Santa Lucia, Honduras, May 27, 2002

Dear friends in our supporting churches:

Our children have the privilege of attending a small bilingual school where critical thinking is encouraged. The school, which is owned and run by a parents association, has small classes and tries to get kids to think for themselves. Except for when they have to learn the national anthem. Honduran law requires that all students, even in private schools, must learn the national anthem in order to graduate from sixth grade.

Our daughter Abi is a sixth grader, and on Friday she has her big test, not just on the anthem but on its content and history, along with a variety of other things–like the Honduran version of the pledge of allegiance. The song is long, eight verses of eight lines each, along with a chorus, written a hundred years ago in an arcane and poetic Spanish that is difficult to understand today. So we’ve been singing it with her for a few weeks, over and over; it seems to go on forever. We’ve also helped Abi memorize answers to a list of 100 questions about the song, including who wrote the words, when and where it was first sung, and so on. Some of the questions are really esoteric, such as who was the Secretary of State in the Office of Public Instruction when Decree 42 was passed by the Honduran Congress. (Decree 42 was what legalized the anthem in 1915. In case your Honduran history is a bit rusty, the answer is Lawyer Rómulo E. Durón.)

Abi has valiantly struggled with memorizing the information, and should do fine on Friday. And then Saturday she’ll forget everything.

This kind of learning by rote unfortunately characterizes the Honduran educational system, and is a major component of a social system in which people are groomed to uncritically accept the imposition of authority. The wealthy elite of Honduras are quite content with a school system where people acquire the basics of formal literacy yet don’t really learn to think for themselves. They are fully aware that if the poor majority of the country were encouraged to think for themselves, the economic and political privilege of the rich would be endangered. Memorizing the national anthem, far from being an exercise in empowerment, tends to reinforce the lack of democracy in Honduras.

In the Honduran Theological Community, the ecumenical seminary where I teach, we trust the Holy Spirit enough to encourage critical thinking. We believe theological democracy is an essential component of theological education. Because of that, some of our students have arrived at the seminary as refugees of sorts, having fled environments where religious education meant memorizing rules and Bible verses. And where personal behavior was similarly managed by narrowly defined moral canons.

One of my students is named Victor. He’s a pastor in the Holiness Church, which shares the Wesleyan tradition with us Methodists. (It split off from the Nazarenes, which split off from the Methodists.) Victor is one of the hardest working students in the seminary. Besides carrying a heavy class load, he serves as pastor of a church in a poor barrio of Tegucigalpa and volunteers as a teacher in our high-school level theological extension program in the countryside. He was a student in my pastoral accompaniment class recently, and I will become his field education supervisor in a few weeks. At the rate he’s going, Victor should receive his Bachelors degree from us about the end of the year.

Before coming to the Honduran Theological Community, Victor studied for four years in a conservative bible institute in Tegucigalpa. In his final year, while working as a pastor during the day and taking classes four nights a week, he and his wife decided to get a divorce. As soon as word of this got to the institute’s administrators, they called Victor on the carpet and kicked him out of the school. They told him he would not be allowed to graduate since he “obviously had a moral problem.”

A short time later, someone told him about the Theological Community and he came to talk with us, eventually enrolling and soon becoming one of our stars pupils. Victor is excited to be studying in an environment where students are encouraged to think for themselves, where it’s acceptable in wrestling with the Biblical text to have different understandings, where answers are not something learned by rote but rather something discerned critically and creatively, where theology is something that emerges from the interplay of reflection and action in poor communities rather than something inherited from long-dead white European males.

Victor has thrived in our seminary environment, and we’ve talked with him about continuing his studies so that he could someday become a professor in the seminary. One of my goals in the coming years is to work myself out of a job by nurturing the development of a Honduran faculty, and Victor is just the kind of person we’re looking for. His bad experience in the bible institute is one of the reasons he would like to become a teacher in our seminary. He says he wants to treat others in a different manner than how he was treated.

In these first wonderful days of the rainy season here, when all is turning green around us, I write to express my thanks for your support for my ministry here in Honduras. Your financial and prayer support makes possible my presence in the lives of people like Victor. Thanks for all you’re doing to make possible the development of a church in Central America that empowers the poor by helping them think for themselves. In so doing, they discover the liberating justice and love that the Gospel holds for them, and for all of us.

Shalom,

Lyda Pierce
lydapierce@earthlink.net