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Photo by Geoffrey D. Brown
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Missionaries and villagers build a church in a day
By Geoffrey D. Brown
News-Post Staff
gbrown@fredericknewspost.com
PIE DE LA CUESTA, Guatemala — Five-thirty a.m., Monday, June 12: The day began with a setback and a vow.
Two days into the Frederick Church of the Brethren’s third mission trip to Guatemala, two members of the team and a resident missionary were throwing up, and the other resident missionary, Robert Jackson, whose leadership and knowledge was crucial to every aspect of the mission, was dehydrated from the previous day’s work.
It didn’t look like a good day to build a church.
Mr. Jackson broke the bad news at the morning devotional meeting. A short silence followed. Then David Viands, a team member from Charles Town, W.Va., on his first mission, spoke up:
“We’ll just have to redouble our efforts. This trip means a lot to Dr. Choe.”
Dr. Julian Choe of Frederick, head of the mission, had planned since November to build a church in Pie de la Cuesta, and was personally funding the construction, for the sake of Mirza Lopez, 7, who had been paralyzed since suffering seizures at the age of 3. Dr. Choe was not going to let Mirza down. After prayers he read Psalm 116.
“I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people.”
The plans were set. A construction team was on its way from Guatemala City, 100 miles away. At best, the construction would be a logistical problem. With members of the core team out of commission, prospects looked bleak.
The trip to Pie de la Cuesta from missionary headquarters in Zacapa began as a smooth ride on a highway followed by a bone-jarring stretch of increasingly rugged and twisting dirt road pocked with craters and studded with boulders. The first sign of life was a small grotto where women were washing clothes at a mountain spring. Below the road to the left rooftops flashed through the tees.
Around a bend at the crest of a hill several larger houses lined the right side of the road, followed by a school building.
The missionaries bounced up the mountain road in the back of a Chevrolet pickup truck. Dogs chased the wheels. The men had to duck inside the truck bed to avoid getting hit by overhanging branches.
Houses in Pie de la Cuesta were more substantial than those of shanty villages the missionaries had seen — walls were block and adobe rather than tin and collected refuse.
Dogs, turkeys and chickens wandered throughout the village, piglets lurked in the bushes and a sow wallowed in a mud puddle. A boy rode a skinny horse, another man sat astride a donkey.
More bad news awaited the missionaries. The sand hadn’t been delivered for the concrete to hold the footings of the church. There was no close-by water source adequate to fill the two 55-gallon drums for the concrete mix. The work crew from Guatemala City arrived with half the number of people they had planned.
Mr. Jackson hurried off to recruit more labor while members of the team got to work carrying the steel rebar building members that would be bolted together to form the skeleton of the church.
It seemed impossible for things to get worse, but the bad luck continued mid-morning when one of the team members, preparing to fetch water for the concrete, backed the mission’s truck into a ditch — its wheels dangling over a steep drop-off. It looked as though the only way to get the truck out would be with a crane.
The day appeared to be lost. But with this group, there was no giving up, ever.
Carlos Lopez Mejia, the Zacapa-based pastor, showed up, sized up the situation, and immediately got to work collecting rocks to pile under the one of the truck’s rear tires, which was suspended over the drop-off. Soon boys from the village were helping gather rocks, and Pastor Carlos and Rev. Bill VanBuskirk were doing their best to give the truck sure footing.
When Mr. Jackson returned with reinforcements from Puente Blanco, he took one look at the truck, got out his tow rope, and pulled it to safety with his four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep. A group of men then headed off to fill the two 55-gallon barrels with water for the concrete.
The team’s morale improved further when resident missionary Tharsis Rodriguez-Jackson, who had been sick all night, showed up with lunch for the crew.
Later in the day the sand arrived, improbably, in a huge dump truck that had navigated the rocky, steep road, then turned around to dump its load in a dozen maneuvers.
By 2 p.m. much of the structure was up, but everyone was exhausted, dehydrated and overheated. All that remained was the force of Mr. Jackson’s will. Under his command, for the next five hours twenty men worked in the blistering heat to raise a church.
There was no shade until the bright tin roof of the church went on. In the endless hours when the sun seemed to sit directly overhead, the temperature approaching 100 degrees, members of the mission weakened, but willed themselves to continue.
The Rev. VanBuskirk’s eyes were liquid, his face baked red, everything about him dripping and drooping, his hips in pain. Yet he still hobbled back to help out with the digging, the mixing of the cement, filling the foundation holes. Mr. Viands sat down in complete exhaustion at one point after eight hours in the sun, only to pull himself to his feet one more time to grab a shovel. Pastor Butch Reinhold never tired, and rarely took a break from his work with the men in the rafters, handing up materials for hours at a stretch.
Pedro Lopez of Puente Blanco, who earlier in his life had lost his left hand to a man with a machete, stood inside the foundation holes to line up the columns. The air in the holes seemed 20 degrees hotter, but Mr. Lopez worked steadily throughout the day. A recently converted Christian, he has been a vital help to the Jacksons’ mission in Zacapa.
By late afternoon Pastor Mejia was coated white with concrete dust. He hoisted sacks of concrete and buckets of sand into the gas-powered cement mixer. Mr. Jackson hauled the mixer from hole to hole almost single-handedly.
For hours up in the rafters brothers Baudilio and Rolando Caal, the two workers from Guatemala City, bolted the structure together, then took the tin roof sections from Pastor Reinhold and set them in place. Mario Lopez, the father of Mirza, 7, in whose name the church was being built, hauled sand and cement and filled foundation holes.
Juan Antonio Suchite-Diaz, a small but powerful young man of 18 from Puente Blanco, hauled bucket after bucket of sand to mix the concrete. And Feliciano Lopez Vasquez of Puente Blanco joined the Caal brothers up in the rafters, while Luis Alberto Garcia Ramirez, and Alvaro Gonzalez Lopez, also of Puente Blanco, worked on the foundations.
Shortly after 7 p.m., the work was finished. Mr. Jackson smiled broadly and held his arms out in praise of his team. The villagers turned out in force to see the new church.
The following morning the entire mission, together again, drove out to the village. Carol Stanfield of Buckeystown and Janie Felton of Frederick made it, after spending most of the past 24 hours in bed or throwing up. Ms. Rodriguez-Jackson, who had not been much better off, made it, as did Mary Jane Tabler of Frederick, who had spent the previous day as nursemaid to her daughter, Ms. Felton, and to Ms. Stanfield.
They rode into the village to the enthusiastic greetings of excited children, who chased them all the way to the church site. Much of the village turned out for a medical clinic to get medicine and vitamins and tell Dr. Choe about their ailments.
Pastor Mejia led a rousing prayer.
Later, the congregation from Pastor Mejia’s home church in Zacapa surprised the missionaries by arriving with dozens of plastic chairs for the first worship service. The children sat on the dirt floor. A fabric screen was tied to two columns at the front of the new structure, and after a brief service the mission showed a “Veggie Tales” movie about Jonah and the Whale, the projector powered by Mr. Jackson’s portable generator 30 yards away in a hollow, its sound muted by a thicket of bushes.
Around the church stood most of the men of the village, inside sat the women and children, and the missionaries gathered in the back of the pickup truck. Pastor Reinhold counted 137 people gathered in and around a building Tuesday that wasn’t there Monday morning.