How Can We Talk About It?

A letter from Justin Sundberg serving in Nicaragua

March 2016

Do you ever feel lost? Even when surrounded by people and activity? Renée, Autumn, Jack, Cassie, Ethan and I recently spent four days in the northwest central mountains of Nicaragua in a village called Santa Josefina. Santa Josefina is a forgotten place, according to one of its community members, situated on either side of a lightly trafficked road. It does not get visits from passersby. The 50 families in this community sometimes feel unnoticed, so when we visited them along with 18 university students from University Presbyterian, our home church in Seattle, we were told the villagers were grateful for our mere physical presence.

One kind of lostness, or disorientation, stirred some of the Seattle contingency as they spent time in Santa Josefina. It was related to their understanding of mission. Before arriving they knew they would engage in service projects, like preparing coffee sapling nurseries, followed by cleaning the area where the village water is captured from a mountain brook. In addition various exchanges were designed so that villagers and students could get to know each other, especially in the absence of a shared mother tongue—a worship service, playing with kids, a tour of farm parcels, and participating in household chores, all designed to enter into each other’s lives. The day trips to the village would be capped with an overnight in Santa Josefina’s humble homes, where royal hospitality diverted our eyes from missing appliances to the faces of our hosts.

Four goals guided the planning of the Seattle team trip. But the goal of working together on stated needs of the community is the one that seemed to rise above the rest and proved most confounding to the team. This is because the work was not stereotypical mission trip work, like evangelism or the building of a house.

This particular mission trip was to fuel the longer-term goal of a relationship between University Presbyterian Church and the Council of Protestant Churches of Nicaragua (CEPAD), perhaps with return visits to Santa Josefina in the next three or four years. In this context friendships will one day allow for houses to be built and wells to be dug, should that be a shared goal formalized in the context of trust and commitment. In a relationship like this there is little room for Nicaraguans to perceive their North American brothers and sisters as wealthy “boss men” or for North Americans to feel sorry for their Nicaraguan friends or to romanticize them as being “simple, but happy.”

Team Santa Josefina and University Ministries

Each person from the U.S. on a CEPAD trip yearns to make a difference in Nicaragua. Christian identity and cultural ideas about charity powerfully shape us, giving us a huge passion to be kingdom builders, bearing the light of Christ to the world. Additionally, the Seattle students had benefactors who financed their trips and to whom they felt accountable, wanting to provide answers to the questions they would likely be asked upon their return: “What did you do?” “What did you accomplish?” “How was your trip?” These questions, for some students, seemed to demand an answer more glamorous or substantial than our modest efforts to help with potable water and coffee plantation renovation.

In the absence of typical answers to these questions, some deep soul work would need to be done, not just to give an accounting to their sponsors, but also to answer these questions for themselves. Would it be ok to talk about their own personal transformation instead of claiming to have changed the life of a poor Nicaraguan? Or stumble a little in answering their friends and relatives’ questions, trying to sum up the enormity of the experience? Perhaps they would not be able to knit together the threads of their encounters into a coherent whole before their return to Seattle . . . or even resolve them at all for months or years to come. This uncertainty can be disorienting, a gnawing lostness, as one is forced to reconsider one’s worldview or perspective on the Kingdom of God and to what Jesus is calling us.

Another way to ask the question running through these students’ minds might be, “Is there value at all in short-term mission, especially if the inviting community desires relationship and a chance to be known as much or more than having latrines built or a new well dug?”

Here are some of their thoughts:

“My host family kept saying how happy they were to have us. She even showed us a letter she had kept from the only other [foreign] guest she had ever had in her home.”

Conversation pause

“On a previous mission trip, after a week we had accomplished a ton of stuff, but looking back I’m not sure I can remember the name of one person from the community we visited. I think the amazing relationships we formed this week is the best thing we did [in this Nicaragua mission trip]. We prepared several hundred bags for coffee tree planting. It was great ’cause I learned how coffee grows, but I had no sense of accomplishment in helping plant more coffee. But playing and teaching Four Square was much better because it has been so meaningful to me [in my growing-up years]. Coffee plants will die, but Four Square is forever!”

“Building projects are great and great for telling others what I did and it’s an ego boost, but this week has caused me to think about pouring my whole self out.”

“You can talk with someone for years, every day, and still it won’t mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever … connections are made with the heart, not the tongue. I got to make those kinds of connections on this trip.”

“If we had built a house, I think the community members would have just seen us as a group who did something that they could have done for themselves.”

Side by side

May the discoveries and reflections of these remarkable young adults give you the strong sense of how God uses such trips for tremendous good, both in the U.S. and in Nicaragua, even in the absence of a house built. Or perhaps precisely because of the absence of a house built.

Thank you for your partnership, interest and care for the people of Nicaragua and us. We invite you to continue walking together with us and CEPAD as we move toward two and a half years with Presbyterian World Mission. Your notes, prayers, visits and financial support are all great encouragements! We will be in the States this summer, in June and July, and look forward to the opportunities we will have to share more of what God is doing through all of us.

Grace and peace,

Justin and Renée