1983 Honduras, Curaçao, and Aruba

1983   Honduras, Curaçao, and Aruba. New Year’s Eve at El Centro Dicipulado, Honduras missionary retreat, Amor Viviente church, The Beachy Amish at Guaimaca, The Catholic Church in Charallave, liberation theology, an unusual pastoral transition, Harry Satizábal, San Bernardino congregational members, Luis Germain, losing my passport, the Caracas Marathon, Venezuelan baseball, Curaçao and Aruba, vacation in Merida.

We had Christmas Eve with our small congregation in Venezuela and brought in the new year with a large congregation in Honduras, both at midnight and both inspiring. The Centro Dicipulado  (Discipleship Center) congregation in San Pedro Sula was singular, however, among the many congregations and worship services I visited over the years. It had to do with a feeling of a large congregation of people from many social and economic backgrounds and various types of households. Young and old, rich and poor, single and married, professional and unlettered seemed to all be together, singing praise to God and fellowshipping.

The service began at about ten o’clock with beautiful singing, prayers, and a number of people spoke, under the leadership of the pastor Isaias Flores. Our children were soon sleeping in our arms and laps, bobbing their heads and feeling limp as feed sacks, but I was animated and looking forward to the new year. At about midnight there was the Lord’s Supper and then a full dinner was served, and everyone hung around and visited. Maybe I was just lonesome, and it seemed so Amish and Mennonite to emphasize discipleship and then hang around, eat and visit. Years later (2006) I met the pastor Isaias Flores again when I traveled with my brother Roy on a service work trip to Honduras; he had become a bishop.   

We were in Honduras for the biennial retreat for Mennonite missionaries and families along the Caribbean coast at Tela. The retreat came as part of the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities orientation and support. We had been given orientation in July; now we were visiting the congregation where a founder was one of the presenters at the July orientation-- Amzie Yoder. Yoder’s presentation and now the Centro Dicipulado were especially good on his working out of an Anabaptist Mennonite orientation, fostering small groups, Christian discipleship and beginning an urban church. The San Pedro Sula church always remained in my mind as the model for a Hispanic Anabaptist church. I realize no perfect model exists, and least of all that a North American should pick one, but still this clear commitment to following Christ was inspiring. We also visited with Janet Brenneman who lived and worked near the church buildings.

Honduras provided an interesting window to the varieties of Anabaptism in Central America. One day we visited with some of the leaders of the Amor Viviente (Living Love) churches and we attended one of their services. This group had many talented young people among its membership and had grown into somewhat of a denomination unto itself and is a member of Mennonite World Conference. Its North American founders were Ed and Gloria King who had earlier served with Mennonite Central Committee. I wrote in my journal: “I was shocked when Ed said that in ten years of ministry, he had not given one hour to teaching peace and nonresistance.”

The Kings were gracious hosts and took us out to Guaimaca to visit one of the most conservative Anabaptist groups one afternoon, the Beachy Amish. Here we saw a traditional Alsatian bank barn and white clapboard houses such as one might have found in Holmes County, Ohio. The Beachy Amish ran an orphanage and their own school, and some olive-toned  youngsters with suspenders and pant legs rolled up and bare-feet were playing soccer in the yard.

An elderly man with a white beard told me of how they tried to introduce better livestock, including having the North American Amish send a plane load of Belgians and Percherons. As they drove the big horses from the Tegucigalpa airport to their settlement, crowds gathered along the road to see the spectacle; he said it was as though the circus had come to the tropics. The Guaimaca settlement was begun as an Old Order Amish colonization effort in 1968, including some of the Stull family who eventually made their way to Alymer, Ontario, and began Pathway Publishing. One of the Stull daughters is married to my publishing and historical friend David Luthy.

By the time we visited, the draft horses were gone, as were the Old Order Amish. Some had returned to the United States and Canada and others converted to Beachy Amish Mennonitism. The community had gained a level of self-sufficiency and respect from the locals, at the same time that they suffered from theft and pillaging from vandals who took advantage of their nonresistant lives and limited police protection in this isolated rural area. I was surprised by a young man named Eash who told about visiting a nearby mountain top and the delight of reaching the summit and seeing from both sides.  He affirmed how that the really good things in life are free and available to all who will give their energy to it.   

Back in Venezuela, we soon outgrew our apartment for the Rosa de Sarón congregation in Charallave and with the Mennonite mission bought a colonial styled building which we converted into a meeting place a block from the city center, the plaza. I remember one afternoon soon after we moved in, the Catholic priest visited us; he welcomed us to the community and mentioned that there were a number of evangelical sects such as ours in Venezuela. He said that the strength of these small churches was that everyone got some attention and caring; he mentioned that this care was often harder for them to do in a large Catholic parish. I told him that whatever our differences, I also was thankful for the Catholic church’s history, Christian universalism and size. I think we both considered our groups to be complementary.

The Catholic church was going through various renewal phases, and among the memorable choruses we learned was the song “I am the Bread of Life” which has the wonderfully high notes in the refrain “Y les resucitaré en el dia final.” (And I will raise you up on the last day.) The Suzanne Toolan words and music came out of the French Taizé movement, and the Charallave Catholics played it every Sunday morning on the public address system of the city plaza. We would sing along in our apartments. A decade later (1992) it made it into our Mennonite hymnal.

There was also some interaction with the Catholics and Evangelicals in liberation theology, especially with a group known as Evangelicals for Social Justice. Some of the youth and I attended a weekend seminar of this organization, and we invited one of its leaders Brigita Marquez to visit our church and to speak. As it turned out he seemed to bring together his own mix of liberation theology and John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. Although the Mennonites were friendly to these goals, we were also busy with baptisms and memberships classes and nurturing the communal life of the congregation. Much of this was as new to me as it was to the members, and we did baptisms in the streams and eventually licensed another minister for our congregation in Rolando Valencia.

The San Bernardino congregation was also growing, but a leadership crisis was simmering just below the surface with the pastor Harry Satizábal. Early in the new year, I recognized that he resented my leadership in the church council, and I believe I failed to understand his needs for control. Things came to a head in the Caracas congregation where some new leaders led by the Colombians Juan and Carmen Montes wanted their part of the leadership, leading to an unusual (to me at least) transition.

Montes and the church council awaited their time until Satizábal made one of his regular visits to his home country in Colombia and Cali for two weeks. Then the church council changed the locks on the church buildings and parsonage and took the pastoral car and hid it in a neighboring sector. Upon Satizábal’s return, a emergency meeting of the church was called to make public their charges against him which to my recall were related to abuse of power. When I raised some procedural questions, they told me I was to be there but not to say anything because I did not understand Latin American culture and how changes were made in Venezuela. The meeting became quite melodramatic after the charges being given, and  Satizábal was given an opportunity to respond. He went up front and gave his defense, at the end falling on his knees with his hands folded upwards and declaring his innocence to God.

At one point the church council said that it was getting an attorney to help and go to court if Satizábal did not abdicate; I think the issue was especially in regards to his keeping the car. I mentioned the Matthew 5 teaching regarding accusations of reconciling with the brother rather than going to the secular judge. They patiently explained that here again I failed to understand scripture interpretation sufficiently because this text had to do with a brother in the church, but since their pastor was no longer a brother, none of this teaching applied. So we went to an attorney and both sides made their case –often simultaneously— in the attorney’s office. After listening for about a half hour to divine judgments in the spirit of the imprecatory psalms, the attorney threw us out of his office and said he was a legal counsel not a religious mediator.

The pastor’s removal was basically a churchly coup d'état; Satizábal knew it was over and said from then on he would only deal with the Mennonite mission. We offered him a severance salary for his work as director of the Bible Institute until the end of the year. I never heard anything of Satizábal after that; I assumed he may have returned to Colombia. He had become acquainted with Anabaptists through the Mennonite Brethren in Cali. Estimado lector, dear reader, and especially if you were involved with this conflict and transition, I confess that this account of a sad chapter in the Venezuelan church is partial and limited, but almost three decades later, it is my best recall.

The coda was that I became the temporary chair of the council for a few months until time to elect a new church council in January of 1984. At that point and at my instigation Enrique Hurtado, a managerial type and devout lay leader was elected. My directive leadership on a successor left some hurt feelings, and I can still hear a long-suffering Millard Garret of Eastern Mennonite Missions lament to me over the phone when he heard of it. By the next year, Juan Montes succeeded in becoming church chair, and eventually he and his wife Carmen found their way to Reedley, California, where as I write this in 2012 he is pastor of the Spanish wing of the First Mennonite Church in that city.

The Caracas San Bernardino congregation had many memorable members among them Miguel Bilote, a humble Italian shoemaker who would give testimony and would sing at the top of his voice “Gloria a Dios, Amen, Amen.” I still have a pair of his hand-made shoes. Another faithful member and treasurer of the church was a woman of some wealth, Blanca de Bartoli. She came to the church by herself, prayed expressively and passionately, (she reminded me of Katie Miller [Abe Katie] from my Maple Grove days) and took care of the single pastor Harry Satizábal. Another colorful character was a Moroccan small businessman Luis Germain, who told long tales of arriving in Venezuela on a merchant ship, having hidden in the cargo. When he was discovered, the ship captain decided rather than punishing him or throwing him over board, he would put him to work which he did. His goal was to eventually begin a Mennonite agricultural colony; he had heard of the Hutterites, and they were his model.

I enjoyed Germain’s friendship, and one time we took a church trip together on a bus to Valencia, several hours west of Caracas, and upon return, I fell asleep before arriving at Maracay. When I awoke upon reaching the Maracay bus station, I discovered that my billfold, money and all my documents were gone. I told Germain and the bus driver about my loss, and we did a thorough search of the bus but nothing turned up. So Germain and I walked to a hotel, and I told the clerk at the hotel (now late at night) that I had no documents or money, but that if he would give us a room and let me use the phone; I would call my wife and she would come and pick me up and I would pay him. The clerk was good natured about it all. So that night, my fellow-believer Germain and I took the room and knelt in prayer. He prayed eloquently, and then I prayed like Job: “Naked I came into this world, and naked I will leave it; blessed be the name of the Lord.” I wrote my brother David that it was “a good experience in re-affirming the basic essentials of life, yet I shouldn’t wish it upon anyone else.”

The next forenoon Gloria picked me up, and we drove to the American embassy in Caracas. I told the embassy staffer that I had lost my passport, driver’s license and other documents, and she asked me what state I was from. Within minutes, she put me in touch with another staff member who had attended Ohio University in Athens. She asked me a few questions to assure herself that I was from Ohio; told me to fill out a one –page form and return the next morning for a replacement passport. Meanwhile, Germain kept his interest in a Mennonite agricultural colony, and when Ken Graber of Mennonite Economic Development Association (MEDA) visited us, he floated the idea with him. Actually, farming and food production had fallen into bad times in Venezuela presumably because easy oil money was available. The country imported much of its foods, even tropical fruits and vegetables.  

Meanwhile, during one of the morning runs at the mini- car race track near our apartment complex, I met a neighbor who was seriously preparing for the Caracas Marathon. So in about April Gloria and I were running with the thought of joining the Caracas marathon that December. Two or three times a week we would run five or six miles and by October we planned to run at least a half-marathon. By that time our marathon training neighbor had moved away, but we still planned to run ourselves. We headed out on the road from Charallave to Quebrada de Cua and back, about twelve miles, and at some point Gloria decided to serve as coach rather than runner that year. I kept reading the marathon literature; a regular count-down feature was in the El Nacional paper. On Sunday morning December 11 we got up early and headed for the zoo of Caricuao (near Caracas) and by dawn, 6:30 en punto, one thousand five hundred runners were on the 42 kilometer or 26-mile race.

The race was sponsored by the Venezuelan beer producers association (Camera Venezolana de Fabricantes de Cerveza), so an additional feature was that besides the usual water stations, beer was also offered along the route. About half way through the race I threw up the cashew nuts I had unwisely eaten that morning on the way to Caracas. At about the twentieth mile, Gloria and the kids showed up to encourage me and I finished and received a little medallion. The male winner was Miguel Hernandez at two hours and twenty-two minutes and female winner was Karen McHang at three hours and five minutes while I finished in four hours and twenty-seven minutes. I was so tired I wanted to die, and decided this race would be my first and last marathon; it has been an easy promise to keep. We stayed in Caracas, and that evening in the Christmas season we went to  the “Nutcracker” at the Teatro Municipal. That’s right, I fell asleep during the performance.

Venezuelans loved sports, baseball especially, and have contributed an out of proportion number of players to the Major Leagues. Their own Venezuelan league (in North America called a winter league) was avidly followed. Each team had a portion of imported players and David Parker of the Pittsburgh Pirates played for several years; he was affectionately called “the Cobra.” One night we went to a Caracas game where Daryl Strawberry played in the outfield, and in the men’s room, we all peed on the floor. During the Major League Baseball season, the sports pages followed the Venezuelan players, especially Baudilio (Bo) Diaz, the outstanding catcher of the Philadelphia Phillies who won the 1983 National League Baseball Championship. Venezuela had active youth baseball programs, and weekly our son Jacob pitched an inning or two for one of the local teams. Jacob used to say it gave his coach the pride of announcing they had one “imported player.”  That same year Venezuela hosted the Pan American games, and one day we went to see the American team play Mexico. Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins and Chris Mullin played on the American team which went 8-0 in the games

A recreation the whole family engaged in was swimming, and Venezuela had beautiful beaches such as Choroní, hidden away up over a mountain behind the city of Maracay. We often went with church families such as the Hurtados or Carlos and Elisa Diaz and their children. An extended trip that summer took us to Curacao and Aruba because we needed to leave Venezuela and re-enter to secure our visas. This visit was memorable for the legacy of Dutch neatness and architectures, bridges outlined with light bulbs in the middle of the tropics, and, yes, visiting a McDonalds. Dear reader, I know that you are not a McDonalds fan, but a little generosity here. Our kids enjoyed visiting the familiar golden arches after a year of arepa, a corn flour-based patty filled with cheeses or about anything else you wished. It could be brought on any street corner of Venezuela. We went to the Dutch Antilles in a ferry boat from Coro in Venezuela to Curacao and flew to Aruba.

The Coro area has some desert sands where the Venezuelans had imported a few camels, mostly for photographs. After returning, we spent a week of vacation in Merida, the mountainous Andean region of western Venezuela. This region was picturesque with small farmers and neat homesteads and well-cultivated fields and gardens along the Andes. We took Merida’s famed cable car up the mountains until we came to the snow-capped peaks and saw Pico Bolivar. The cable car had four sections, and at one station we got off with a local peasant who had bags of purchases; he was met by his children and a burro, and we walked with them along a mountain trail for about an hour. He said he had quite a distance to go yet, so we turned back and returned to the cable car. Without necessarily intending to, we took about every form of transportation from walking, boat, plane, car, cable car and camel (well, for photography). 

On the way back we drove through Barinas and some of the cattle country and plains (llanos) region of Venezuela. It reminded me of the novel Doña Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos and his description of the Plainsman: “…in every case merry, yet melancholy, a realist and yet imaginative; humble afoot, proud on horseback—all of these at once, without any clash, like the virtues and faults of a newborn soul.” I loved this novel when I read it in 1983 and found it no less rewarding on another read in 2012. We visited Gallegos’ statue by the Organization of American States building near the White House in Washington D.C.
    

By December the United States President Reagan (probably a Mister Danger figure to some Venezuelans) had ordered the invasion of Grenada, an island nation about one hundred miles off the northern coast of Venezuela. This action gave one reason to reflect on the meaning of imperialism and national sovereignty, as well as the cost of another Marxist-oriented regime in the Caribbean. 

I also became aware that my Mennonite publishing colleague James Horsch was leaving Laurelville Mennonite Church Center after two years and returning to publishing. I called Ralph Hernley, the chair of the Laurelville board, and he said Dana Summers had already been tapped for executive director and that a program director position would be created which may be a good fit for me. In the next year, our family had to make a decision whether to stay or return from Venezuela, and I had to make some decisions regarding work. Meanwhile, Gloria’s sisters Bonnie and Carla (the Maurice Stutzman family) came down to visit us for an enjoyable Christmas.

This chapter is from memory and my letters and personal files of 1983. The song “I am the Bread of Life” appears in Hymnal: A Worship Book (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, Faith and Life Press, and Brethren Press 1992, 472).  The prayer when I lost my documents is based on Job 1:21 which I wrote in a letter to my brother David on October 5, 1983; the description of the Venezuelan Plainsman comes from Doña Barbara (New York: Peter Smith, 1946, 296). We visited a Rómulo Gallegos statue during the week in 2012 when I wrote this, It is located in the lawn of the Organization of American States building in Washington D.C.