Parramos, Guatemala Spring 2011
TESTING 1..2..3....My arrow is floating around. That can't be good.
Hello there. I'd like to introduce myself: My name is Lynne Goodrich. Most of my friends know me as Pepper. I like that. You may have known me, by one nomen or another, before I disappeared from the airwaves a couple of months back. I live in Guatemala, in a town called Parramos, to which the Lord brought me in 1999, and where he revealed to me that he had a ministry which I was to live. It was a bit of a shock. One would think that in the twelve years(!) since then I'd have gotten used to being a ministry; but I must tell you that it would have been a lot easier to have been given a ministry to live. Of course that would have gone against the tenor of my life as God's child. Once, just once, I'd have liked to be like "most people". Evidently, once again, that's not gonna happen.
Which has made it a bit difficult to communicate about "my ministry"; and forget "goals and objectives"! It's not that I can't develop and write goals and objectives. I'm well trained, as a teacher, to do so. I even like to do it. A lot. But every time I did it for my ministry, I returned to a changed ambiente in Parramos, radically different from that which I'd left. My hope at this time is that, having taken the wrenching decision to let go of living in Colorado, and driven back to Guatemala with a car full of personal items, I will finally be able to better express "the sense of my ministry". And look! Here's a mission statement. (Comments and suggestions are solicited.):
Pasos Hacia La Paz in Parramos.
Mission Statement
It is the mission of this ministry to bring to the children and families of the neighborhood in Parramos, known as Canton La Libertad (also as Zona 3), an experience of the Quaker testimonies of community, equality, intentional simplicity, integrity and peace, through the placement of a Friend in Residence ("Quakerspeak") in that neighborhood. The neighborhood is typical of this rural town and its villages, the municipality of which includes some 10,000 residents. The primary goal of this ministry can be expressed simply as: To provide to this particular neighborhood, through that Friend's presence, an experience of good-neighborliness, as understood among Friends and the defining culture in the United States (reference again the Quaker testimonies).Mission Statement
Pepper's ministry in action
An example of occurrences (out of which develop specific objectives) pertinent to that goal, is: Last week a young man was murdered, execution style, and his mother wounded in the process. His father was a neighbor of mine, so I went to the velorio (kind of a wake). Where I met the mother with the bullet fragments in her arm. Which led to my giving her a ride to the hospital the next day, after the burial, so the docs could operate on her arm. (She was not about to miss her son's funeral.)One contrasting example: Yesterday a remolino blew off half of my roof. A remolino is, as I understand it, the opposite of a tornado - it begins from the ground, up. This was a comparatively small one, also twisting off some of the corrugated metal sheets of my neighbor's roof. It did not affect neighbors on either side, except to the degree that those laminas landed in one family's yard and on another family's roof. Kids and grown-up folks laughingly helped me recover my laminas, brought me a ladder, gave a little advice, and then left, returning to whatever they'd been doing. No one offered to help replace the laminas. Well, here I am at the age of 65, no longer able to be a "tomboy". I cannot afford hire an albanil to make the repairs. I shall have to ask for help (the kids always want to help, but this requires adults). We shall see what happens.
It is currently summer in Guatemala. Summer begins variably, when the rainy season has obviously ended. In the mountain ambience, it brings good hot days - but not necessarily every day - and nights are always cool...or cold. I currently have a sleeping bag and a down comforter on my bed. We experience a number of cool, gray days, which threaten (or promise) rain, but which usually deliver the rain to some destination unknown to us.
A sizeable percentage of adults work in some aspect of agriculture. There are quite a number of large fincas, specializing in one crop such as green beans, broccoli, tomatoes, snow peas, coffee and avocados. Somewhere there's an asparagus finca; but I haven't found it yet. Many people work on fincas or in one of the three processing plants on the edge of town. Many families rent, or may own, plots of land on which they will raise the corn and black beans which, dried, will keep them in tortillas and various bean dishes, for the next year. The past winter brought much too much rain here, and destructive winds. People lost their entire crops. Prices for food, typically went up. And when the price on beans, corn, tomatoes or bananas increases by one or two cents, that feels disastrous to a typical family. Add that to the bad world economy!
This seems to be a good place to stop. I just looked up and outside the cloths that I draped from the new "end" of the roof, next to my bed (which, thankfully still has its lamina ), and discovered that it's daylight. At 6:15 a.m., it's still cold, which of course I feel more; but the sky is a beautiful blue, and I hear the birds chorusing (?). It's a good time for meditation-and-prayer time.
There's much more to tell, of course, after having gotten overtaken by life for the last several months, and not kept in touch; but I don't want to give you a book to read, at least not all at one time!
I hope you're well, enjoying life and experiencing it as an adventure within a reasonably stable context. Until next time, I'm
still......Me
Donations to support Pepper's ministry can be made to
Mountain View Friends Meeting w/Pepper Goodrich's ministry noted
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