Christ’s ‘Amigos’ Offer Helping Hands, To Rebuild Nicaraguan People’s Lives
By PRISCILLA GREEAR, Staff Writer
Published: September 18, 2003
CHINANDEGA, Nicaragua—To a mission team from North Georgia, the scene looked like a shockingly sad and bizarre surrealist painting on hunger. But to Gladys Rivas Cadenas, a mother of three, it was a mundane sight, just a part of her daily life.
As flies swarmed, men standing on a garbage truck thrust their shovels into mounds of trash and pushed it into the Chinandega dump. There, children and adults waited to rummage through the new trash, searching for food and survival items.
One little boy wearing a backpack held a broken umbrella and observed other listless diggers. A woman in an unzipped skirt held a shopping bag and a jean jacket over her head. An elderly woman with a rag around her head said she was looking for firewood. “I’d like to move to another place, but as I’m poor, how is it possible?” she asked.
Nearby lay dead chickens and decomposing cow intestines. Bony cows caked in mud occasionally picked at the trash or licked a person. One man said, “I do this to support myself, to survive. There is no other work.”
Cadenas, a leader in the El Limonal slum next to the dump, which is home to 350 families, somberly walked around the squalid site with mission team members from Amigos for Christ in Buford. She spoke of a committee formed to move families out of the dump, the community working with the Amigos from Georgia and with the Chinandega 2001 Foundation.
Amigos executive director John Bland, a Georgia Tech graduate and former Peace Corps volunteer, led the missionaries to the dump to show the urgency of the next Amigos project.
Bland, a youth minister at Prince of Peace Church, Buford, first took youth on mission trips to Nicaragua in April 1999 after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch. After seeing the “incredible need” they felt compelled to stay involved. He later sold his share in a computer software business he had co-founded so he could start Amigos in 1999 as a nonprofit relief organization.
Amigos supports the work of Italian missionary Father Marco Dessy in Nicaragua, who directs the Chinandega Foundation. Projects they’ve completed in the past three years include a free surgical hospital, medical clinic, primary and secondary schools, and community water systems. Amigos has a special focus on rural development projects. Only three percent of its budget goes to operating costs, and the group has so far provided over $12 million in aid.
The mission trip was held July 26-Aug. 3 and was the fifth one Amigos led to Nicaragua this year. The 46-member group included people from parishes ranging from St. Mark’s Church, Clarkesville, to Sacred Heart Church, Milledgeville, and youth and teachers from Sacred Heart School in New Orleans.
Bland, his wife Sabrina and their three children spent June and July in Nicaragua, and John’s mother Lupita, of Mexican descent, came along as an interpreter.
“Faith without works is nothing. We want to immerse ourselves in their lives and have our hearts suffer with them and show them our faith” by our service, said Bland in an interview at the dump with FOX-5 anchor Russ Spencer, who participated with daughter Maria.
Said missionary Eric Hampsey, an engineering doctoral student at Tulane, as he absorbed the pungent images, “It’s a pretty incredible experience. Seeing the situation they’re in firsthand makes you realize how bad it really is. These are all God’s children. I don’t believe God intended for anyone to live in some of the conditions we’ve seen at the dump. We need to do everything we can, whether donating money or ourselves on these trips and most of all (through) prayer.”
The team walked along dirt roads, where runoff seeps when the nearby septic tank overflows, and passed by shacks made of plastic, metal and cardboard with dirt floors and no electricity or running water. Many suffer from respiratory infections. Cadenas said men find work in the sugar cane fields earning $2 a day, but that is only a few months a year. She’s better off than some, selling perfumes, cigars and bras for a company where she gets 10 percent of the profit.
As missionaries began working on a ditch to collect sewage runoff, she returned to the dark one and a half room shack where she lives with her husband and three children. A devout Catholic, she smiled as she pointed to a Holy Family figurine, saying, “That is my family.” The stench of burning trash wafted through the air. Cadenas said the community is desperate to get out of there and they pray to God and the Virgin for deliverance.
Her youngest, as ducklings and chicks roamed around his feet and clothes hung to dry on barbed wire, turned on a cartoon on their TV operated by a battery, and said, looking up at the reporter, “I’m sick. I have a cough and feel like vomiting.” Cadenas explained, “He thinks he’s talking to the doctor.”
The government relocated many people to El Limonal after Hurricane Mitch caused a mudslide that killed 3,000 near Chinandega alone. After the government moved survivors to Limonal, Amigos and a couple of other organizations built some 300 houses at Santa Matilde, bringing life and vegetation to a barren area. They didn’t stop there, next erecting a school and health clinic. Some originally chose not to move, fearful that there was nothing better than the rent-free shacks at the dump.
Cadenas’ hopes are now set on 51 acres purchased by Amigos called Santa Catalina to relocate families, where the mission team gathered later that day for a ground-breaking ceremony. As temperatures crept over 100, Bland explained on the dusty field that the plan is to build 160-170 houses there.
“The only way we’re going to get this done is to tell the story of how this can happen,” he said. “Everything we’ve done at Santa Matilde we’d like to replicate. Take a good look at this place as it is now and hopefully in five years it’s going to be full of people and kids and better lives.”
He asked God to help the Limonal families to “hang in there.”
“We know you led us here for a reason and this is going to be hard work, but we know that when you guide us all things are possible,” he prayed.
Santa Matilde Families Savor Clean Water, Garden Plots
While they may make Habitat for Humanity houses look like mansions, the cement homes of Santa Matilde are decent and have four rooms, latrines and vegetable gardens. It’s a subdivision of sorts for the 3,000 residents, with a mini-taxi service of carts pulled by bikes. Residents still speak of problems like no furniture or needed medicine at the clinic, but things are better.
Missionaries spent four days working alongside locals on the community school, mixing cement and building a foundation for a new secondary school, painting classrooms and sanding tile floors, gulping down water and Powerade.
Hampsey was struck by the contrast between the despair at El Limonal and the joy at Santa Matilde, where children fought for spots in photographs. His most joyful moments were playing with the children and giving them simple things like his sunglasses and “just seeing their faces light up.”
Josue Martinez is one who, these days, has a lot more to hope for. In sixth grade at 15, he smiled shyly as he visited with missionary Catherine Shreves and gave her a tour of his home on row Q, as his brothers followed him. He walked into the sparsely furnished rooms, saying that his favorite subjects are math and science and that he assists his teacher with tutoring and wants to go to the Instituto Chichigalpa and be a teacher.
The garden, separated from the open kitchen area by a plastic sheet, has everything from corn to mango, and the shower is made of plastic draped in a circle, into which the hose is pulled when running water is available—usually two hours daily. Most of their chickens were in the coop, while one cocky bird strutted through the visitors.
His mother, Claudina Martinez Zamora, who has a first-grade education and sells tortillas, later came home, relieved to have scheduled free hernia surgery through the Amigos hospital. She has had the condition for over a year, but no money for treatment. Even now, “It’s difficult. There’s no money to get around,” she said. Nevertheless, recalling the “very ugly” conditions at the dump, she said “things are good now thanks to God.”
Her husband, a bricklayer, was grateful for materials from Amigos with which he helped build their home. “You all help us more than anyone helps the poor. The government doesn’t help,” he said.
The community school provides Josue and other students a balanced meal, cooked by mothers. That day youth gobbled up rice, beans and tomato pasta with cheese, a refreshing sight in their uniforms of white shirts and navy pants and skirts as toddlers walked around outside in their underwear and bare feet.
The feeding program funded by Amigos for 375 students started last April after Marist School students from Atlanta came and built the kitchen. Amigos covers the $900 per month cost for meals, as well as teachers’ salaries.
“If they don’t come to school, they don’t get a meal and that’s why attendance is up,” Bland said. “This is by far and away the best meal they’ll get (all day), so it’s worked out good.”
“Education is everything” in terms of breaking the poverty cycle and fostering self-sufficiency, Bland said, yet many communities in Nicaragua don’t have school buildings, desks, materials or teachers because of a lack of funds.
On one outside school wall, Andrea Nutt, a member of St. Mark’s Church, Clarkesville, steadily painted a colorful mural as children observed and asked questions. The artwork promotes education and Christianity, with images of the Sacred Heart, a rainbow, globe and the Garden of Eden, and a teacher writing numbers floating off a chalkboard. Nutt, 22, studies representative painting in Italy and hopes her “creative tangent” offers “a moment of relief, hope and fantasy, or maybe (something) more real.”
“Sometimes when you see things outside ordinary life it’s more real than what you think is real,” she said.
On her second mission trip, the experience “makes me find myself because we can now see more clearly without the distraction of comfort,” Nutt said. “It is easier to see a soul … People present themselves with greater humility. It’s easier to see love and it’s easier to see God because there is less material distraction.”
Community leader Felix Montoya, wearing a baseball cap and Nike shirt, sat by a new water well and said he’s deeply grateful for the work of Nutt, the Amigos and other American aid organizations.
“We have dignified houses and our own gardens and chickens. We have a school, a health center, sewing workshop,” he said. “In addition to potable water we would like to have electricity. We are soliciting support so that this dream can become reality.”
“Today, our children are already forgetting the tragedy of Hurricane Mitch. They go to school with hope to grow in this nice environment we now have.”
Resident Ramon Baca will teach residents how to cultivate their gardens through better farming techniques when he completes his college degree in agriculture in December. He will begin working for the Chinandega Foundation, in exchange for the tuition assistance he received. Baca is a role model, as he is the first from his family to complete school, a “dream come true.” He became determined to overcome poverty growing up sharing one bedroom with nine siblings.
Future plans include an agricultural cooperative where residents can bring vegetables or handmade crafts to sell.
Other projects are those in the Betania complex, the missionaries’ home base where they slept in volunteer quarters. In the vocational school there students learn special skills like sewing and woodworking, with proceeds from items sold benefiting programs. At dusk, neighborhood children play basketball, swing and hang out in the recreation area. One béisbol fan said his favorite team was the Phillies because of Nicaraguan player Vicente Padilla, who lives in Chinandega. A music conservatory is being built here where boys with the Getsemani Boys’ Choir, which will tour Atlanta in October to raise support for projects, and others can study. Missionaries attended Mass in a Spanish-style church, with beige tile floors and wood benches and a high ceiling, and relaxed on the student-carved rocking chairs on the porch, with two cages of chatty parrots.
During the week they also went shopping for crafts in Chinandega, a city without tall buildings and a sense of being left behind where anomalies exist like stray horses chomping grass and horse-drawn wagons move alongside Toyotas. Sampling local foods, they sucked the mushy centers out of grape-like fruits, plucked mangos from trees and ate fried plantains.
Summer Family Immersion In Nicaragua
In an interview at dusk on a fun day at the beach, John and Sabrina Bland, both easygoing and perspicacious combatants of poverty, spoke of how they apply the approach they learned together in the Peace Corps in Paraguay to “work yourself out of a job” by empowering locals to become self-sufficient, although the need is endless in rural areas.
“We’re not trying to convert them but help them optimize their condition with the resources they have and the resources we have,” said Sabrina.
Said Bland, “We’ve really been able to get things moving. Being present here and working as a team has been phenomenal.”
He spoke of the importance of their work digging wells, as “one of the biggest health issues is lack of clean water.” In some communities villagers must travel two miles to the nearest river, sometimes contaminated by heavy use of pesticides. Four new wells were drilled at one farm this year to provide drinking water and an irrigation project to support an orphanage. Bland’s friend Russ Turco, an engineer, designed a submersible pump, which is enabling them to establish an irrigation system to grow crops not just in the rainy season but year-round. On their wish list is a $50,000 well-drilling machine to break through thick rock.
“My focus is to be able to provide crops for them for the six months that they normally wouldn’t be able to. We’ve done that at another farm and it provides food for a lot of the feeding centers,” Bland continued.
Added Turco, “This is kind of an experiment in agriculture because we’ve been wanting to get into drip irrigation.”
The Blands feel that their shared “odd experience” has strengthened their family relations and made their children, who attended school in Nicaragua, stronger and less influenced by peer pressure. Their daughter Annie, 13, agreed it was “kind of weird.”
“I didn’t like it a ton because I wasn’t with my friends. (But) I think it’s pretty cool because not many people can say they’ve spent the whole summer in Nicaragua,” she said. “It makes me more thankful for the stuff I have. When I get in the shower (at home) I stay in forever … I hear some of the kids (in the United States) complain about dumb stuff and I’m like, ‘O-K.’”
A favorite summer memory was visiting with a special friend there. “She has like painted her house and grown fruits and stuff and she is really sweet to me … You can make a difference in somebody’s life by coming down here and by being a friend,” Annie said. “I think it was a big thing for my Dad to give up his other job. It was a lot different, but I really like this job a lot, a ton better than what he used to do because I get to meet new people and go new places. This is what my Dad loves to do.”
While raising money to run Amigos is challenging, Bland has found that, with a foundation stepping in to cover operating costs and having donated office space, “God provides for exactly what we need” for his family.
Amigos trips touch everybody in a unique way and he hopes that missionaries will consider using their skills and resources to help and “take away (from it) whatever God planted in their heart, to do good.”
“He changes a person. You realize God sent you down for a purpose, to have you come and see the truth of the amount of need that exists,” Bland said.
Computer Analyst Hears Call In Chinandega
Missionary Hampsey felt God’s call to come on the trip after hearing the Getsemani choir sing at Tulane last fall.
“As much as this trip has meant to me, I feel I’ve been led to do more, whether helping raise money or awareness or getting other Methodist people involved,” he said. “I feel I’m definitely changed. All the things I kind of strive for in life, a big screen TV, expensive car—being here they just all seem so insignificant.”
Billy Perez, who was in Nicaragua for three weeks on his third mission trip, said the trip helps him to focus more on serving.
“You get a new perspective each time you come. It makes you feel good helping others,” said Billy, 17, adding that his Spanish is getting a lot better. “I’d like to stay longer and more often. Every day it makes me want to go to medical school and help people … It’s the most rewarding seeing the look on people’s faces once their problem or sickness has been cured.”
His mother Patty Perez’ dream is to work full time for Amigos as a fund-raiser and outreach coordinator, if she can find a sponsor for her salary.
“Christ just opened my heart up and spoke to me in what he wanted me to do … It’s all led up to this,” said Perez, a trip leader and computer system analyst. “I was there when we moved people out of the dump. We’ve given them a reason (to hope). You see children that didn’t smile now smiling and having a future. You see lush gardens and more opportunities for them. I want to bring some life into these people.”
“The most difficult thing we as people (have) to do is just surrender to God and trust he’ll take care of us, but at this stage in my life I can trust in God just to do something that is so gratifying.”
A youth ministry volunteer at Prince of Peace and a single parent, she finds it an “amazing ministry” to share with Billy and other teens, watching them grow spiritually and emotionally and return each year.
“To see (Billy) in an orphanage with a handicapped child in his lap, playing soccer with the kids in the villages, it’s the best. It’s just the best gift you can give your children to open their eyes to the struggle and suffering of other people so that when they grow up they’re compassionate.”
Perez, who moved to Buford in 2000, had thought about moving back to Indiana to be near her father after her mother died in a car accident, but when Bland talked her into making a mission trip she felt compelled to stay in Georgia and serve through the Amigos. Her mother always supported all her ministries.
“Before she died we had talked about me being a public speaker ... She pretty much reassured me that is something I’d be great at,” she said.
In the slum of El Limonal, Cadenas is grateful that Perez and other Amigos are working for the forgotten poor of Nicaragua. She has a dream of escaping the dump and having a home.
As they cultivate their gardens, couples in Santa Matilde like Carlo Alberto Betanco and his wife Juana Baldioseda Rafael Salazar are profoundly content.
Sitting in his backyard, Betanco, 64, said that this house is the nicest place in which they’ve ever lived, gratefully showing his basket of eggs and mighty corn stalks in his garden.
“I feel at peace,” he said. “This is a paradise that you all have given us.” |
