C-mail: Roughing it

Howdy All!

I'm glad to be writing you again from Caracas, Venezuela.  The past months have been a bit grueling to say the least, but you can read more about that below in the story section.  Thankfully, everything is back to normal, aside from the uncountable number of families who have lost their homes.  But allow me to explain:

1. After my last update explaining the tragic affects due to the heavy rains in Venezuela, things got worse in our barrio.  I explain what exactly happened to our hillside in much more detail below, but let's just say Murphy wrote the law and you know how that goes.  At the end of it all, I'd guess about 200 homes were lost just below where our team lives leaving a huge scar on our hillside covered with rubble and dirt.  For those of us who didn't lose their home, we are almost back to normal: we have running water, working transportation, phone and internet, trash collection, and the dust plague has abated.  But most important is that no one lost their life due to the landslide and falling houses.  Praise the Lord!

2. With so many of our neighbors having lost their homes and now displaced, we've continued to minister to them in the refugee shelters.  Starting in December, the government set up these shelters all over the country to give temporary housing to the 130,000+ people nationwide who had lost their homes.  As the months have rolled on, people have been moved and shifted different shelters all over the city and surrounding areas leaving our neighbors scattered to the four winds.  We have been visiting weekly one shelter in particular where the greatest concentration of our neighbors are located.  There are many needs and much opportunity for ministry in this and all such shelters. The need is great, but the workers are very few.  Please pray for volunteers to come along side to help with and start new ministries in these shelters. 

3. We have recently seen new movement with bible studies and house church groups in the community of San Pablito.  I don't want to say too much for the moment, but we're pretty excited to see what is taking place.  Please pray for new leaders to rise up to lead bible studies and for us to find households open to reading the bible.  More on this in the next C-mail.

4. Team update: The Shorack family returned from their sabbatical late this January.  It was wonderful to receive them back as they are a huge blessing to the team.  The Shorack family, and the InnerCHANGE Caracas team, will be celebrating ten years on the ground in Caracas this November.  Arturo and LayYen, the Venezuelan couple that joined our team in September, just had their first baby.  Grecia was born on the 21st of February after an emergency cesarean.  Even though she had defecated in her amniotic fluid, the doctors were able to get her out quickly enough for her to be completely healthy.  They are all enjoying being a new family.  Noretys, the young Venezuelan woman who also joined our team in September, is getting ready to start her preparation to minister with InnerCHANGE in Africa.  Starting in July, she will be studying English in Trinidad for six months. Please email me if you would like information on how you can support the ministry of InnerCHANGE in raising up new and local missionaries.

5. Personally, I've been feeling swamped as of late.  All the instability of the hillside, comings and goings on the team, and the continual adjustments here have been exhausting.  At the same, I'm really excited about what God is doing here.  At the end of April, our team is going to take a vision retreat to take time to listen to what God would have us chose as our vision.  There are many exciting options and needs we can choose to work on, but we need God's help in guiding our process on how to focus our efforts. Please pray for strength and wisdom for me as leader and for our team as we hope to hear from Him. 

That's going to be it for now. It is always so encouraging to hear back from you, even if only to know how to be praying.  I wish you all the best in everything and miss you all dearly.  Until next time, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

In a nifty little class called Strength of Materials, a young engineering student learns that nothing in this world is rigid.  That is to say, everything deforms, everything is elastic. When a force is applied to an object, the object experiences a stress.  This stress causes a corresponding deformation in the object.  When the stress is removed, the deformation also disappears and the object returns to its original state, assuming that the original stress was not sufficient to permanently deform the object.  Some materials deform better than others, aka they are more elastic.  For example, ceramics and glass don't deform much before they break.  Metals on the other hand are rather elastic and deform nicely until they reach a critical stress at which the metal catastrophically deforms and soon fractures.  However, there is a material that I would characterize as being one of the most elastic in existence.  Over the past few months, I've had the privilege to both observe and be part of the human material as it underwent stress, the consequent deformation and the return to its original state once the stress was removed.

Things really started going bad back in early December. As I mentioned in my last update, many families had lost their homes due to the landslides. Even though they were continually shuffled around refugee centers and had to deal with serious loss of privilege, they were at times, and from a certain perspective, lucky. The government did an excellent preliminary job of getting people into shelters and getting them the needed resources for basic life. Additionally, the Venezuelan people assembled generous outpourings of donations, but in this particular case, they were largely unnecessary and many donated items never reached their intended recipients. Many cultural groups, churches and other programs flocked in droves to the shelters to do programs and sports with the children. However, since December, their presence has been minimal to nonexistent. In our section of the city, which was heavily hit, schools were converted into temporary shelters with each classroom housing 8-15 families. The loss of privacy was difficult. Women were given shifts to cook for the entire shelter and of course, when someone else cooks for large numbers of people the food never comes just like you want it, nor is it even what you might care to eat. The loss of good food was difficult. In the shelters large lines of students and those with jobs formed outside of the bathrooms at four in the morning. The loss of time for showering, shaving, and everything else was difficult. I won't even mention the paper work involved with beginning the process of securing a new residence, but the loss of time was difficult. The word that has floated around is that most families in the refugee centers are going to be there at least a year and a half before all the houses and apartment buildings are completed.

For those of us on the hill that didn't lose their homes, things were tense. Although the rains had stopped, the hillside continued to move. Everyday, the ground would sink about half an inch. I wish I had a stop motion camera to track the movement of the ground. One road in particular was divided in half by the settlement. Walking up the hill, the section of the road on the right did not move at all. While the left slowly settled little by little until a 15' foot cliff divided the two halves. Check out the attached pictures to see its progress down the hill.  It's easy to write about now looking back over the course of the months, but during the process it was a little disconcerting.

At my last update, a post had fallen blocking traffic up the hill. This meant that everyone who lived higher up the hill had to walk to their homes. Thankfully the post was soon repaired and transportation continued on as normal. However, just weeks later, precisely on Christmas day, a huge hole opened up swallowing the post and asphalt alike, leaving only half of the narrow road in tact. Transportation by car and jeep became impossible and the only way to come up the road was by foot or motorcycle. Those of us that lived higher up on the hill were now left with two possible routes to get home: 1. The adventurous route by the gaping hole in the aforementioned road (which also had a broken sewer pipe pumping raw sewage down the mountainside) or 2. Taking a very narrow set of stairs that connected to another road. Many people chose the stairs that first day.  However, the not so local criminals from a neighboring sector took advantage of the situation and chain robbed about 60 people over the course of an hour, at which point a more local criminal came to the defense of his neighborhood and chased off the offending criminals with a pistol. After the robbery everyone decided to take the route by the gaping hole.

A meeting was organized on that Sunday to address the situation. Held in the parking lot of a textile factory located just below the gaping hole, we were there informed that the gaping hole was not only a risk to our transportation and neighboring houses, but also to the water pump that services the upper part of our hillside. The hole (located directly in front of the pump station) was bound to grow and and the pump would have to be moved. There were uncertainties of when the pump would be moved, when it would be reinstalled, of how many more days of running water we would have to fill up our tanks, etc. There were also questions about what would be done about the crime and if there would be police stationed on the stairs. These questions were not addressed at the meeting. There were promises to build an alternate road behind the factory that would connect to the rest of the barrio. There were calls for everyone to bring their trash down to the main road below the gapping hole so that it could be collected there instead of disposing of it where the trash trucks no longer had access. There were also a number of women who were not satisfied with the responses of the officials and decided to protest the next day.

My teammate KT and I decided to participate in the protest. What happened there is a story in and of itself, but suffice it to say, the protest, like many protests, was successful, completely unnecessary, and a flop, all at the same time. 

There were still issues with the trash. Thankfully everybody collaborated in carrying their trash with them down the hill to the indicated locations, but there were still piles of rotting trash that had not been collected for days left the meeting. One day after buying a few items to make a rainwater collection system, a neighbor asked me if I could help bag up the trash. The textile factory had agreed to let smaller trash trucks pass through the factory on an alternate road to collect the trash, as long as it was bagged up.

I spent that afternoon with a small and eclectic group of neighbors bagging up the dump on the street. Those present included the family of the welder across from us.  While he worked with the shovel, his wife and children asked for donations from passersby to buy garbage bags.  Also present was the taxi driver whose wife is in charge of the drug trade in our neighborhood.  Also present were the moms in the neighboring houses concerned about the plague of flies bothering their children.  Also present were a few young men who, as they passed by, decided to throw their strength into the matter. Also present were a couple of crack addicts that live and work on the street and helped out.  Also present were 10-20 million maggots about which I don't particularly care to write. After about three hours or so, we had all of our trash bagged up and ready to be taken away. Present in the shower that night was a bottle of bleach.    

New years eve was very low key this year due to the lack of water.  The aforementioned pump was turned back on the day after the meeting, but a hole in one of the pipes prevented it from reaching anyone. From that moment on, no one would receive water by the traditional means of the pipes in the ground.  For the moment however, everyone still had their water tank. The race to save water was on. In my "apartment" I have access to running water inside my house only if the aforementioned pump is on. When the pump is off, I get my water from a tank just outside my door. This tank is shared between four renters, including myself, and their respective families. The tank ran out within days. Even so, we did all we could to save water. The drain pipe below the sink was disconnected to collect the water from washing the dishes for flushing the toilet. Washing clothes was out of the question and thankfully my girlfriend was glad to help me out in that area (although in the barrio where they live, they only get water every two weeks to fill up their tank.) The essentials of showers and doing the dishes became possible with progressively smaller amounts of water.

Eventually everyone's tanks ran dry and it became necessary to get water the hard way. In actuality, there were many hard ways to get water. The first thing to understand is that there are anywhere from 60-45,000 people that live on our hill. When the pump was removed it left at least 20,000 residents without water. The second thing to understand is that our hill is a real hill, and a steep one at that. So the people that live at highest point were going to be in very sore shape if they had to carry water up themselves. But no need to worry, somebody (and no one is really sure who organized this; there were many officials running around with badges of ministries that no one had heard of before) organized to send water trucks up the hill. They managed this with the help of the textile factory that let the trucks pass through the working factory that gave them access to the alternate road. And even then, this "road" has parts that are at least a 30% grade (see the photo if you don't believe me). The water trucks were destined for the highest sectors on the hill. This was frustrating to many who didn't receive water and soon a few trucks fell pray to armed gangs on motorcycles that directed the trucks to their section of the hill. The national guard quickly stepped in and began to escort every truck coming up. I know one well organized sector in particular received water twice a day and had plenty to spare. However, this left the families lower down on the hill waiting, and waiting, and waiting for some truck driver to have mercy on them and fill up their barrels. It was not uncommon to see a group of women wait from 7 in the morning to 9 or later at night, standing guard over a regiment of empty 55 gallon drums. For those not gifted with patience like that, we got to carry the stuff. Everyday a steady stream of men, women, and children pushed, pulled and heaved gallons and gallons of water.  3-4 gallons in a wheeled basket were the choice of children. Men on foot without dollys, like myself, carried 5-6 gallon containers on their shoulder. Those with dollys would mount a few 5-6 gallon containers or jump straight to a large 10 or 15 gallons. Those blessed with cars and trucks used anything and everything. The comunal house in a lower sector that still had access to running water offered their hose at first and then individual homes began to share their water with the dry.

Carrying water every to every other day was good exercise for a week.  After a week it turned grueling. It made me think of the proverbial African women that walk for miles every day carrying water on their heads. We weren't walking for miles, but we were carrying it uphill. Neither did any of us know, nor learned how, nor even tried to carry it on our head. All that to say, it wasn't fun. Nor can it be for the women in Africa I imagine.

As the days went on, the ground kept falling just a little bit everyday. The area around the hole began to worsen. Asphalt began to crumple and break apart. Electric and phone lines hung inches off the ground as telephone poles bent and gave way. The houses across the street from the hole began to crack and show fissures at the corners of the windows. One house built on columns fell down in one piece and landed like a trailer in the aftermath of a tornado. Frequently you could hear the structure of the houses cracking as you walked by causing screams and frantic scrambles from the pedestrians. And yet, most chose to take this Indiana Jones route instead of the stairs. The fear of getting robbed or shot was still much greater than that of getting hit by a falling brick or being swept away in a landslide.

Our valiant team of three began to get in really good shape by this time. Walking up and down the hill carrying groceries proved to be wonderful exercise. But we're young; it was the elderly, disabled, and the unhealthy that suffered greatly. The transportation game changed daily. Sometimes there were jeeps in certain locations, other times not. As the hill continued to fall, previously usable roads became impassible and the routes of the jeeps changed. For where we live, it made more sense to walk.

I know this all sounds like a bad Monty Python skit, but things continued to worsen in the same vane.  It was about that time that the water works started excavating to place a new pipeline. One Friday morning, a machine with a saw blade the size of a small kiddy pool magically appeared.  The still morning was cut to shreds as the carbon tipped teeth dug into the asphalt and lower substrate. The street and all nearby houses filled with dust. The excavation continued for another two weeks, and inundated our street with a heavy yellow dust. Our office transformed into tutankomen's tomb. Jeep drivers and pedestrians alike donned facemasks giving a strangely medical quarantine feel to the street. That is of course, if you could see people's faces through the thick dust fog.

It was also about that time that the textile factory graciously opened its doors and allowed transportation to come through the middle of the factory to access the provisional road with the 30% or more grade. It was a nice gesture, but in practice it left much to be desired.  The factory would randomly close their gates leaving long lines of cars waiting to pass for hours.  Many people returning from work at night had to find other places to sleep as it became impossible to find transportation up the hill after 8 o'clock in the evening.  The other complication with the steep street was that very few cars had the strength get up the road.  And forget about it when the road was wet.  Traffic up and down became a dangerous journey.  Sadly, one jeep lost its brakes on the way down and claimed the life of an elderly woman in the resulting crash.  By this time, the gaping hole had taken the entire street and the only accessible pedestrian route was by the stairs.  Thankfully the national guard had finally stationed a few soldiers along the stairs, but even then, robberies around the stairs were common place. 

By then it was early February, and I took a much needed spiritual retreat I had put off since November.  When I returned I didn't recognize the hillside.  Heavy machinery had come in and torn down cracked house after crumbling house.  The gapping hole was no longer a gapping hole, but a field of rubble.  I heard stories of people laying down in front of menacing machinery ready tear down their beloved houses of 40 years that they had built with their own hands.  I don't have an exact number, but I would guess around 200 homes were ultimately lost. 

It would be a few days after that until the new pipeline would be finished.  It would be another two weeks until the water came back with full pressure.  It would be another two weeks after that until the machinery had cleared a new road and transportation began to flow as before. And now, aside from a bit of dust from the continual excavation of the hill, things are back to normal. 

I've honestly had to think pretty hard about all that happened to be able to remember and then write this.  Truth be told, the whole incident seems like a dream that never really happened. Even in the midst of it all, we just adapted.  We were all in the same boat and we got used to it: the lack of water, carrying the water, the dust, the trash, the walking, the falling houses, the horrible transportation, etc.  It was all just another thing like the rain.  And now that it's all over, we're used to that too. 

Interestingly enough, no one really talks about what happened. It's not a topic of conversation, precisely because we've all forgotten about it.  There are more pressing things to adjust to.  The stress is gone and we have elastically adjusted back to where we were at before this whole mess started.

That isn't to say that the stress wasn't, well, stressful, because it really was. Life without stress is much easier, but it isn't necessarily happier or more fulfilling. A stressful life needs to be a shared life. Not shared verbally per se, but shared in experience. The fact that everyone lived the same difficulties made it possible to keep on living, and also return to normal once it was all over.

I wish I could say that I'm hit with a grand sense of gratitude every time I turn on the faucet, or every time the trash gets taken away but honestly I'm not. I'm pretty good at forgetting what things were like. The reality is that no matter how horrible or wonderful the circumstances, the extremity or blandness of the situation, the absolute misery or absolute tranquility of the environment, we can adapt to it and we can live in it. There will always be something to complain about, and there will always be something to be thankful for. That's a choice we all need to make, and it's a choice made much easier together.

Until next time, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

Protest

Here's the story of the protest that blocked la redoma on the 27th of December.

My teammate KT and I decided to join the protest. I felt that the authorities were doing as best a job as they could with planning and rebuilding the infrastructure, but they were completely ignoring the issue of crime. There was a rumor that when someone asked the police to come and watch over the stairs, they responded that the community should hire its own delinquents to patrol the stairway.

The protest was my first such event and was an excellent learning space. First, I learned that groups doing something out of the ordinary need strong leaders. Strong leaders are natural leaders. That is to say, they can't help but be leaders regardless of the their own disposition; everyone looks to them for instruction and inspiration. Remove the leaders and the movement dissipates. There were two such natural leaders present at the protest. The second thing I learned is that many times natural leaders are clueless as to their status as natural leaders.

The protest blocked off a major intersection at the base of our hill that feeds the local market place (la redoma) and serves as a major hub for our section of the city. The police showed up immediately, and very naturally ended up being directed towards the leaders. The police briefly chatted with the leaders asking for the demands of the protest and then quietly took a spot in the shade to make sure everything proceeded peacefully. When motorcycles tried breaking the human blockade, one of the leaders asked the police for a caution tape and was quickly rewarded with a full roll. The blockade of the intersection lasted for about three hours. It came to an end when the leaders, obviously unaware that they were the leaders and moral support of the group, went to shore up a road block at a different location and left the main location leaderless. Soon a group of people, who knows who they were, showed up at the scene and began to negotiate with us to unblock the road, and in spite of our verbal protests, completely undid the blockade while the leaderless protesters were left wondering what exactly had happened. A very anti-climatic protest over all. One interesting cultural note, almost all of the protesters were women. Our little group vacillated between 20-40 people, while an equal number of men sat by watching. We later figured that blocking the road as a man can be very dangerous as it leads to many confrontations with other men on motorcycles which can turn deadly in a not so public setting.

The blockade turned out to be actually counter productive in the end, but I chalk it up to the ever present chaos of groups. The blockade first started in a different location much earlier in the morning. A high ranking minister in the government deployed to the scene of the protest immediately and then climbed the hill to survey the damage with two of our neighbors.The arrival of the minister and his action up on the hillside were of course was completely unknown to us. The president of Venezuela, interestingly enough, was immediately informed of the blockade we had made (after the initial protest) and called the minister asking why in the world people were still protesting if he was already on the scene. The poor minister, who to the best of his knowledge thought that the protest had ended, could only respond that all the protesters were part of the opposition against the president. It was a lie to cover himself, but what was to be done? He didn't know we were protesting, and we didn't know he had already showed up. What's more, the people who knew that the minister had arrived were not natural leaders, and even if they had tried to stop the blockade, it would have come to nothing. We only found out these details of the story a week after the protest.

So, like I said, the protest was successful in that it caught the attention of the authorities and they responded, unnecessary in that the protest had already achieved its goal when it started the blockade, and a flop in that it was a unresolved ending with no clear outcome.