Mission in TODAY
Vol. XVIII x No. 4
APRIL-MAY 2006
Mexico
Disciples in the school of the poor
By Jose Antonio M. Rebelo
Comboni Missionary
It has been four years now since the Comboni missionaries have assumed two missions among the indigenous mixtecos in the mountains of Guerrero, (ironically, the State to which the world-known seaside resort of Acapulco belongs): one in Metlatónoc, the poorest municipality of the Mexican Republic, and another in the neighboring municipality of Cochoapa. Their humble conviction is that they have a lot to learn from these people and could even be evangelized by them.
Metlatónoc and Cochoapa are in the heart of the mountains of the State of Guerrero, 12 hours away from the capital, Mexico City. To get to these places, one has to endure 8 hours of bus ride until Tlapa, the region’s main city which is also the Episcopal headquarters, and another four hours in a pick-up van “eating the dust” of the road that blurs the sight, obstructs the nostrils and penetrates the clothes and shoes.
During the rainy season, it takes even longer to cover the 70-kilometer dust road which separates Tlapa from the mission stations. The risks brought about by fogs and landslides are also higher: each step can lead to a dangerous trap and the vegetation-bare mountain can crumble under heavy rains. One has to be armed with spades and picks to get through the way.
The long and winding road through the mountains seems endless. It goes up to almost 3,000 meters in altitude and comes down to 1,000 meters, always sinuous, without any protective rails on the sides. Rather than contemplating the picturesque scenery, one has to constantly fix his eyes at the giddy precipices where death is seemingly on the lurk. To miss the road is to fall to death.
The beginning of the future
The Comboni missionaries arrived at Tlapa on October 10, 2001, the death anniversary of their founder, St. Daniel Comboni. They reached the place that even Mexicans defined as “an unknown, magical, attractive world.” They decided to get acquainted with the language and the people’s culture first for a period of three months. (The diocese has three ethnic groups: nahuas, tlapanecos and mixtecos.) They opted to learn the mixteco language.
The missionaries vividly remember how they “studied the people’s daily life, listened to their diversified idioms, and became aware of their racial discrimination and domestic violence.” In the process, they also came to know “of the exploitation which the employees were subjected to, increasing impoverishment, denudation of the mountain and of their lack of reforestation programs.” They likewise learned of the diocesan project that “announces the Kingdom and fights for justice.”
The kind of evangelization called for among the indigenous was one that embraces the whole aspects of life – socio-economic, cultural, political, and religious. “This was how our style of evangelizing was molded.”
The new missionary paradigm became: “To let the poor and faithful people evangelize us with their ways of believing and loving, of enduring and prophesizing, by their community life, popular struggle for autonomy and by exercising power through obedience. They are a varied people – with different languages but rich in solidarity and fraternity. “We found them so welcoming that we felt the warmth of brotherhood so alive in the mountains.”
Tough reality
On February 1, 2002, the missionaries climbed the mountains to the lands of their dreams, Metlatónoc and Cochoapa. On the way, they contemplated the nature: doleful, wounded, crushed; and the water of the river, limpid. Recalling their dream, they now confess: “The passion for the mission was the only motive for us to penetrate these naked, destroyed and maimed mountains.”
Metlatónoc is 2,500 meters above sea level. It has an extreme climate that goes from icy cold to scorching heat. It comprises 130 mixteco-language communities, almost abandoned but with a great desire to deepen the Word of God sown through the centuries (beginning in 1600 by the Augustinian missionaries). The people are scarcely evangelized.
Maize, beans, pumpkins and poppies are what the people grow. That is subsistence agriculture. The great majority rear goats, chicken, turkeys and sometimes a cow or a horse. The forest is being destroyed. Lack of arable land compels peasants to burn down trees to make space for new fields on the slopes of the mountains.
The needs are innumerable. For example, there is not even one hospital in the whole mountain; there are only small clinics to treat minor illnesses. Children leave school and teachers find it difficult to bear the rough mountain life. During the wet season, the muddy roads make it impossible to reach the farthest villages. Cement houses are few. More common are houses made of wood, adobe, cardboard and zinc. The indigenous life was invaded by political parties which caused deep divisions among the populations.
How to evangelize?
The Comboni missionaries arrived incognito at Cochoapa, their first station. They found “a dull people, confined to their mysterious and silent world.” The parish house built by the people was spacious but unfinished. It lacked windows and rooms (which is still true today). For one year, they all slept in one room.
They were welcomed by the Daughters of Charity sisters, who have lived there for four years, and offered them soup. In the evening, shivering with cold, they had a cup of tea together with boiled eggs and a delicious Portuguese cheese offered by a colleague. On the following days, they ate typical tortillas that the people started bringing them.
They became more aware of the harsh living conditions of the poor indigenous. “The reality is so distressing that it can make God cry. There are no jobs. Sicknesses kill the children and the elderly. Mothers giving birth also expire due to the absence of medical care. Lodging is precarious: there are many wooden houses, with patched cardboard pieces and roofs of corrugated iron. Garbage is everywhere. Men drink too much. Children do not go to school for lack of teachers. Women are discriminated upon. Fear paralyzes the community. There are political and religious divisions.”
An alternative is to escape for the northern states or the United States of America. Emigration is the most relevant phenomenon which threatens the culture, compels the children to leave school and separates families temporarily or definitely. The migrants’ remittances can be noticed in the families’ buying a car, in the construction of a cement house or in the opening of a small business.
The missionaries discovered also that “feasts are full of symbols – candles, flowers, incense, and music – signs of a resistance that seems to be falling apart.”
Such analysis brings them to raise some disturbing questions: “How to evangelize these indigenous? How to announce God’s love to tired faces of children who do not have a place in society, with no right to school; to youth without job opportunities? How to proclaim life in the middle of death, of every kind of needs, and lack of hope?”
For the missionaries, it was clear that “religion should be a factor, an instrument of liberation, knowing that the God of life wants us to stand firm.”
Walking barefoot
They admit knowing “some things about indigenous life, but superficially.” They have not yet really “experienced God from the people’s perspective.“ They have heard “about their pain, but they do not know their hope.” Therefore, they affirm that “the missionary inculturation is to experience God amidst and through the plight of the indigenous people.”
They got this option from the biblical experience of Moses, reported in the book of Exodus. Moses was an urban privileged man, educated and protected in the palace of the Pharaoh. Belonging to the upper class, he need not get involved with the poor. One day, seeing how his “brothers” were mistreated by the Egyptians, he changed his heart, fled from the Pharaoh and went to live in the desert among the marginalized. The missionaries concluded: “We, too, are children of the city but, one day, we opted to come and look after God’s flock in the mountains.”
The bush is one of the few plants that survives in the desert. Thus, it could be the symbol of the poor and indigenous people. For the powerful, for the system, the bush has no value; it is just a waste, good to be burnt. Moses, on the contrary, discovers God while contemplating the burning bush (Exodus 3) that was not consumed in spite of the flames of fire.
The Combonis make a comparison with what is happening in the indigenous’ society: “Intolerance, racism, neo-liberalism, privatizations, birth control, and corruption did not manage to extinguish the indigenous’ life. The poor’s survival power proves that God is present in the midst of their struggles.”
The missionaries also believe that, to know the people more intimately, and to understand how God keeps them like Moses, they “have to take off their sandals and walk barefoot – meaning, they should be simple and humble of heart on a holy ground – which is the life of the indigenous.”
Moses, with God’s mandate, goes to free his brothers from the slavery of Egypt. The Comboni missionaries felt that they can help the abandoned and give solace to the excluded indigenous. They did not know exactly where to start the mission, but they wanted “to taste, see, and feel the life of the poor and to discover their riches hidden by the dusts of time.” They are walking slowly and humbly, aware that knowing the language is a vital instrument in winning these indigenous people.
Immersion process
Without immersion, it is not possible to win the people, to inculturate and to make an integral evangelization. The Combonis were ready to strip themselves of prejudices and to depart from the indigenous’ raw demands and expectations. Their purpose was to first know the language better, their culture and realities, to make a clear option for the poor and to initiate a process that will allow the people to regain protagonism and be the subject of their own world. In other words, they wanted to take off from what they were encountering, without renouncing the announcement of the Gospel to illuminate and transform that reality.
The attitude the missionaries assumed was that of disciples in the school of the poor – to learn the indigenous’ ways of living and care toward nature and their community – love for the earth, solidarity, simplicity and relationships based on equality.
The aim is “to promote a Church with an indigenous face, autochthonous, one that defends people’s rights and one with a liturgy that reveals the bounty of the God of life.” Therefore, they openly state that “the poor, the tribal people are not the ones who should be converted; the Church, each one of us must change radically and adopt a new spirituality of contemplation, resistance, solidarity and fraternity.”
After four years, the missionaries have kept the same spirit. Of the first group, only Camilo Ortega, a missionary who had previously worked in Colombia, remains there. (The others were called to other assignments.) The mystic has not changed. The difficulty of the language and cultural barriers helped them to maintain an attitude of humility in dealing with the people and provided an aperture to be evangelized by them and to pursue the idea of transforming the realities with the power of the Gospel and, ultimately, to build God’s Kingdom in the place. <WM
Indigenous
worldview
- The Earth is communitarian. The land is the space where we live and work to get nourishment. But it is also a spiritual space in which our roots, our ancestors, made the land our “mother” who feeds us at birth and welcomes us in her bosom at death. The land and all life in it belong to all.
- The human being is the fruit of nature which it feeds and with which he has a mystical relationship. The American Indian is as contemplative as the Buddhist, but while the latter looks inside him, the former contemplates nature in its variety and beauty. Men are the land’s dreams, they germinate as little herbs. Their social behavior – playing, celebrating, loving or working – is determined by a close and harmonious relationship with nature.
- Prayer. The indigenous peoples follow, step by step, the cycles of death and resurrection of the maize. The earth is a huge sanctuary that gives them witness, day after day, of the miracle of life that revives. For them, the whole earth is a church and each place is a sanctuary where they venerate the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Guadalupe.
- Society as a community. Everybody is expected to pursue the common good on which the individual prosperity depends. Social and economic life is a form of a collective and mystical relationship with nature. The Indian community identifies itself with a festive and gratuitous fruit of nature. Social relationships are based on the criteria of reciprocity and permanent sharing which find its most remarkable expression in a feast. A feast is a metaphor of an economy of reciprocity (Guaraní). Exchange of goods is ruled by the principle of egalitarian distribution. Thus, an exchange is, in fact, a social dialogue, an act of solidarity.
- Eating has an ontological importance. For the Aymara, food has a divine value. The kitchen, where the fireplace is, is the main focus of the domestic heat and the place to give birth.
- Education. Children are breastfed until they are three or four years old. They are joyful and fond of merrymaking. Among them, nobody hears bad words or insults. They learn how to sing and dance at a very early age.
- The experience of death culminates the vital cycle centered in the communion with nature. The dead undertake a long trip full of pleasures. The world of the dead is the world of the ancestors, tradition, memory and foundations of life. They are underground as fecund seeds of a new humanity.
- Values: The feast, the gratuity, the solidarity, the utopia, the “communality”, the love for the land and nature, the family, the culture, the myths, the spirit of endurance and the tenacity to carry on believing in the possibility of a different and better world. <WM
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