Dear friends:  
     As he carries a bucket of wet cement across the room, César's legs wobble a bit. But he gets where he is going, drops the cement in a wooden trough, and with a trowel starts throwing it on the wall with a practiced flick of the wrist. Slowly, the rough brick surface acquires a pebbled, stucco finish; as the wall changes appearance, the room takes on a new life.  
     César Augusto Rios knows the room well. Fifteen years ago it was the National Guard command post for Jalapa, a village nestled among fields of corn and tobacco, close to the Honduran border. People from throughout the valley suspected of supporting the Sandinista guerrillas were brought there to be tortured.  
     César was brought there four times during 1977-78. Each time he was tied up and beaten. Electric shocks were applied to his body, especially his genitals. Once Guardsmen took him to a pine forest outside the village and made him dig a grave, his own grave. When he was finished, he was told that if he didn't confess the identity of other Sandinistas and the location of guerrilla troops, he would be shot and buried there. He said nothing, and the Guardsmen eventually took him back into the house in Jalapa where he was tortured some more.  
     Despite the cruelty of his treatment—he has scars today from the electric shocks, a long scar on his cheek where a torturer cut him with a bayonet, and legs that wobble because he didn't receive proper treatment for several bullet wounds—he was glad the U.S.-supported troops never took him to another house across the street. That house they utilized to kill prisoners they needed no more; blood stains still exist on the walls of the house across the street.  
     The house where César was tortured was captured by the Sandinistas in the final weeks of the 1979 insurrection, and became a command post for the new government's army. It was a busy place in the early 80s, as the army and the people of Jalapa determinedly held off several huge assaults by the contras who—at the urging of the CIA—wanted to take Jalapa and declare a provisional capital there. As the war wound down, it was turned over to the Sandinista youth organization. With the change in government in 1990, it was deeded to the Organization of Disabled Revolutionaries (ORD), a group of mostly young men who were disabled while fighting for their country. In Jalapa the ORD has over 130 members, including César Rios.  
     The ORD decided to take the former torture center and turn it into a center for life. They drew up plans to convert the huge house into several workshops: a bicycle repair shop, a brake shoe relining factory, a tailoring school, and a center for repairing and refitting the prosthetic arms and legs that most of the ORD members wear. With money and help from some United Methodists in Minnesota, they set about transforming the building.  
     It's not an easy task; old plaster has to be chipped out, walls repaired, wiring and plumbing installed, the roof replaced. Yet transformation—personal or societal—is seldom easy. César and his physically-challenged colleagues in Jalapa are transforming an old building from a death center into a place that supports life. His wounds, painful as they still are, don't hinder him from working hard to achieve what he wants. He wobbles out of the room to fetch another bucket of wet cement.  
     As Nicaragua tries to learn to live with war no more, the transformation of an old building in Jalapa is a model for what the country as a whole has to do. Yet too many people—some still hoping to reverse the changes of a decade of revolution, others intoxicated by violence as a way of life—aren't interested in that transformation, and so Nicaragua continues to be torn apart by violence. Since late 1992, the pace of violence has picked up considerably; everyday the papers report another assassination or massacre. We're becoming Lebanon. Injustice thrives. The poor get poorer. The wealthy build higher fences and keep their money in Miami.  
     With the end of the cold war, we who confess a God who wants peace must redouble our efforts to stop the killing and injustice that fill our neighborhoods and our world. While the U.S. Congress debates minimal reductions in the military budget, millions of people die each day for lack of basic food or medicines. Politicians search for new pretexts, new bullies, to keep military contractors wealthy and contributing to political campaigns.  
     It's an opportune time to transform the world in which we live, to change what's become a torture center for many into a place of life for all. If people like César can work to resurface the walls that once heard the agonizing screams of the tortured, so can we repent of our participation in a world that's been given over to military madness for too long. If César can work to build a bicycle repair shop, so can we transform our churches and neighborhoods into factories where injustice is rehammered into justice and peace.  
     It's a journey that takes us from Good Friday to Easter, from the cross, a tool of torture in the hands of the National Guard of Jesus' Palestine, to the empty tomb, a sign that torturers don't have the last word. They didn't have the last word with Jesus, nor will they in Nicaragua. César is making sure of that. Join with him, won't you? May your Easter be filled with resurrection!  
  
SIGNS OF LIFE  
     It's easy for us to get depressed about Latin America these days. Neoliberal economic changes are making the poor even poorer across the region. Hope seems a scarce commodity. But then we meet someone like César, quietly working away to transform a small corner of the world, and we cheer up. We get inspired to not give up. So as our Easter present to you, we want to share some other signs of hope, signs of life, that we have witnessed in other corners of this hurting hemisphere. Most of the cases involve Methodists, but that's sort of accidental. They could just as easily be Catholic or Jewish. The point is: there's hope. Enjoy it.  

Guatemala: Liberating Literacy  
     The San Francisco coffee plantation, a huge private farm owned by a German-Guatemalan family, lies a three-hour walk from the village of San Juan Cotzal in northern Quiché province. Almost one thousand workers—all indigenous—labor year-round on the plantation, and some 500 more flock to the farm during the harvest. Like medieval serfs their lives are controlled by the dictates of the owner, who flies in once a week by helicopter from the capital. The plantation's children are malnourished, sanitary facilities almost nonexistent, and working conditions deplorable. No one leaves or enters the plantation without permission.  
     An army base on the plantation, along with a paramilitary patrol, keep people in line. There are also two churches: one Catholic, the other Methodist, both built decades ago with the aid of the owner. While the churches provided spiritual nourishment to bodies bruised by oppression, they also told the poor to be content with their lot, thus playing an important role as well in keeping people in line. But times are changing.  
     In 1991, the Methodist Church on the plantation started a literacy program. After church members conducted a census among plantation workers to identify persons interested in becoming literate, 60 adults began spending four nights a week in the church, learning to recognize the shapes of words, slowly forming the letters of the alphabet with hands tired from laboring in the coffee groves. The students practiced reading by plowing through the Bible and the Guatemalan constitution, certainly not easy texts.  
     For Eustaquío López, the lay pastor of the San Francisco congregation, the program fulfills a long-held dream. A plantation worker for almost four decades, López, now 48, learned to read after his conversion to Christianity at age 17. López had never gone to school. Four elders in the Methodist Church tutored him for several months so he "could better understand the word of God."  
     López' literacy is a rare commodity on the plantation; most of the adults cannot read or write. And because their parents cannot afford notebooks and pencils, few of the more than 300 children can attend the small plantation school with its three teachers. Illiteracy, one of the factors that keeps the plantation workers pliant and poor, is passed on from generation to generation. By sponsoring the adult literacy program, the Methodists of San Francisco are committed to breaking that cycle.  
     An incident last year on the plantation illustrates the threat that literacy presents to the powerful. A drunk plantation worker tried to break into the Methodist Church building and broke the door in the process. Like all cases of delinquency on the estate, the dispute was taken before the visiting plantation owner.  
     During the discussion, one of the Methodists mentioned the constitution's proscription of trespassing. The owner asked the Indian how he knew what the constitution said, and the worker proclaimed he had read it. The owner was aghast, and proclaimed, "You are fools for reading that. You have no right to read the constitution. Only a judge has that right. You're getting yourselves involved in problems," he threatened. "It's prohibited, it's against the law. Careful, or you'll get yourselves into trouble. You'll go to jail for reading the constitution." Literacy can be a powerful instrument in the hands of the poor and oppressed.  

Haiti: No longer zombies  
     An intriguing land of contrasts, Haiti possesses unspoiled white sand beaches and pervasive repression, French haute cuisine and wretched urban poverty, voodoo and revolutionary Catholicism. Replete with shame and submission, its history also boasts heroic resistance and valor. Long the poorest country in the hemisphere (although according to the World Bank, Nicaragua took over last place in 1992), Haiti gave the world a lesson in popular democracy in the late eighties when its people threw off a dictator and elected a champion of the poor as president.  
     It wasn't the first time Haiti set an example. After 300 years of colonial exploitation and a 12-year struggle against Napoleon's armies, in 1804 Haiti became the world's first black republic, a symbol of hope to slaves throughout the hemisphere. Yet such freedom was costly: in order to guarantee its sovereignty from France, Haiti incurred a huge foreign debt that it didn't pay off until the 1920s. The effects of that burden foreshadow the demonic problem of debt throughout the region in the last quarter of this century.  
     Haiti's problems didn't all originate abroad. The mostly mulatto elite exploited the labor of the poor to build incredible wealth that it spent ostentatiously. While the wife of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc") had state-of-the-art air conditioning installed in the huge national palace so she could wear fancy furs for state receptions, thousands of poor Haitians risked their lives to sail away in tiny boats only to find the U.S. Coast Guard waiting to bring them back.  
     Once "the most beautiful pearl in the Caribbean necklace," Haiti's natural wealth contributed more to France's revenues in the 1700s than the other French colonies combined. Yet today it is a sad, deforested land. Although it produces most of the world's baseballs, authentic economic development has been blocked by a feudal system of political despotism. Genuine democracy remains impossible in a land of sophisticated repression, where Tonton Macoutes—a paramilitary force created by François Duvalier ("Papa Doc") and trained by former German SS officers—practice their terror at will. Such thugs have long carried out the orders of absurd characters like Baby Doc, elected president-for-life in 1971 by a vote of 2,391,916 to one.  
     When a free election was finally held in 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, riding atop an exhilarating movement of Haiti's poor majority, won two-thirds of the vote. Yet the powers that be, both in Washington and in Pétionville, the wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, couldn't tolerate the radical priest and the liberating faith he embodied. After eight months in office, Aristide was overthrown, leaving government soldiers and Macoutes free to exercise their terror against those who had dared to change the flow of Haitian history.  
     Today, the poor majority of Haitians suffer and wait, and the church accompanies them. In Port-au-Prince's La Saline neighborhood, once the site of a slave market, children fall asleep from hunger during classes in a Methodist-run school. They have no food in their homes, but their parents send them to school nonetheless, for they know with certainty that the future will be different. Haitians claim that once zombies have tasted salt, they recover from their drugged state and are liberated from the master's control. The Haitian people have tasted salt.  
     Paul visited Haiti in November and interviewed the Rev. Fede Jean-Pierre, superintendent of the Methodist Church there. The full interview will appear in the May issue of New World Outlook. Here's just one part, where Fede clearly articulates where change will originate:  
     If change has to originate from those who are rich, who hold power in this country, then there is no hope for a better future. The same thing is true if we think the U.S. is somehow going to solve our problems. If there is a better future for us, it will have to come from the very people who have been suffering for so long. That's why I'm hopeful: I have seen with my own eyes how, despite all the propaganda to discredit Aristide, despite all the wealthy have done to repress and exploit the poor, to zombify the poor majority, they have not succeeded. Because of that, I am hopeful. Our people are no longer zombies and will never be zombies again. That frightens the rich, who have long believed that the world must be divided into inferiors and superiors. They realize now they can no longer use our people as objects.  
  
Brazil: Defending children  
     Brazil has long evoked colorful and exotic images of Carnival, the Amazon, and scantily-clad women on Rio's beaches. Yet scenes of street children, dressed in rags and huddled in a doorway, while not a common theme for picture postcards, may be today a more accurate reflection of life in modern Brazil.  
     The children are one product of a process of economic "development" in the region that has left a few people rich and most people poor. Children feel that poverty more than anyone. Throughout Latin America, 78 million children live in what the UN considers "extreme poverty." Half the region's children are poor, and a majority of the region's poor are children.  
     As if the structural brutality of poverty wasn't enough, poor children face escalating violence from those who make them scapegoats for troubled economic times. In large cities from Buenos Aires to Monterrey, forces of public order are carrying out class cleansing; they are exterminating children. According to a recent investigation by the Brazilian Congress, during a three-year period 4,611 children—3,781 of them black—were murdered in Brazil, and the rate is increasing.  
     Brazil's assassins ironically call themselves justicieros—those who do justice. They are often police officers moonlighting to supplement meager salaries. According to Juan Rodríguez, a street-wise 19-year old shoeshiner in São Bernardo do Campo, "killing children means no more to the justicieros than stepping on an ant." He slams his foot down hard on the sidewalk. "They want the poor cleaned off the streets," Rodríguez says, "but they don't understand that they can kill one of us and there's always another one to take their place."  
     Although a few of the justicieros have been caught and jailed, they are not the cause of the problem. The killers often come from the same overcrowded slums as their victims; their families barely survive on police salaries that are low and eternally losing purchasing power to inflation. They simply kill for a living, and most believe the public is behind them.  
     There are as many as ten million poor children who spend a good portion of their time on Brazil's streets these days. Hundreds, if not thousands, of governmental agencies and NGOs spend millions of dollars a year to house, feed, counsel, and protect the children. International attention in recent years has stimulated a burgeoning industry; street children are a cause célèbre and big bucks are available. Yet there are many ways of working with the kids. Government programs tend to be staffed by bureaucrats who claim to know best what the kids need. Church-sponsored programs can be equally paternalistic, with romantic volunteers giving children a bath and teaching them proper table manners. Such approaches reinforce the kids' dependency, retarding their ability to become subjects of their own history rather than objects of someone else's.  
     In recent years, more and more church workers have come to understand that, taking the essential step from charity to solidarity.  
     Humility seems a prerequisite for those really interested in helping the kids. In Recife, Paul met with a group of young middle-class Christians who gather late each evening on the Rua da Palma to sit and chat with children who make the street their home at night. Mary Lemos says her group saw that while many organizations work with the kids during the day, few educators or social workers are around at night. So they decided to sit with the kids and listen during the lonely—and often dangerous—hours. They promised themselves they would devise no program nor look for any funding for at least a year; first, they want to learn from the kids what's important. Lemos claims people who show up with preconceived notions of how to help are only part of the problem.  
     For many church activists, the best way to help the kids is to support the kids' own organizing efforts, especially the National Movement of Street Children. The Movement was formed 1985 by street kids who recognized that the government had no financial interest nor moral ability to address the problems the children faced. Facing both neglect and extermination, those who lived on the streets decided to take matters into their own hands. The Movement has won significant change in both the constitutional framework and the bureaucratic apparatus that deals with kids on the street. But the struggle goes on amidst increasing violence.  
     In São Bernardo, several Methodist activists work closely with the National Movement, collaborating with the kids in a way that's designed more to empower them than take care of them. Church workers sponsor a variety of artistic activities, from street theater to dance, both for kids on the streets and for children in the favelas at risk of becoming street children. According Sandra Corrêa, a Methodist pastoral worker, the project seeks to "create a space where children can fantasize, where they can envision a different future."  
     The Rev. Holney Mendes, a young Methodist pastor assigned to the streets of São Bernardo, meets regularly with kids to practice the capoeira, a combination of dance and martial arts that came to Brazil with black slaves. A form of resistance to slavery, it was banned at one point in Brazil's history, and remains a symbol of resistance to oppression. The church workers promote capoeira as a tool of organization and education. "It requires discipline," says Mendes, "something not found on the street. It gets rid of aggressiveness and passivity. It's a survival tool."  
     Capoeira is a marginalized dance for marginalized people. Street kids often have no possessions besides their bodies, so it encourages them to love their bodies and use them for self-expression. Yet middle class Brazilians, long shooled to disparage black culture, are often frightened by capoeira as if it were the consummate mugging technique. One evening in São Bernardo Paul went searching for a capoeira group and ended up by mistake at the wrong Methodist church. He pulled a man from the back of the sanctuary and asked where the capoeira group was meeting. The man stared at Paul as if he were crazy. "This is a church," he announced firmly.  
     The Methodists also work with a group of street kids who shine shoes in the city's plaza. Mendes helped them form a cooperative; he tutors them on how to manage their money and make decisions democratically. Group members pool their resources to buy supplies collectively, saving money and learning the benefits of working together. "We're not interested in giving these kids charity," says Mendes. "We want to become partners with them in changing their lives and changing the society that abandoned them."  
     In effect both union organizer and pastor, Mendes also works with kids who watch parked cars or carry out bags of produce at the local market. In group sessions the kids analyze common problems and come to agreement on collective approaches to solving them. Last year, for example, kids in the market set a minimum amount per bag that consumers must pay or else carry their own bags of bananas and cabbage. Every week the kids meet to air any problems that may have emerged in the work environment.  
     Mendes says those working with kids must move from paternalism to political activism. He and other pastoral workers in São Bernardo began meeting with the mothers of street kids last year, encouraging the women to organize in order to face together the problems they and their children confront. It's not easy work, but Mendes insists it's how change will take place in the long run.  
     With funding from abroad, the Brazilian Methodists give scholarships to kids who show academic promise; the recipients make a commitment both to study and to give back a certain amount of time to helping other children organize. And since September, 1987, when six children from Mendes' project were massacred while sleeping in a city market, the ministry has provided the funds to relocate several kids who became targets for local justicieros.  
     While it's long been socially acceptable to provide charity for children in the street, working to change the structures that oppress children and send them into the streets is not allowed by Brazil's ruling elite; supporting the children on the edge of Brazil's modern society can mean risking your life. Several church activists in São Bernardo have been threatened in the last year. One received a note stating, "Whoever defends a thief is also a thief and deserves a coffin and a black candle."  
     [This section is adapted from a longer article by Paul, "Targeted for Death: Brazil's Street Children," that appeared in the January 20 issue of the Christian Century.]  

Family News  
     Lucas just started first grade at the German School. The bus picks him up about 6:30 am, while the stars are still out and his parents yawning. Classes are in Spanish—they won't start teaching him German until next year. When he comes home from school, he enjoys riding his bike or talking his parents into taking him swimming where he practices somersault dives and sees how far he can swim underwater.  
     For several years, Abi, who just turned four, has gone to a day care center run by Salvadoran refugees. In December the last of the group returned to El Salvador, and the center closed. In January, some of the staff and the non-Salvadoran families who remained at the end opened a new center in a different part of the city. It's been a struggle given the high cost of everything here, but the center is surviving. Abi got the same educator (called tia, or aunt) as last year, so the transformation has been easy for her. When Abi comes home she enjoys copying her big brother, climbing the ming tree in our front yard, and mothering the baby kitties we always seem to have underfoot.  
     Paul is staying home for a few weeks to catch up on parenting and write about Nicaragua. After trips to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Cuba earlier last year, he spent three weeks in Brazil in June, preparing articles about both AIDS and street children. Then he spent November travelling through the Caribbean, interviewing people and taking photographs for a series of articles that will appear in the May-June issue of New World Outlook. He claims the trip was all work, and says he only went swimming in the Caribbean three times. Right.  
     Lyda helped organize pastoral teams working with victims of the September 1 tidal wave that killed 180 people along Nicaragua's Pacific coast. The teams focused their attention on children suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome. Lyda also helped organize ecumenical seminars to assist local church leaders put an appropriate theological spin on the disaster. Whereas some wanted to claim that God sent the killer waves as punishment for people's sins, the seminars explored God's involvement in the tragedy not as the author of suffering but rather as one who suffers alongside the victims.  
     That issue is an extremely personal one for women who are the victims of domestic and family violence. In every workshop that Lyda or other staff members of the women's ministry carry out throughout the country, the issue of violence against women is intentionally raised. When the subject is broached, the stories often flow forth from the women; abuse of children and women is a serious problem here (as it is in other cultures, including the U.S.). Yet social approval for such violence is slowly eroding, due to a variety of factors, including a "My Body Is Mine" campaign. Within the church, Lyda's program is working to ensure that people understand that God does not condone sexual violence.  
     In October, Lyda helped with logistics and translation for the Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance held here in Managua. In January, she participated in a reorganization of CEPAD's ministries that will increase the participation of women in programming. In February she participated in a women's conference in Cuba, and in March worked on developing women's programming for CEPAD's new radio station. Lyda's frequent absence from the house recently provoked Abi to ask at the dinner table (where Lyda was not present), "Where does Mamá live?" Paul assured her that Mamá still lived with us but was just real busy.  
     We all took a break from being busy when Paul's parents came to visit us at year's end. We enjoyed a couple of weeks of relaxing with them, first in the mountains and then at the ocean. We're working out a scheme to send the kids to the States to visit both sets of grandparents during July. Does anyone want to come visit us at the end of July who could fly here with two delightful, well-behaved children? Call collect.  
     Lyda and Paul won't be coming to the U.S. for any length of time until early next year when our term is up. If you're interested in having us speak in your community, now's the time to do something (see box on previous page). In the months ahead, we will be reflecting with our colleagues on where God is calling us to be in mission during the coming years. Pray for our discernment.  

Elections and Baseball  
     Along with the rest of Latin America, we watched closely the U.S. presidential campaign. After living in Central America all these years, we confess that George Bush wasn't very high on our list of favorite people, and we relished his eventual defeat. We're waiting for him to be put on trial for his involvement in the so-called Iran-contra affair, though his Christmas Eve pardon of several co-conspirators makes that unlikely. We've tried to get excited about Bill Clinton, who seems an earnest guy who really wants to accomplish something, and has crafted an atmosphere where change appears possible. We wish him well.  
     Yet our optimism is tempered by two factors. First of all, Latin America (with the exception of Mexico) seems not to exist on Clinton's priority list, and he appears content to continue the policies of the Bush administration for the meantime. Latin Americans are waiting to see what Clinton's approach will be to the rest of the hemisphere. Secondly, their lack of hope rests on the observation that the two major U.S. political parties are really branches of the same party, representing no fundamental ideological differences. Using baseball terminology, a common characteristic of discourse here, a Nicaraguan friend once explained this to us by saying, "The Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. are like the American League and the National League in U.S. baseball. The rules are slightly different in each league, but the game is the same."  
     The Rigoberto López Pérez Stadium, named for the patriot who shot the first Somoza, is just three blocks from our house. We easily hear the cheers whenever anyone hits a home run, especially if it's hit by a player from the Boer—Managua's team. Baseball is a souvenir of the long occupation by U.S. Marines early in this century. It's the most popular sport here, as it is in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic—other nearby countries that also suffered long U.S. military occupations. Listening to Nicaraguans talk about baseball is entertaining, since most of the technical terms remain in English. El pitcher tiró tres strikes al batter.  
     The World Bank announced late last year that Nicaragua had now taken over last place in the hemisphere in terms of per capita share of gross national product. For this dubious honor, Nicaragua beat out Haiti, long the hemisphere's poorest country. The poverty that Nicaragua experiences today, the countless personal struggles of people like César Rios, are a direct result of the war imposed on this little country by the United States. How we wish that U.S. policy over recent decades had consisted of exporting bats and balls (and tractors, fishing nets, medicines . . .) rather than guns and mines.  
     As the new administration in Washington starts crafting its policy toward the poor countries of the world, now is a good time to heed Maya Angelou's inaugural instruction to "not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness." Like the street kids in Brazil, the poor of the world want neither guns nor charity. They want justice. Let us all learn to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Shalom!