A letter from Tim Wheeler in Honduras
Winter 2014
Dear Friends,
The start of the New Year came quickly for us. Gloria received a mission team on January 5, the first of 20 planned for the year. She picked up right where she had let off in 2013—providing hope and encouragement to people in Honduran communities, as she likes to say, by putting a face on solidarity. By that time I was in Mexico working with the Heifer team on using values in their work and doing a self-review program. Another trip was planned for early February to Nicaragua.
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People look up to Eluterio Martinez
Later in January Gloria and I went to the village of Chonco. As you wind along the river and rise up to a ridge that overlooks the river running toward Guatemala, you feel that you are going into the Mayan past. Chonco has maintained its identity, traditions and values while other villages around them crumble to the intrusions from the outside world. The road itself is a testament to them as people; they built it by hand and it is a tribute today of their determination.
Once in the village we climbed the stairs taking us into the center of the village. The usual curious boys surrounded us; the slap of tortilla-making could be heard, telling us of the normality of life taking place. We were met by the village leader, Eluterio Martinez, a quiet and dedicated leader who always looks for ways to bring people together for community improvement. Eluterio leads by example. He took me up higher in the village to meet his father, not for any particular reason but more as a favor or kindness that he bestowed on me.
He told us of the history of the village and the struggles that they have had since the border demarcations with Guatemala in 1933 determined that they were part of Honduras. Nevertheless, little changed from that time until the recent past. They had no land, lived in houses made of sticks and thatched roofs, and had to give part of their crop to the large landowner who had usurped their ancestral land. Eluterio’s generation was the first to attend school. In the 1980s peasant organizations started to bring a new message to the rural poor about their rights and the benefits of being part of an organization. They would meet hidden out in the forest for their own safety. Later, identified as indigenous people, they joined a movement that eventually led to the government buying up land and assigning it to indigenous communities. That is when they received the right to the land that had been their ancestors’. Their story is the story of many Honduran communities: a subsistence level of life with little access to land, education and health services.
Community transformation and improved living conditions came later. This part of the story is linked to PC(USA) mission teams that were organized in a program to help them build their own houses in 2006. This became their landmark project, in which they demonstrated their abilities when given the opportunity. They made the cement blocks near the river where there is sand and carried the blocks on their backs up the hill and mountain to the housing sites high above the river. The story went on and on, about building a school, bathrooms and wash areas, all done by their own efforts with support from churches in the U.S. They received cows from Heifer and passed on offspring to more families. Children have protein in their diet and a school library. Their story became a story of what is possible when there is good leadership, a community spirit and opportunities for something different. Their community organization turned to advocacy and negotiated with the mayor of Copan to bring electricity into the village.
And yet with all of this change it was obvious that the people had maintained their cultural traditions and sense of identity. The programs had brought living improvements, had lessened the arduous work of women, and had placed a new importance on basic education. But one has the feeling that their story will continue for a long time into the future as direct Mayan descendants live with dignity and within their vision of the world.
I was uplifted from the visit that day. This visit gave me hope for what Gloria and I are involved in among other communities in terms of building up self-confidence, organizational strength, and community transformation; and for the year ahead of challenges, of new hopes and new calls. I wrote a little verse afterward:
I went back to Chonco at the start of the year,
to pick up the pieces from here and from there,
I went to see our friends,
a circle of love that never ends.
It was good to go to Chonco, and start anew,
and see what so many other communities might do.
Thank you for your continued financial support, for your interest in our activities and in us as people. Thank you for the prayers for people in Honduras, for those least amongst us. We hope you will continue this journey with us as together we and our global partners work to address the root causes of poverty and bring about God’s reign.
Yours faithfully,
Tim and Gloria Wheeler
Mission co-workers in Honduras and Mesoamerica
Apartado 15027, Colonia Kennedy
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
The 2014 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 43
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