Building Stoves, Healing hearts
Worthless Lumps of Clay
After a buffet breakfast on the Hotel Tolimán deck overlooking Lake Atitlán, ten of our group piled into a van already laden with trowels, buckets, and bottles of purified water. It was a calm day. The smoke from morning fires cloaked the waters and choked the otherwise crisp, clear air. We drove up the cobbled main street and then past the ATM and town square where shoeshine boys already circled up and down the slide and ladder, their boxes waiting for chance customers on their way to work. We wove between stalls and wagons frying tortillas and simmering beans, and around vendors lining up their black market Nikes among the daily greetings of neighbors and competitors on the streets where much of their living takes place.
Soon we paused in front of a wide opening in a sliding metal gate. I expected a driveway or alley, but instead we turned onto the town soccer field. (“Field” is a bit of a misnomer, at least for “north of the border” eyes that might imagine recently mown turf or grass worn thin by pounding feet, quick turns, and slide tackles. This was a large expanse of thirsty dirt, bordered by stadium seats and two netless goals.) Where were we going? I thought we were building stoves this morning.
We rounded the stadium at the far end of the “pitch,” as it’s known among soccer insiders, and stopped just in time to see two women and a small girl headed for market. They were dressed in handwoven cortes, long wrapped skirts, and embroidered blouses known as huípiles.Each balanced proportionately, impossibly huge baskets of wares on her head.
Two elongated sheds stood on each side of the barren lot. Built of discarded planks of wood and corrugated metal, they huddled beneath the eaves and hugged the ribs of the buildings next door as if they were trying to hide but had nowhere to go. Jose Luis and Sergio, our Habitat crew leaders and stove experts, informed us that these sheds were the homes of our partner families with whom we would build today.
Don Edgar greeted us. Shoeless in a cowboy hat and weathered jeans that matched his hands, we knew he had worked long and hard years on the volcanic hillsides near San Lucas Tolimán. He couldn’t stand for long, but welcomed us to his one room home whose dirt floor peeked from between three beds and a tall chest jammed with the material lifetime of Don Edgar, his wife, and their son, Carlos.
Two weeks earlier, they had been thrown off the land where Don Edgar had worked for sixty years. The landowner had died and his sons no longer had any use for him and his family. “Sixty years and nothing,” he said.
Nonetheless, they had found this stamp of soil and built their new home (renting or squatting, we never knew), and now here we were—“God’s blessing,” in Don Edgar’s words—here to build a smokeless stove that would give Don Edgar’s lungs a chance to heal, and free time for Carlos to find work. Now, Carlos spends most of the day’s hours in remote areas on the mountain, cutting and carrying the wood needed to cook their salted tortillas and rice.
Don Edgar offered to help us, but he and Carlos had already dug the clay and formed the adobe bricks. We told him to rest while we shoveled and stirred and poured. Soon, he was snoring.
* * *
Our country has a long and often ugly history in Guatemala. Our companies and government, during thirty years of civil war ending in 1996, often supplied the money and the arms to massacre whole villages of people, to shoot all the men and boys of a town right before the eyes of their mothers and wives and sisters. Don Edgar and his family were some of the lucky ones. Over 250,000 died and 45,000 people, mostly Mayan, were“disappeared.” Many of the villagers were caught in the crossfire of paramilitary groups, government forces (80% of the atrocities have been attributed to the government, according to a 2010 Reuters article), and guerrilla fighters. The campesinos had wanted to grow coffee, corn, and beans, but instead they grew fear, desperation, and anger.
Many of these same villages surround Lake Atitlán, including San Lucas Tolimán, the municipality where my husband and I worked in June and December of 2011 and again in the summer of 2013. We accompanied a group from First Presbyterian Church in Bend, Oregon. While we were there, Clive Rainey, Habitat for Humanity’s first volunteer and longest working employee, explained that we had a chance to help God redeem these lands, to reform tools of war into tools of peace, to help Guatemala’s indigenous poor transform lumps of worthless clay, mixed with the blood of their murdered relatives and the sweat of their own brows, into adobe stoves that could save their children and themselves from respiratory disease and hunger, that could save their forests from depletion, and save their homes and lives from landslides.(The hillsides were being stripped of the trees needed to cook over open fires whose smoke filled the lungs of all those nearby.The denuded hills were subject to landslides during the heavy rains of summer.) We could restore community and respect between our countries and be part of a resurrection of love and hope.
Pretty words, perhaps, but no less reality…and this hope—not without precedence.
What we see as useless, damaged, unworthy, and weak is often what God can resurrect and restore and then use to redeem, heal, and transform. An event or a life that we see as tragic, unjust, or devastating, can be worked for good by God.
For two years, my daughter worked in an organization that advocates for sexually trafficked teen girls. Many of the employees were themselves previously trafficked, but have survived, found healing, and are being used to bring that new life to others. Likewise, we often hear of former drug addicts or gang members doing the same. Similarly, a parent who has lost a child can comfort and accompany others back to a meaningful life.
I recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. imagining the day when “the sons of slaves and the sons of former slave owners would sit down together at the table of peace.” No doubt he was thinking back to the Old Testament scriptures that prophesized a day when“swords would be beaten into ploughshares.”
In the dirt and fields of Guatemala, this became a reality during our most recent visits. Each time, twenty-one neophyte masons, along with the recipient families, built six-seven stoves and two homes so that three generations of Guatemalans could breathe better, could keep the summer rains from rising to the levels of their beds, could focus on sending their children to school instead of to the coffee fields and the hillsides in order to keep a roof over their heads and a fire burning under their tortillas.
In Guatemala, we were able to see stained and worthless clay transformed. We were able to see the children of warriors and the victims of war build a stove, pour mortar, and become agents for peace. Thank God this transformation is possible, for if it were not, what hope would there be for me, for you, or for any of us? By the power of God in us, we can be both the redeemed . . . and the agents of God’s redemption.
Copyright Sue Nell Phillips, Bend, Oregon, 2013
After a buffet breakfast on the Hotel Tolimán deck overlooking Lake Atitlán, ten of our group piled into a van already laden with trowels, buckets, and bottles of purified water. It was a calm day. The smoke from morning fires cloaked the waters and choked the otherwise crisp, clear air. We drove up the cobbled main street and then past the ATM and town square where shoeshine boys already circled up and down the slide and ladder, their boxes waiting for chance customers on their way to work. We wove between stalls and wagons frying tortillas and simmering beans, and around vendors lining up their black market Nikes among the daily greetings of neighbors and competitors on the streets where much of their living takes place.
Soon we paused in front of a wide opening in a sliding metal gate. I expected a driveway or alley, but instead we turned onto the town soccer field. (“Field” is a bit of a misnomer, at least for “north of the border” eyes that might imagine recently mown turf or grass worn thin by pounding feet, quick turns, and slide tackles. This was a large expanse of thirsty dirt, bordered by stadium seats and two netless goals.) Where were we going? I thought we were building stoves this morning.
We rounded the stadium at the far end of the “pitch,” as it’s known among soccer insiders, and stopped just in time to see two women and a small girl headed for market. They were dressed in handwoven cortes, long wrapped skirts, and embroidered blouses known as huípiles.Each balanced proportionately, impossibly huge baskets of wares on her head.
Two elongated sheds stood on each side of the barren lot. Built of discarded planks of wood and corrugated metal, they huddled beneath the eaves and hugged the ribs of the buildings next door as if they were trying to hide but had nowhere to go. Jose Luis and Sergio, our Habitat crew leaders and stove experts, informed us that these sheds were the homes of our partner families with whom we would build today.
Don Edgar greeted us. Shoeless in a cowboy hat and weathered jeans that matched his hands, we knew he had worked long and hard years on the volcanic hillsides near San Lucas Tolimán. He couldn’t stand for long, but welcomed us to his one room home whose dirt floor peeked from between three beds and a tall chest jammed with the material lifetime of Don Edgar, his wife, and their son, Carlos.
Two weeks earlier, they had been thrown off the land where Don Edgar had worked for sixty years. The landowner had died and his sons no longer had any use for him and his family. “Sixty years and nothing,” he said.
Nonetheless, they had found this stamp of soil and built their new home (renting or squatting, we never knew), and now here we were—“God’s blessing,” in Don Edgar’s words—here to build a smokeless stove that would give Don Edgar’s lungs a chance to heal, and free time for Carlos to find work. Now, Carlos spends most of the day’s hours in remote areas on the mountain, cutting and carrying the wood needed to cook their salted tortillas and rice.
Don Edgar offered to help us, but he and Carlos had already dug the clay and formed the adobe bricks. We told him to rest while we shoveled and stirred and poured. Soon, he was snoring.
* * *
Our country has a long and often ugly history in Guatemala. Our companies and government, during thirty years of civil war ending in 1996, often supplied the money and the arms to massacre whole villages of people, to shoot all the men and boys of a town right before the eyes of their mothers and wives and sisters. Don Edgar and his family were some of the lucky ones. Over 250,000 died and 45,000 people, mostly Mayan, were“disappeared.” Many of the villagers were caught in the crossfire of paramilitary groups, government forces (80% of the atrocities have been attributed to the government, according to a 2010 Reuters article), and guerrilla fighters. The campesinos had wanted to grow coffee, corn, and beans, but instead they grew fear, desperation, and anger.
Many of these same villages surround Lake Atitlán, including San Lucas Tolimán, the municipality where my husband and I worked in June and December of 2011 and again in the summer of 2013. We accompanied a group from First Presbyterian Church in Bend, Oregon. While we were there, Clive Rainey, Habitat for Humanity’s first volunteer and longest working employee, explained that we had a chance to help God redeem these lands, to reform tools of war into tools of peace, to help Guatemala’s indigenous poor transform lumps of worthless clay, mixed with the blood of their murdered relatives and the sweat of their own brows, into adobe stoves that could save their children and themselves from respiratory disease and hunger, that could save their forests from depletion, and save their homes and lives from landslides.(The hillsides were being stripped of the trees needed to cook over open fires whose smoke filled the lungs of all those nearby.The denuded hills were subject to landslides during the heavy rains of summer.) We could restore community and respect between our countries and be part of a resurrection of love and hope.
Pretty words, perhaps, but no less reality…and this hope—not without precedence.
What we see as useless, damaged, unworthy, and weak is often what God can resurrect and restore and then use to redeem, heal, and transform. An event or a life that we see as tragic, unjust, or devastating, can be worked for good by God.
For two years, my daughter worked in an organization that advocates for sexually trafficked teen girls. Many of the employees were themselves previously trafficked, but have survived, found healing, and are being used to bring that new life to others. Likewise, we often hear of former drug addicts or gang members doing the same. Similarly, a parent who has lost a child can comfort and accompany others back to a meaningful life.
I recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. imagining the day when “the sons of slaves and the sons of former slave owners would sit down together at the table of peace.” No doubt he was thinking back to the Old Testament scriptures that prophesized a day when“swords would be beaten into ploughshares.”
In the dirt and fields of Guatemala, this became a reality during our most recent visits. Each time, twenty-one neophyte masons, along with the recipient families, built six-seven stoves and two homes so that three generations of Guatemalans could breathe better, could keep the summer rains from rising to the levels of their beds, could focus on sending their children to school instead of to the coffee fields and the hillsides in order to keep a roof over their heads and a fire burning under their tortillas.
In Guatemala, we were able to see stained and worthless clay transformed. We were able to see the children of warriors and the victims of war build a stove, pour mortar, and become agents for peace. Thank God this transformation is possible, for if it were not, what hope would there be for me, for you, or for any of us? By the power of God in us, we can be both the redeemed . . . and the agents of God’s redemption.
Copyright Sue Nell Phillips, Bend, Oregon, 2013