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Photo by Geoffrey D. Brown
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Find the strength to build
By Geoffrey D. Brown
News-Post Staff
gbrown@fredericknewspost.com
ZACAPA, Guatemala — Pastor Carlos Lopez Mejia tilts his head and looks up with a face that seems as old as the jagged mountains to the south, though he’s only 37. He bounces on the tailgate of a pickup truck on the way home from a day of mission work, his camouflage day pack and machete at his feet. His compact, powerful body jostles with the movement of the truck, which leaves the dirt roads down from Pie de la Cuesta and roars onto the country highway at 70 miles an hour.
He smiles and looks to the roadside, then turns back and lets loose his trademark cry:
“Zacapa!”
The missionaries riding with Pastor Carlos join in his cheers for the hot, busy, wild city that is their home for the week.
“Zacapa, la tierra caliente donde los hombres son valiente!” Pastor Carlos yells. In English the slogan’s poetry is lost: “Zacapa, the hot land where the men are brave.”
Listening to the mournful sound of his voice leading spirituals in an open-air church, it isn’t hard to imagine Pastor Carlos as a 13-year-old conscript at the height of the brutal civil war that tore the country apart and killed 100,000 people. He left the army as a sergeant at 16.
Today, he is the pastor of Church of the Nazarene in Zacapa, a soulful, fervent congregation who soak up his passionate sermons.
His strength and endurance are an inspiration as he helps build a church in a day in the 98-degree heat, as he acts as protector and guide in a seven-hour hike to a mountain village, as he applies muriatic acid to clean the mortar from the face of the new stone wall around the church in Puente Blanco.
Resident missionary Robert Jackson pulls the truck over at a corner, and Pastor Carlos climbs out and swings the pack over his shoulder. He waves the machete at the departing truck and fades into the city that has always been his home.
Scrawny dogs prowl the streets and barely escape the crush of minibuses that spill passengers on every corner at one quetzal a trip — roughly 12 1/2 cents. Families of four and five get around on scooters that snake around minivans, and around every corner whines the high pitch of small-bore motorcycles.
The missionaries from Frederick watch in wonder and amusement. Some scenes are strange to them, and they ask the veteran missionaries what they are seeing.
Many of Zacapa’s streets are bumpy with cobblestones, and speed bumps are everywhere, which is probably a good thing considering how the people drive. Without something to slow the scooters and motorcycles and minibuses and cars, there would be a fatal accident on every corner, no doubt.
On the first trip to Puente Blanco, just outside the city, the trucks swerve to avoid a dog scratching itself in the middle of the road. On one side of the street, a group of cows graze in someone’s front yard; on the other side a gray pig reclines on the sidewalk in front of a shop, a few feet from an open door that reveals a butcher at work. The pig, the missionaries guess, is next.
Zacapa is ice cream shops and electronics stores, churches and bars, butchers, grills, and a market crowded with live chickens, Korean television sets, a blind musician and street-corner preacher, fried bread-fruit, brightly colored string bags, begging children, soccer balls, hats, burrito stands.
Burly men walk with semiautomatic handguns tucked in their belts. Municipal police patrol with assault rifles and are unfazed by the bangs of powerful firecrackers tossed into the street. Private guards tote pistol-grip shotguns at fast-food restaurants and community centers, gated and protected by razor wire. Theft is rampant.
At night, mortars are launched, and gunfire erupts from behind the high-walled compound across from the missionaries’ home. What appears to be an affluent neighborhood is full of rubble and weeds and half-built block houses. The mortar shells — not ordnance but festive, powerful fireworks, according to missionary Robert Jackson — continue day and night for at least three days until perhaps the neighbors run out of ammunition.
The distinction between rich and poor is clear, as are the demarcations of race. A large portion of the population is of Mayan origin, or mixed Mayan and European. Many of the poorest people are Mayans.
Just outside town a white bridge crosses a branch of the Motagua River, a short walk from the Puente Blanco refugee camp, named for the bridge. To get to the camp by motor vehicle, the missionaries pass through a sports complex after waiting for a guard to unlock a gate.
On one trip to Puente Blanco, a guard is armed with a pistol-grip shotgun. Mr. Jackson smiles and chats and the guard seems relaxed, although the group wonders why he’s there. Has there been some trouble? Is someone especially important at the sports complex? They never find out.
Past the gate, as he steers down towards the river and the refugee camp below it, Mr. Jackson stops beside a certain tree, which he calls the manzanote; growing from its branches and trunk are long, cruel spikes. During the war, troops would hang people from the tree and interrogate them. Soldiers would push their prisoners into the spikes if they didn’t hear what they wanted, he said. Contact with the spikes might prove fatal if a lung or artery was punctured, but the death would be slow and painful enough for the torture to yield at least some information.
The war ended 10 years ago.
“This country’s just beginning to get back on its feet,” Mr. Jackson said.