Guatelama

[Tim Bonney]

Many of you would have been hearing about the volcanic eruptions in Guatemala and the loss of life there in the past few days.

Well, First UMC Indianola is supposed to be sending a group to Guatemala and landing at the airport that is about 25 miles from the volcano that was shut down twice this week due to eruptions. I'm attending this trip with 13 other persons, several of them college and high school students.

We are supposed to leave on the 22nd of June. So now we are following the news closely and try to discern if we will be able to make the trip or not.

I thought about a lot of contingencies. Volcanos wasn't one of them.

[Dave Roberts]

Praying for the trip and for the people in harm's way.

[Haruo]

My niece in Guatemala is luckily about two and a half hours from the volcano, and hasn't even suffered ashfall. Will keep your group and the area in prayer.

[Tim Bonney]

Thanks for the prayers! If it wasn’t for the location of the airport, the mission we are going to also has experienced no ash fall. The airport situation is really the iffy thing right now.

[Sandy]

[Tim Bonney]

Yes, we are flying into Guatemala City. Right now there continue to be issues at the volcano that has been erupting but, nothing that seems to be effecting the airport or the mission we are visiting.

We are going to a small village called San Lucas Toliman. The mission is actually run by the Roman Catholic Church.

We finally decided that we would make a final decision by the 18th of June. That is the Monday before we are to leave on the 22nd. I think it is likely we will go and I also think it is possible that a few people will decide to not go. So we may travel with a smaller group.

I’ve done enough international traveling to know that delays can happen and you just have to roll with it as long as it is nothing dangerous.

[Sandy]

Guatemala City has a pretty modern airport, not big, but pretty nice for Central America. I was there when I was in college, for a week, helping build a building for a church in Chichicastenango. It was quite an experience. We rode a commercial bus up there, up narrow mountain roads. The bus was an old American school bus, plywood where the fabric once was on the seats, no glass in any of the windows, including the windshield, and the locals rode 4 to a seat. The electricity in the town went off at 7 p.m. each evening. I will never forget, in a place that seemed like the end of the world, there was a corner grocery store that sold Coke and 7-up. The church building that we built was basically framework covered with corrugated tin. We insulated the interior walls and put up wallboard, they had one window air unit. It seemed that the benches would only hold about 150 people but somehow they crammed 300 in there for the building dedication on Sunday. Wonderful people. Gigantic bugs and lizards.

[Tim Bonney]

The Lord willing, I’ll see the airport on the 22nd of June. We are going to San Lucas Toliman. The mission we are visiting is a Roman Catholic Mission that we have a connection with through Simpson College. There is some Methodist work in the Guatemala City area too.

[KeithE]

[Tim Bonney]

Thanks Keith! Yes, this is a Roman Catholic Mission we are visiting. Simpson College has connections through a previous trip so our church connected up with this location through them. They are doing really good work in medical, agricultural, and several other missional projects in the area. This will be our church’s 4th trip there. The volcano this time complicated our travel plans. But all seems to be coming together.

[Tim Bonney]

I returned yesterday from 10 days in Guatemala. It was a very interesting trip. I learned a lot about the country, their culture, and the poverty in the area. We also had good opportunity to participate in some of the ministry through building projects going on around San Lucas Toliman.

I’m always reminded that US citizens far more rich than we ever realize and that poverty is as much a function of poor political systems as it is economics.

[Dave Roberts]

[Haruo]

The current situation in Guatemala owes much to the US invasion the year I was born. A precursor of 9/11, when we overthrew Chile. Chile has had a bit more luck recovering from our assistance, but they haven't forgotten what we put them through, Pinochet and all that.

[Tim Bonney]

Dave and Haruo, you are both right about US involvement for generations being on of Guatemala's problems. Sadly, also, we forgot our historic involvement in the country and then turn a deaf ear when refugees seek help for a situation that we are in part responsible for.

The characterization of asylum seekers as criminals is such a horrible shame. The people of Guatemala I met are poor but very hard working continuous people who are just trying to do what we are all doing, make a life for us and our families.

[Haruo]

When someone makes it move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
UN and OAS,
They have their place I guess,
But first...
Send the Marines!

Tom Lehrer, 1965, That Was the Year That Was
It's on YouTube. I was raised on it from age 11 on.

[Jim]

The illegal immigrant problem reminds one of the Mariel boat-lift of 1980 (125,000 immigrants), when Castro consigned some of his folks to the evils of the USA. This reminder appeared in TIME in August last year:

In order to save face, Castro put forward the narrative that the Cubans who sought to leave the island were the dregs of society and counter-revolutionaries who needed to be purged because they could never prove productive to the nation. This sentiment, along with reports that he had opened his jails and mental institutes as part of this boatlift, fueled a mythology that the Marielitos were a criminal, violent, sexually deviant and altogether “undesirable” demographic.

In reality, more than 80% of the Marielitos had no criminal past, even in a nation where “criminality” could include acts antithetical to the revolutionary government’s ideals. In addition to roughly 1,500 mentally and physically disabled people, this wave of Cubans included a significant number of sex workers and queer and transgender people—some of whom were part of the minority who had criminal-justice involvement, having been formerly incarcerated because of their gender and sexual transgression.

Castro felt forced to do this account of a period of serious unrest in the citizenry. The current “asylum-seekers” were in no greater danger than were nearly all the Cubans then. Carter simply accepted the Cubans, as democrat leaders want Trump to do now regarding the immigrant-influx, no questions asked with respect to whoever makes it through Mexico to the border. Obama faced the same problem in 2014 and placed people in cage-like facilities, pictures of which have been used by the media as current, an example of fake-news.

[Sandy]

[Dave Roberts]

Jim, you need to check your history. Carter did admit the Mariel Boat Lift people, but the first large Cuban group was accepted by the Eisenhower Administration in 1958-59. If I'm not mistaken, Ike was a Republican, and that exodus from Cuba was much larger.