If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
–Emily Dickinson
I realize that it's been over two months since you've heard from me, and I apologize. All sorts of routine and crises have gotten in the way, but I feel our Bolivian community has come out alive and stronger on the other side.
About two months ago, our two most experienced Bolivian staff (a married couple) shocked us by resigning. To evaluate where we stood, we closed the Casa de Esperanza for a month and spent the time in prayer, fasting, and receiving advice from other ministers in La Paz.
In a strange twist of timing, during this month I was eight hours away, at language school in Cochabamba, “the land of eternal spring.” While my teammates were fasting in El Alto, I was feasting on meals prepared for me by the Bolivian family I lived with. While they prayed, I played. Just kidding. I kept contact with them, read Bible passages along with them, and prayed for wisdom and future direction. However, most of my days were spent studying Spanish, “cleaning up the smudgy places,” as I told one teacher.
I have long wanted to go back to language school. My Spanish was adequate, but I craved fluency. I wanted to feel comfortable teaching and sharing my faith in Spanish, and I wasn't at that level. “The Spirit does not speak in just one language, and Christians must not impose theirs. Language is sacred, intimately linked to culture…This new language is not always given in a flash of the Spirit, alas!” (Jean Vanier, The Broken Body) To fully share Christ, as I must, I needed deeper understanding of Spanish, which will in turn gain me a deep understanding of Bolivia and its culture.
For example, one day my Bolivian host mom asked me if I wanted haddox for supper. “Haddox?” I thought. “I've never even seen that word in Spanish. I wonder if it's an Aymaran word.” I looked it up in the dictionary. Nope.
“Tell me about this haddox,” I asked her. “Is it common in Bolivia?”
“YOU know,” she said, frustrated. “HADDOX. You eat them in the USA.”
We had hot dogs for dinner.
What a wonderful time. As one of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen, wrote in his diary when he attended the same language school, “There are frequent moments during which I say to myself: 'I will never master this language.' But the same experience is also refreshing. I can be a student again.” I felt the same relief. Six weeks break from the debilitating altitude of El Alto. Six weeks of pure study (well, let's be honest: study punctuated by pizza and coffee breaks, hikes and volleyball, exploring and worship). It was a gift I thank my community for.
But the week before I was scheduled to return, during the last week of our community prayer, violence and tragedy and all that good stuff swept El Alto. I got a call from Heather who was in our center, watching from the fourth story a protest play itself out in the Red Light District. They were dragging things out of the brothels and burning them, she said. She could see smoke and hear people chanting. She had been the one to call the police two hours earlier. The police had seemingly baby-stepped the 7 blocks from their station to the protest, and two hours later they were doing little more than crowd control.
What happened, as I saw it on the news in Cochabamba the next day at breakfast, was that the "Good Neighbor Society" got tired of the bars and brothels and the violence and delinquency they brought to their tidy little neighborhood. So they stormed the streets in broad daylight, banging down doors and walls of brothels and bars, dragging out furniture, mattresses, TVs and DVD players, and burning everything they could get their hands on, including one of the brothel owner's cars. Some of the girls came to our center to hide and pray and wait for Andy to drive them home. I couldn't breath as I watched the video footage from 350 kilometers away, in my middle-class host family's house. I saw one of my friends dragged from the brothel and her sweater torn off of her as she tried to fight through the crowd and get away. There was a bestial glee on the faces of the mob.
In response, my friends who prostitute went on a hunger strike. They refused to have their weekly medical checkups and STD tests. Some sewed their lips together to confirm the hunger strike. Andy and I went back to the streets last week for the first time since the violence. The girls were working, but most of them stayed on the street until they had a client, then entered the brothel. There was no raucous music, no disco lights. Even the clients edged along the streets nervously. Every friend who Andy and I talked to shivered and shook their heads pessimistically about the situation.
The next day, the sex worker union held their monthly meeting in our center. As a kind of payment for letting them use our space, they let our social worker Nilda share a short message from the Gospel of Matthew.
“No one knows what you're suffering right now,” she said. “No one in the world can truly sympathize-except Jesus Christ. Once He looked at Jerusalem and started crying because He loved the people who lived there so much, and He knew that in a few years they would be suffering as their homes were destroyed around them. And right now, He's crying with you. He longs to keep you safe, 'as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.'”
Nilda's poignant message is the reason for the bird reference in the poem prefacing this letter. We're hoping that routine won't return too quickly to our little segment of the world. God has a way of using these shakedowns to shake up people's souls, and that's my prayer for our friends who prostitute.
May the peace of God reign in our hearts and in the world,
Cara Strauss