Dear friends:  
     She goes to the children's park every day to wait for her husband.  
It's not going to be a pleasant reunion.  
     Francisca Sical last saw her husband Gonzalo on December 19,  
1982, when he left their home in the remote village of Rabinal to buy  
cigarettes in a local bar. Witnesses saw uniformed men seize Gonzalo  
and take him to the local military base, a place from which few villagers  
came out alive. Francisca never saw her husband again.  
     In the mid-eighties, when the army moved its base a kilometer to  
the west, the site was converted into a children's park. What almost  
everyone knew to be mass graves were covered with thick concrete.  
     In February, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team broke  
the concrete and began digging into Rabinal's macabre past. Every  
morning, Francisca walks to the park and sits quietly with dozens of  
other Maya Achi women. They talk in hushed tones while they watch  
workers dig up skeletons from the ground. Like Francisca, the other  
women are waiting for their husbands, sons, and daughters--loved ones  
stolen from them during a campaign of institutionalized terror.  
     The exhumation comes after human rights activists patiently  
convinced residents they could publicly identify the gravesite and  
demand that their loved ones be exhumed. "We've lost our fear,"  
Francisca told Paul as she watched a worker use a paintbrush to clean  
dirt from a newly revealed skull. "We're not afraid of the civil patrols  
any longer, we're not afraid of the army. We've been going to talks about  
human rights and the law. Before we didn't even know what the law said.  
But now we've woken up a bit." She admits the wait is distressing,  
however. "It was hard for me then, when they took Gonzalo, and this is  
making all those painful feelings come back."  
     The waiting women carefully survey each new skeleton  
uncovered, looking for some sign that it belongs to a loved one.  
Identification will be difficult, since most of the bodies were apparently  
buried without clothing, meaning there are no clothing fragments or  
buttons to make identification easier. What limited dental and medical  
records are available will help the identification process, but many  
cadavers will ultimately remain unidentified.  
     The dig is expected to last well into May. Workers expect to find  
as many as 100 bodies, including those of children. Among the first  
cadavers removed were several belonging to small children who had the  
bad fortune to have accompanied their fathers or mothers when the  
adults were captured.  
     As in other areas of Guatemala, the state-sponsored violence in  
Rabinal served as a final arbiter of personal disputes. Francisca said her  
husband was disappeared after a relative--who had feuded with her  
husband over ownership of a plot of land--denounced Gonzalo to the  
military as a guerrilla supporter.  
     The exhumation in the children's park is one of several near  
Rabinal in recent months. Last May, for example, in a joint Catholic-  
Maya ceremony, residents reburied peasant farmers from the village of  
Plan de Sanchez who were massacred July 18, 1982. A wealthy  
landowner had repeatedly warned them not to cross his land when  
returning from market in Rabinal. When they continued to do so, he  
called in the army, which murdered at least 180 people, burning most of  
them alive. From the ashes of the killing field the forensic team  
recovered 84 distinct skeletons, 25 of which were identified.  
     Military officials have decried the exhumations as "an  
orchestrated plan to disparage the armed forces" and are keeping an eye  
on who's digging where. When Paul showed up to cover the exhumation  
in Rabinal he was questioned by the police. At an exhumation in nearby  
Aqua Fria during February, forensic workers were filmed by military  
intelligence agents claiming to be journalists. Army lawyers have  
successfully blocked several other exhumations around the country,  
including a proposed dig at the Las Montanitas military base near the  
Mexican border. Human rights activists say as many as 600 bodies are  
buried there, perhaps including that of Efrain Bamaca, the guerrilla  
commander married to U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. Bamaca was  
captured in battle and later murdered after several weeks of interrogation  
supervised by a CIA-salaried Guatemalan colonel.  
     Tens of thousands of bodies--no one knows the exact number--  
await exhumation from mass graves throughout the highlands. In most  
cases, residents know where the graves are located, and many relatives  
secretly visit the graves to light candles and pray for the dead. The fear  
of speaking out publicly is slowly changing, however. In February, the  
Mutual Support Group released a list of 125 specific sites where the  
organization is demanding exhumations.  

We write these words during Holy Week, a time to reflect on death and  
resurrection, a time to read again the passion narratives and to  
experience afresh the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ as we  
open ourselves to our neighbors in this troubled land. The powerful men  
who ordered the assassination of Jesus are the same ones who today  
routinely order the torture and death of Guatemalan peasant farmers,  
union organizers, and human rights workers. For us, people like  
Francisca flesh out the Gospel story, encarnating hope as they struggle to  
survive in a world made hostile by those threatened by resurrection.  
     Sitting in the children's park waiting for her husband to be dug  
up, Francisca seems for us a sort of icon, an image that invites us into a  
reality different than our own. During this Holy Week, we ponder her  
image, her life, her waiting. We recall others we have come to know  
here, people like Lucio, an indigenous Presbyterian pastor in  
Chimaltenango who courageously continues his human rights advocacy  
despite the assassination of two coworkers and a string of death threats.  
We recall Regina, who after 15 years of internal exile, of losing her  
husband and 16 other close family members to the repression, continues  
to believe that as long as others are there to share the weight of the cross,  
she will continue to hope and struggle for democracy and peace.  

Holy Week is also a time when life slows down a bit around here, when  
schools are closed and many families go on vacation. For the poor,  
however, there are few schools to close and no vacations, and in the corn  
fields around our home our neighbors rise early to plant their fields.  
Their falling hoes glint in the sunlight, rising and falling to open holes in  
the fertile earth where the farmers deposit their corn, beans, and hope.  
     There are days when it seems that as missionaries all we can do  
is plant seeds and then, like our farmer neighbors, hope that a harvest  
awaits. In recent months our relationship with the leadership of the  
Guatemalan Methodist Church has been plagued by differing  
understandings of what we're doing here. In the case of Lyda's work, the  
all-male national executive board of the church has done almost all it  
can to scuttle any meaningful ministry with women. It has become  
apparent that --to put it bluntly--the men who control the church really  
don't want women to be empowered. While that only underscores the  
importance of Lyda's work, it also means that she and her coworkers--  
two indigenous Methodist women--must spend a lot of energy defending  
the program from men who want to dismantle or disable it.  
     Men control the Methodist Church here. There are no women  
pastors. There are no women elders in any of the churches. Local  
organizations of Methodist women are effectively required by church  
rules to have a man present at all their meetings. Not surprisingly, that  
man often ends up controlling decisions. These traditional women's  
groups, not surprisingly, have done little to educate or empower women.  
     With funding from the United Methodist General Board of  
Global Ministries, a program was begun to accompany and empower  
women in the indigenous communities where the church carries out its  
ministry. Yet church leaders here promptly hired three men to run the  
program. When the GBGM demurred, the Guatemalan church  
acquiesced and hired two women, at lower salaries.  
     After studying K'iche' for several months, Lyda became  
coordinator of the program, and she and her coworkers have developed a  
viable program despite continued tension with the denomination's male  
leadership. In August, for example, the program sponsored a retreat for  
35 indigenous women from Anglican and Methodist churches. For  
almost all the women, it was the first time they had gathered with  
women from another church. And it was the first time that any had  
gathered as just women with no men present.  
     During their time together, the women studied HIV/AIDS, which  
is silently spreading but about which there is a lot of ignorance in rural  
communities. They also discussed domestic violence, often sharing  
moving personal stories of suffering at the hands of loved ones. The  
retreat provided a safe place to share, where women could realize that  
they're not alone, they're not crazy, and that what's happened to them is  
not right.  
     Participants also looked at women in pastoral ministry. Most of  
them had been limited by their churches to arranging the flowers on the  
altar and cooking for men's gatherings. Studying several women from the  
Bible, they observed that God cares for women as full people, and that  
women have valuable talents to offer their community.  
     Lyda led a session on self-esteem, asking the women to try and  
say something they were each good at. They discovered it was hard for  
most of the participants to say, "I can do something well." So Lyda asked  
the women to help each other, and they opened up: "I know that you can  
sing well." "When your children are sick, you know how to use herbs to  
make them well." And so on. They filled sheets of newsprint on the wall.  
They talked about creation and how women were created in God's  
image. They decided that for women not to love and respect themselves  
was to denigrate God's wonderful creation. The sisters went home with  
their hearts a bit lighter, their heads a bit higher, each one knowing that  
God loves them just the way they are.  
     This year the program is carrying out four regional workshops  
designed around similar lines. (Special thanks to members of our  
supporting churches for providing most of the funding for these  
gatherings.) The first one comes in mid-April, just a few days from now,  
in the Ixil-speaking highlands around Cotzal in the north of Quiche  
province. In May the program begins training women from several  
communities in how to build cooking stoves that consume less fire wood  
and emit less smoke (see sidebar below).  
     The response from women at the grassroots to these educational  
events and development projects has been enthusiastic. The tension with  
the male leadership of the national church has taken a heavy toll on  
Lyda, however. We try to remind ourselves that all we can do is plant  
seeds. And remember the old cliche that missionaries go where they are  
needed but not wanted and stay until they are wanted but not needed.  
     Paul is assigned halftime to the Methodist Church here, and last  
year he helped church leaders produce two issues of an English-language  
publication and one issue of a Spanish magazine. Further work is  
pending, but the church's executive board (yep, the same bunch of guys)  
is dragging its feet on how to proceed. Meanwhile, Paul has helped the  
church's Volunteers in Mission program get reorganized and develop an  
educational component for visiting work teams.  
     In his work as a journalist, he's written about issues such as  
refugees, street kids, land ownership, and murdered pastors in  
Guatemala, disappeared children and postwar reconciliation in El  
Salvador, and the collusion between several socially-responsible mutual  
funds in the U.S. and a glue manufacturer that helps kill street children  
in the Third World. He spent three days covering the pope's visit to  
Central America and three weeks following hurricanes around the  
Caribbean. While much of his writing and photographs continue to haunt  
the pages of United Methodist publications such as Response and New  
World Outlook, he also writes regularly for Ecumenical Press  
International, Latinamerica Press, and the National Catholic Reporter,  
and occasionally for magazines such as The Christian Century and  
Multinational Monitor.  

Paul wrote a lot about Guatemala's recent elections, which included the  
participation of a left-of-center coalition--the New Guatemala  
Democratic Front--for the first time since the CIA coup in 1954. During  
the campaign, the Front's congressional candidate from this province,  
Manuela Alvarado, an indigenous woman from Cantel, occasionally  
spent the night with us because of death threats against her and other  
coalition members.  
     The Front garnered almost 8 percent of the vote nationwide and  
won several mayoral races in the highlands, an amazing feat considering  
that indigenous citizens have been marginalized from the electoral  
process and few are registered to vote. The Front's performance marks  
the continued opening of a political space within which indigenous  
activists and human rights groups can organize to change Guatemalan  
society.  
     The election of Alvaro Arzu as president also offers grounds for  
cautious optimism. Arzu is a right-wing businessman whose party  
nonetheless represents a more modern understanding of capitalism than  
that of the landed oligarchy that has traditionally controlled Guatemala's  
destiny. Arzu's perspective on government allows for a greater level of  
political and economic participation than Guatemala has recently seen,  
and the neoliberal technocrats who advise him seem intent on  
establishing ideological autonomy from past governments.  
     Arzu has taken a fresh approach to peace negotiations with the  
guerrillas, meeting secretly with guerrilla commanders in December  
while still a candidate, then openly in February after taking office. Citing  
an atmosphere of "mutual confidence," the guerrillas announced an  
indefinite cease-fire on March 19. Hopes have been kindled for the  
signing of a peace treaty this year, though two of the topics remaining to  
be discussed will prove particularly difficult, and how they are dealt with  
during the negotiations will signal whether peace for Guatemala will  
exist only on paper or will be built on authentic foundations of economic  
and political justice.  
     One of the two remaining topics is agrarian reform, and while  
Arzu certainly doesn't favor transferring large amounts of land to the  
poor (after all, that's what earned the ire of the U.S. government in the  
1950s), he will probably support some significant changes, including  
reorganizing the outdated and corrupt land title registry and establishing  
a tax on unused land. These are enough to anger the conservative agro-  
export sector, a group that in the past simply threw out presidents it  
didn't like.  
     The other thorny theme in the talks concerns the role of the  
military in a democratic society. The most powerful sector of  
Guatemalan society, the military has remained the power behind the  
throne since the introduction of democracy here in 1986. Yet Arzu's  
dealings with the army since taking office have set the stage for a more  
productive discussion of this theme than most observers imagined a few  
months ago. During his first month in office, Arzu removed about half  
the generals in the officer corps and began to whittle away at a surplus of  
colonels who use their military positions for illicit enrichment,  
controlling enterprises ranging from car theft to kidnaping rings. More  
than 50 top army officials are currently charged with crimes, an  
unprecedented development here. Yet in response to these purges, crime  
has increased dramatically, probably an attempt by disgruntled officers  
to destabilize Arzu's government.  
     While we applaud some of the steps Arzu has taken to date, we're  
waiting to see how much is substance and how much merely an attempt  
to peddle a different image of Guatemala to the international  
community. And we remind ourselves that long-term change will come  
only from the poor themselves. The patient courage of people like  
Francisca, Lucio, Regina, and Manuela to struggle for their rights gives  
us hope that--if peace can be given a chance in Guatemala--things will  
change for this country's poor majority.  

Well, there are lots of other things we don't have room to write about  
here: our trip back to Nicaragua last June (and how the plane almost  
crashed), our wonderful garden, how cold it got this winter (14 degrees  
Fahrenheit), how the kids are doing in school, the dog and cat (Simba  
and Mischief), our favorite escape (a remote village on the edge of Lake  
Atitlán), and so on. Please accept these few words we write here as a  
meager expression of our deep appreciation for your continuing prayers  
and financial support. Know that we keep you all close in our prayers,  
asking God to grant you the insight and courage to sow justice and peace  
in your own communities.  

                                                                   Paul and Lyda