Genuine community

Genuine community

            I wrote this poem when I worked at the nature center at the Jack Norment Camp in Paraguay.  The name of the nature center was “Arapy,” a Guaraní  word meaning “sky – foot.”  (Guaraní is the mother tongue of Paraguay.)  We were committed to building genuine community with all creation, that above and around us in the sky and that on and in the earth below our feet.  At times, it seemed like an impossible task.

            As I sat one day on the edge of the stream that flowed through the camp, this poem came to me with a heart heavy with grief.  I had just finished a five kilometer hike up stream from the camp and made many shocking discoveries along the way.  The first thing I noted as I left the camp were the eroded hillsides.  As I looked back over my shoulder, the camp appeared to be a lonely emerald jewel surrounded by the deforested land.  The soil in Paraguay has a distinctive brick red color, the same color that tainted the stream after every rain.   On my first stop further up the stream,  I found two clandestine tanneries that were dumping their wastes and byproducts including chrome and aluminum directly into the stream.  My nose lead me to the pungent smell of an alcohol distillery where there were enormous vats oozing a horrid smelling black goop.  I found out that it was the waste left over from the sugar cane used in the alcohol production.    Next I arrived at the municipal slaughter yard just in time to watch all the blood and useless parts of several cows being hosed into the stream.  I kept following the stream as it came down through the town of Caacupé and counted the pipes dumping raw sewage and drain water.  Plastics, cans, diapers, batteries, and every kind of garbage imaginable was piled high, left behind by high waters of a storm.  Finally, I came up to a fence.  It was a pig farm with the ramshackle sties in a disorderly arrangement on both sides of the stream. 

            The Jack Norment is on the opposite side of  the stream from the Barrio San Francisco, a very poor outlying area of Caacupé.   I worked with the students from a small school in the Barrio San Francisco,  children discriminated against for living in what was considered to be the “armpit” of the town.   The garbage trucks from Caacupé would unload in the Barrio to build up the dirt road beds with the wastes from other parts of the town. In the hot afternoon summers, I would watch the children playing and laughing in the stream, children with skin sores, runny noses, distended tummies,  and rotting teeth.  They would gaily shout my name when I would come walking down to see them and run to hug and greet me chatting in a mix of Spanish and Guaraní.

            I sat on the edge of the stream and cried for the children of the Barrio San Francisco.  Environmental degradation is one of the most obvious manifestations of injustice and systemic violence in our global community.  As we fight about where to dump all of our toxic wastes shouting “not in my back yard”,  we ignore the children and the streams,  the powerless and voiceless.   We manipulate the environment to discriminate against the poor and to reinforce the destructive powers of segregation, racism, and classism.   The environment has become a weapon in modern warfare; oil intentionally spilled on agricultural lands, defoliants sprayed on forests, and poisons mixed into drinking water sources.  Will the environment also become a primary reason for violent conflicts? Will we be fighting not only for agricultural land to produce our food, but for clean water and air?

            It was with the children and the stream of the Barrio San Francisco that I felt the urgency for a miraculous and profound transformation:  healing not only for the humans of the community but also the environment.    I often felt like my activities with the children of the Barrio San Francisco were just tiny and temporary Band-Aids attempting to patch the deep wounds of injustice.  We planted trees in the school yard and made puppet stories about the stream.  We hiked through the forest at the camp learning about the trees and singing songs about nature.  They taught me the names of the animals and the plants in Guaraní, the language born in that land and that describes its beauty with word images.    I despaired, however, fearing that  the tiny seeds of hope, peace, justice, and stewardship I was sowing would die along with the stream before they had the chance to bear fruit.

            I have gone back to Paraguay about once a year since I have lived in Chile to teach environmental education and conflict transformation workshops.  I will never forget the day that we scooped our nets through the stream and found the first dragonfly larvae!  Over the years, the tanneries have been closed, the alcohol distillery has built a new waste containment system, and there are projects to better handle the garbage and the sewage.  The hillsides are still bare and the stream is not clean.  The children still have runny noses and health problems.  But somehow I must keep believing and hoping  that the seeds of healing are growing against all odds.

            Transformation for the Barrio San Francisco, and for the inhabitants of the world, will come hand in hand the healing of the people, the community,  and the environment.  None can be whole without the healing of the others.  This is message at the heart of Shalom.