On Being Flexible yet Questioning: Confrontingt the Religion Factor

Monday, February 20, 2011

The next two days are all about figuring things out. They are spent in mostly thoughtful pursuit of the truth—my own, theirs and society’s. (As if I could even imagine solving the problems of the world, let alone mine, in a couple of days!)

In order to exercise this unexpected time of self-examination I do what I always do when I find myself floundering in pockets of doubt or happiness or sadness. I talk. Communicate. Ask questions.

Admittedly, I didn’t know much about the Community House or Safe Passage or Oneness before I knocked on their door last evening, was graciously received and fed.Even with this pathetic "pouch" for a food sack the way to my heart is still good food. 

I knew what I had read on the websites. I knew what Margaurite had told me via her friend, Carol, another committed Canadian volunteer. I knew by conversations I had had with Community House owners and Oneness founders, Richard and Susan Schmaltz, that volunteering with them would be inspiring.

Richard and Susan Schmatz are visionaries. They are the kind of people who make a difference in the lives of others. I admired them before I met them. I admire them more now.

However, what I didn’t know when the big steel door at 13 Santa Inez, on the edge of Antigua, swung shut behind me was that there would be another project to consider and perhaps participate in. The five other people in the house are part of an Evangelical church group from Arnprior brought here by Shirley and Guy, our Community House hosts, to “serve” in the village of La Pinada.

Richard is so ill that he has been admitted to the hospital in Antigua. There is no need for Susan to worry about placing us at the dump school. Sarah, Marg and I happily join Shirley and Guy’s project, eager to both help out and learn more.

Breakfast is served at 7am and we all gather around the wood tables in the dining room. At 8am we climb up into the back of a rusty old pick-up truck driven by the amiable Walter, for the drive to the work site. Luckily, there are benches in the back. I pull my hood over my head and hold on for dear life. It is a pleasant ride over the by now familiar uneven Guatemalan  roads with way too many speed bumps, encased in the stench of rotten exhaust.

Guy (Paster Guy to his flock at the River of Life Christian Fellowship church back in Arnprior, Ontario) and Shirley have built what we believe is a Community Centre in the hillside village—literally a village on the side of a hill. The building has four floors of cement block construction with parged walls. (I consider myself a parging expert after my stove building days. We talk like we've been masons for years. I don't LOVE doing it the way Margaurite does, but that's just plain wierd!).

Our job for the day is to paint the community kitchen my favourite shade of darkish lime green and a Mexican fiesta yellow. The room is really big. The parged walls are, of course, rough. They devour the paint with a ferocious thirst. But we just keep slapping it on. Sarah moves the ladder around the top to do the edging. Marg does the middle section with a long-handled roller. I do the bottom.

The other five volunteers are members of the Arnprior church, here to work as part of Guy and Shirley's "Love Made Real Ministries". The two men work with the masons on the flat soon-to-be- green-featuring-a-chicken-coop roof. They work really hard, carrying cement up stairs and doing other muscle bound things. One of the women paints the four bathroom stalls. Another paints the hall. The third is a 14 year old from VanKleek Hill. She works alongside us for much of this first day.

But it isn't long before the religious dynamic begins to tighten its grip on me. I knew that Richard  had recently taken the Executive Director job at Safe Passage and that he and Susan now lived off site. What I hadn't considered was that religion was now the over-riding volunteerism motivator in the house.  

"...let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." 1 John 3:18 says the intro to the Love Made Real recruitment/fundraising brochure.

I'm okay with this. After all, my month-long odyssey has been about stepping outside what is predicable and safe, and living a truth that is real. The need for an efficient way to cook food for a family that lives in poverty is the reality. Stoves save lives is the happy truth. They greatly enhance the quality of air in homes where the family often sleeps only feet from the fire, and they prevent incredible human tragedy because the fires are contained. Partnering with a Gautemalan group to build stoves for identified families is a truth. I joined the Guatemala Stove Project because it is grassroots, provides a service that saves lives and people need, and because the local partner decides where the stoves go. They know their people, their communities.

I have a problem with Good Samaritanism when it is more about the giver than the receiver. I have a problem with us coming to another country and assuming that our way is the only way. I have a real problem with giving something and expecting something in return.

This is where my emotions go haywire. My past catches up to me. That damn Catholic upbringing! Even decades after the fact it evokes so much confusion. The intensity of my feelings squishes the blood out of my head. Questions with no answers beg to be answered.

That more religious than all religious words, "FAITH", bounces off the greenness, echoing loudly as it swoons around us.

Why are we all here in this green room with a modern propane cooktop that has yet to connected? Is this about giving a helping hand or is it more about trading "God'isms" for the basics of life? My friend calls it "Religion for Food".

One of the women got on the back of the truck this morning clutching a book she calls, "my daily devotionals". Later in the afternoon, once Sarah and Marg and I have returned from Hilmar's hiking tour of the village, I ask her if she has been into the homes of the people she professes to "serve". I am shocked by the answer I receive.

"No," she says. Then with a stern look, she coninues, "We're going to do a prayer walk."

Whoa doggie! Back up the bus.

Prayer walk?

Sounds suspisciously like preaching.

Then I learn that the "community centre" on the main floor, the one with what I've been calling a "stage" is really a church.

So, to recap, the building consists of two main rooms -- a church as you enter and a kitchen below.

I feel like I have been tricked.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a community in need. The question is this, "Is religion the tonic that will cleanse their wounds and help to create a better life for the next generation?"