journal.

That Fall the New York Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta went on a Latin American tour, and Caracas was on the schedule at the Poliedro auditorium. The concert began over a half hour late because we had to wait for arrival of the presidential party of Luis Herrera Campins. Various cabinet members and former president Rafael Caldera were also in the front row. The orchestra played the national hymns of both counties, and Jacob stood up and held his hand over his heart. After the program which included a Copeland, we wandered to the front where the dignitaries were greeting people. President Campins shook our hands and rubbed his palms over Elizabeth and Hannah’s heads, “Ay canos (Ah blondes),” he greeted them.     

I suppose that aside from the culture shock of living in the middle of metropolitan Caracas, the shared space and lack of family privacy and time was too much change. One night during a service there was a theft of a camera and some money; I don’t think one of the church attendees was involved, but it seemed too open and too much community. Within a month by the beginning of September we abruptly moved to Charallave. Aside from the lack of privacy, the move was precipitated by the beginning of the school year, and we wanted to get the children into a local Spanish school. We needed to decide whether to enroll them in Caracas or in a Charallave academy. Finally, I was to serve as pastor of the Charallave congregation.

Charallave in the Valley of Tuy soon had a daily and weekly rhythm that made it a pleasant place to live. Before breakfast, each morning a group of walkers and runners from the neighborhood apartment buildings would go out on the mini-car racing track and walk and run  for exercise. On the way back I would go to the newsstand and pick up a copy of the daily El National for the news of Venezuela and the world. At noon the children would go to the Nuestra Señora de Coromoto School where they would line up from shortest to tallest before entering into the classroom. They did their lessons with Gloria in the evening or the next morning, and the teachers in little pink tennis shoes were helpful. And soon Gloria was leading JOY aerobic exercises classes with the neighborhood women.

Every Sunday at our apartment we could put folding chairs in the living room, and we would gather for Sunday school in the morning, and preaching service in the early evening around five o’clock before dinner. During the week singing and prayer services were conducted in one of the apartments. Often on Saturdays or a weekday when the children were off school, we would take off for the shore or some museum in Caracas . There were homes for a pastoral call and sermons to prepare and conference projects to visit. Soon the Advent and Christmas season came with fireworks exploding at all hours in the streets and everything became lively. On Christmas eve, our congregation rented the events hall of our condominium. We had special Advent music and a Christmas drama, and dinner was served at midnight. Toward dawn Christmas morning, I went through the streets and around the plaza, and everyone was still up eating, drinking, visiting and making music.

This chapter comes from memory and from journals and date books of 1982.