Dusting Off The Owner’s Manual
In the early day of this century, automobiles were just coming on the scene. Riding in one was an adventure. Appropriate attire was required. The uniform of a driver and passengers included a waterproof coat, a sturdy hat, goggles to protect the eyes, and gloves.
Most vehicles came to be equipped with a compartment designed to store the goggles and gloves. This compartment became known as the “glove box” or “glove compartment.”
Things have changed now, and driving is no longer such the adventure—except on the roads of Miskitia or the streets of Miami, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. No longer do drivers and passengers wear raincoats, hats, goggles, and gloves. But the “glove compartment” remains in every car.
Take a look in the glove box of almost any car. Very rarely will you see a pair of gloves. Instead, you will most likely see old maps, pens that don’t write, crumpled gas receipts, a battery guarantee (expired), an insurance card, Kleenex (new and used), and a scratched pair of sunglasses. In our glove box in La Ceiba, you will find a diaper as well for those fragrant emergencies.
In most cars, underneath all this “valuable stuff,” you’ll find something really valuable—the Owner’s Manual for the vehicle.
What is this Owner’s Manual? It’s a book of information on the vehicle prepared by the manufacturer. This little booklet tells you about the various parts of the automobile, how they function, what to do to keep the vehicle running properly, what to do if there are problems, and who to call if you need help. If you follow the instructions in the booklet, the manufacturer guarantees that your vehicle will provide you with quality transportation for years. If you ignore the advice given in your owner’s manual, and operate the vehicle as you want, and change the oil when you want, then the guarantee is void, and eventually there will be problems.
In 1981, my life in Vail, Colorado, was in disorder, yet by 1984 things had changed. What made the difference?
The Bible provides an outline of God’s principles for living the life He gave us. It’s the Owner’s Manual, so to speak, given to us by our Creator. My life changed because I finally opened the glove compartment, took out the owner’s manual and read it. I guess I must have been feeling in need of some repair after years of ignoring the manual.
It makes sense that our Creator naturally would give us directions on how to live life here on Planet Earth—every aspect of life. He gives us guidelines on how to run your business, how to relate to your neighbors, children, and spouse, the proper attitudes about work and rest, and most importantly, how to relate to your Creator.
It’s all there—in the Bible.
I knew that if the owner’s manual could affect me in such a profound way, it would affect others as well. . . .
Refugees have been around since the dawn of time. Ever since man began to make war on each other (which is just a secular way of describing the ongoing battle between God and the opposing forces of evil), there have been victims of those conflicts who have been forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in another land. The first recorded refugees were Adam and Eve. They were victims of the war between Satan and God, and they were forced out of their homeland.
Another group of refugees recorded in the Bible were the inhabitants of Israel after the fall of Jerusalem.
When God brought His people to the “Promised Land,” He brought them to one of the most strategic locations in the world—the land bridge between Africa, Asia, and Europe. This land, known then as Canaan, was the meeting place of the armies of the great empires of that age. If the Egyptians wanted to expand their empire, they naturally moved northeast across Canaan to attack the Babylonians. If the Assyrians want to take part of Egypt, they, too, naturally moved south through Canaan first. This land was literally the “freeway” of the known world, and God placed His people right in the median. Why?
I think that it was so that God’s people would constantly have to trust in Him to protect them from these grand empires and their often ruthless armies. They would have to maintain a close relationship with Him, placing their total trust in Him.
For some reason, trust and faith are important elements to God of our relationship with Him.
If you study the history of the nation of Israel and the surrounding empires during the period of 1300 B.C. to 400 B.C., an amazing fact stands out: as long as the Israelites were faithful to God and maintained their close relationship with Him, neither the Egyptians nor the northern empires (Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians) had any expansionistic tendencies. Many times their histories during this period record deep internal struggles. However, when Israel became comfortable, and then lax in their relationship with God, and began to focus their attention into other areas, and on other “gods,” then suddenly a king with ideas of conquest appeared on the northern or southern horizon, and war ensued. Sennacherib and Tiglath-Pileser III were two of these conquering kings who made their appearance at a time when Israel as a nation had turned away from God. Each captured a portion of the country. Finally, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, conquered what was left of the once mighty nation of Israel in 586 B.C.
The Babylonian king exiled many of the Jewish captives to Babylon. There they remained until the Persian Empire was victorious in their war against Babylon. The Persian king, Cyrus, gave these Jewish refugees permission to return to their homeland in 539 B.C. In subsequent decades, many groups of Jewish refugees returned to their desolated homeland.
A leader of one of these groups, a priest named Ezra, recognized that the fall of his nation and the subsequent years of exile had resulted from the fact that God’s people had left the owner’s manual in the glove box for too long. Too many of the kings of Judah and Israel had ignored God’s moral and governmental laws and had ruled as they wished. The people had long forgotten what the laws that God gave to Moses actually said, especially after living many years in a foreign land.
Ezra saw that the key to rebuilding His nation was knowledge and application of God’s principles to the lives of His people. It was time for them to take the owner’s manual out of the glove box, dust it off, and get the vehicle running and back on track.
Over 2,600 years later, there was another refugee situation. . . .
The Miskito Indians had been forced from their homes in Nicaragua along the Rio Coco in 1981 and 1982, and over 40,000 had fled into the swamps and savannah of neighboring Honduras. When we arrived in 1984, we came with relief supplies. However, it was immediately apparent to us that transporting huge amounts of cargo to Miskitia to meet these refugees’ physical needs was a logistical challenge that only a large, well-financed organization like the United Nations could handle. Yet we knew that God had us there for some purpose. . . .
In 1985, a refugee who had been a teacher in Nicaragua came to us asking us about the possibility of helping him start a school. At that point, it had been over five years since most of the refugee children in our zone had attended classes. Ron and I were sympathetic and wanted to help, but we had no experience in education (except, of course, that we had both been students for many years). We bought a box of notebooks and some pencils, gave these meager supplies to the teacher and wished him well.
The following spring I was in Tegucigalpa when I got a call from John, our administrator in California. He told me that a couple from Washington was en route to Honduras, hoping to help start a school in one of the refugee villages. I met the couple, Earl and Sharon Washburn, and we talked. Earl was a scientist working on a classified project for the Air Force. His wife Sharon was a school teacher who spoke good Spanish. Earl had been on the same trip with John, Ron and me in November of 1984. At that time he had visited the village of Alatis, about 40 miles west of Auka, near the town of Rus Rus, and wanted to return there with Sharon to help start a school.
There was already a school in Alatis, however, that had been started the preceding year by Friends of the Americas, a relief organization that was working on the upper Rio Coco. I asked Sharon and Earl to come to Auka and help us instead. They agreed.
Earl and Sharon spent a month training four Miskitos. These four were not professionally trained teachers, but they were the most educated people in their village and had a desire to see their children in school receiving an education. After their four-week workshop, they returned to their villages to organize the classes. I returned to Tegucigalpa with Ron to look for some school books for these teachers to use.
I started at the Friends of the Americas office by asking the secretary where they bought the books for the schools they had started around Rus Rus. She didn’t know, but she showed me a receipt of some book purchases that had been made. I jumped in a taxi, showed the driver the address on the receipt, and we headed off.
The taxi stopped in a residential area in front of a house.
“Is this the address of the bookstore?” I asked.
He nodded yes. It didn’t look like a bookstore to me, but rather a walled private residence. Without getting out of the car, I told him to take me back to the office.
There, I called the phone number on the receipt. A lady with a pleasant voice answered. I asked her if this was a bookstore, and she said “No.” I told her I was looking for school books and I must have the wrong number. She replied that while her house was not a bookstore, she was a teacher who had prepared some teaching materials. The taxi driver had taken me to the correct location. I apologized for bothering her, and as I was about to hang up she told me to come back to her house because she had some materials that I might be interested in.
I got back in the taxi and returned to her house. Opening the door, she introduced herself as Victoria de Palacios and invited me into her living room. She was a very pleasant lady and began to show me first and second grade reading and writing books that she had written. Impressed, I began questioning her about the books, but quickly realized that I was at the limits of my Spanish “educational” vocabulary.
She realized it too, and suddenly, in perfect English, asked me, “Would it be better if we spoke in English?”
“You speak English?” I asked.
“Yes. I went to college in Tennessee and got my Master’s at New Mexico State.”
A light went on.
A few years earlier Victoria had been hired by the U.S. government to work on a project developing curriculum for Honduran public schools. After two years of work, slowed by the bureaucratic restraints of government work, and completely frustrated with the system, she resigned, took her materials to a print shop, and, with a loan from a friend, printed the first and second grade books herself. Now she was beginning to sell them to many of the private schools in Honduras.
Most Honduran schoolbooks at the time used methodology that required the teacher to write each lesson on the blackboard and have the students copy it in their notebooks. This method was antiquated by U.S. standards. Victoria, with her training in the United States, had written school books incorporating all the latest techniques being used in the United States. I realized that this was exactly the type of material that we were looking for.
Another light went on.
I excused myself for a few minutes and returned to the hotel to get Ron. He needed to see this. When we both returned, Victoria showed us her series of charts, alphabet cards, and math flash cards that accompanied the text and workbooks. We were impressed. In our conversation with her we discovered that she taught education methodology at the university in Tegucigalpa and was formerly the principal of a private Christian school. She was also good friends with the current Minister of Education.
Another light went on.
If we were going to start an education project, this woman could be a great help. As we leafed through the pages of the books, I whispered to Ron, “Boy, it would be great if we could get her to come to Auka to train our teachers.”
The very next moment Victoria suggested this herself: “You know, I’ve never been to Miskitia. If you like, I could come out and spend some time training your teachers.”
The Big Light went on!
I sat up in my chair! We accepted her offer immediately and began making plans. Ron and I left Victoria’s house excited and inspired. Suddenly we saw greater possibilities for our work in Miskitia.
A few days later, Ron and I returned to Auka with some books, but much more— a vision. We saw a way to really do something worthwhile with these Miskito refugee communities by giving them something that would serve their immediate and future needs— education, with an orientation to Christian principles for living. With Earl and Sharon’s help, and now the assistance of Victoria, one of the most respected educators in Central America, we had the tools to construct something substantial.
We began visiting the villages in our zone (the Kruta and lower Coco Rivers) asking if there was interest in an education program for the children. There was. We needed teachers, so we interviewed and selected the most educated adults in each village. There were some who had some teaching experience, but most of our candidates had only finished the sixth grade. Church buildings were made available by the pastors and village leaders for classrooms. Our plan was to begin the 1987 school year in March with schools in 12 villages with grades 1 through 3. Ages and grades would be mixed up since nobody had been to school in five years. We knew that having a 6-year-old with an 11-year-old in first grade could present problems, but we had to start somewhere.
John found churches and individuals in the United States to sponsor these schools by donating money to pay teacher salaries and buy the schoolbooks and materials. By March 1987, everything was in place, and we flew Victoria to Auka to spend a week with our teachers. Sharon Washburn also arrived to participate in the workshop.
After the first training session, I asked Victoria what she thought of our teachers.
“They are a bit rough,” she replied. “Many of them have problems reading, writing, and speaking Spanish.”
She worked hard that week with our teachers. So did Sharon. This week was an important time for our teachers. Not only did they improve their own reading, writing, and math skills, but they saw Victoria and Sharon as true role models—experienced teachers who could answer all their questions about teaching children. Their participation in the school project gave them, and all of us, hope that we could be effective in reaching our children.
Classes began the following week in the villages of Auka, Bikanka, Lisagna, Srumlaya, Turalaya, Topomlaya, Tuskru, Livinkrik, Sih-Uran, Sawa, Boom, and Klampa. The curriculum included basic literacy skills, math, social studies, science, and the Bible. We had over 300 students enrolled.
When it came time to put a name on our school project, my thoughts turned to Ezra and his desire to see his people incorporate the Word of God into their lives. What an appropriate model for our teachers!
“For Ezra had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the Lord, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel.” (Ezra 7:10) [NIV]
The school project became known as Project Ezra.
Christianity came to the Rio Coco in the early 1900's and to the Rio Kruta in mid-century. Most Miskitos accepted Christianity as their religion, and many attend church services on Sunday. However, most don’t understand the importance of a personal relationship with the Lord. Few actually understand what the Bible says about how our Creator desires us to live our lives. Many integrate their Christian beliefs with traditional animistic beliefs.
In this somewhat confused spiritual environment, our objective for Project Ezra was to teach more than just basic literacy and math skills. We wanted to give the people in our villages practical Godly wisdom for ordering and living their lives as well as an understanding of true personal relationship with God. Ezra’s refugees and our refugees shared the same need— knowledge and application of the Word of God— how to use the “Owner’s Manual” that God gave us. Teaching the children was a start, and we knew the next step would be working with the adults.
Victoria returned in July, with Elia, another professor from the university, for another workshop with our teachers. With help from these professionals, the teachers began making progress in their teaching skills. This training, plus using Victoria’s curriculum and having the money to buy books for each of our students, made the schools successful that first year.
When you think of the difficulties of putting together a school project in a very remote corner of Central America, using untrained teachers, and with limited finances, the challenge is overwhelming. However, it was obvious to all of us that the Lord was orchestrating something here. Sharon and Earl’s arrival, my “chance” meeting with Victoria, her willingness to help, and the success that John had in finding school sponsors were all indicators that something beyond our means was going on. And He wasn’t finished yet.
How many people do you know who say they attended the famous Woodstock concert in 1969?
We know one who actually did.
His name is Tom Keogh, and in 1989 we invited him to Auka for the Summer Project Ezra workshop. Tom is an American who was raised in Puerto Rico, went to high school in Connecticut, and originally came to Honduras as a Peace Corps volunteer. There he married a Miskito girl and returned to the United States for a Master’s degree in Bilingual Education. In 1985 he returned to Honduras to manage a radio educational project for the U.S. government. In early 1989, the radio project funding ended, and Tom returned to his wife’s town on the coast to live, raise coconuts, and fish.
When we first met Tom in 1985, he was not a follower of Jesus Christ but he was listening to what Ron and I had to say. Tom is a brilliant intellectual. Some time in the next few years, something convinced him that a relationship with the Creator was the most important thing in this life.
Since he was an educational professional, fluent in Spanish and Miskito, and now a Christian, I knew that Tom would be an ideal person to work with our teachers. The school project was growing now, and we needed a professional educator to manage our schools—somebody with all his qualifications. We talked to him about the possibility of working full-time as the Project Ezra director. He was agreeable, if we could work out some financial support arrangements. Unfortunately the school project had no budget for a project director, especially one with Tom’s qualifications. Still, I had a feeling that something was already being worked out to provide for Tom and his family.
At that 1989 summer workshop, we had some other guests. Two men from Holland visited us. They were the directors of ZOA, a Dutch refugee assistance organization. ZOA had provided health care to many villages along the Kruta River and along the Caribbean coast and currently had two nurses stationed in Auka.
ZOA had been interested in Project Ezra, and the previous year had donated a 25 HP outboard motor and some building materials for the schools. At this meeting, these directors of ZOA expressed interest in helping us start an adult literacy education program as part of Project Ezra. We suggested to them that the best way to do this was to hire Tom to manage the adult program as well as the primary education.
A few weeks later, after their return to Holland, they offered to provide Tom’s salary for the next three years!
Another provision from our Lord! We now had a tri-lingual professional to direct the school project and train our teachers. Now we could begin the adult education phase of Project Ezra.
Tom moved his family to Auka, and we started the 1990 school year with Tom as the director. The adult literacy program began with basic reading and writing training. Tom wrote a study on the Gospel of Mark in Miskito to use as the second level adult course. Now we could use the Bible as a reader and combine literacy training with Bible study. By 1992, this adult education program had expanded into eight villages.
The year 1990 was very significant in another respect. In February, a presidential election was held in Nicaragua—the first real free election since the Sandinista revolution in 1978. The Sandinista party candidate was Daniel Ortega, the current head of the party and President of Nicaragua. The opposition parties united and chose as their candidate the widow of a well-known newspaper publisher whose assassination in 1978 had sparked the revolution that ousted long-time dictator Anastasio Somoza. Violeta Chamorro was given no chance by any analysts to oust Ortega as president. The day before the election, Ortega calmly guaranteed reporters that victory was his.
However, when the votes were counted at the end of the next day, Violeta had won the presidency by a large margin. It was the upset of the century in Central American politics. Everybody, especially we and the refugees, was pleasantly “shocked” that Violeta had won.
The new government included people from both sides of the conflict. One appointment that was particularly interesting to us was the new Minister of Education. He was a refugee named Dr. Huberto Belli, author of the book “Breaking Faith.” Dr. Belli publicly stated that his goal as Minister of Education would be to replace the Marxist values taught to the Nicaraguan children by the Sandinistas with traditional Christian values.
This appointment excited us for a number of reasons. First, his goal to teach Christian morality in Nicaraguan schools was similar to our goal of teaching God’s Word to the Miskitos. Secondly, if Nicaraguan government schools were teaching Christian morality on the Rio Coco, perhaps there would be no need for Project Ezra to continue. Perhaps Laura and I could return soon to Hawaii and live a more normal life.
The first issue to be addressed was how the new government would receive us and view our project.
By the fall of that year, refugees had already begun crossing the Rio Coco and returning home. The refugee villages on the Kruta river literally dissolved as the Nicaraguan Miskitos packed up and returned to Nicaragua. Our villages on the Rio Coco simply moved all the buildings from the Honduran side to the Nicaragua side of the river.
In November, we received a letter from the governor of the Nicaraguan Miskitia inviting us to meet with him. In this letter he made a formal request for us to continue our project and expand it wherever we could. The following January, we received a letter from the local head of the Ministry of Education inviting us to meet with him in Puerto Cabeza to discuss the continuance of Project Ezra under a formal agreement with the Nicaraguan government.
We started the 1991 school year with all of our schools on Nicaraguan soil. We were excited to see our villagers were no longer refugees and back in their home villages. In April, we traveled to Puerto Cabeza where we signed a formal letter of agreement with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education. This letter recognized Project Ezra as an official independent entity operating as part of the Ministry of Education. They asked us to consider operating Project Ezra as a permanent part of their public school system. Our hope at that time was that the Ministry would have funds and teachers available to place teachers in all of our villages by 1993. Then what started out as a two week trip for me could finally end. . . .
A nice thought, but events proved that it was not to be.
At the end of the ’91 school year, the Ministry said that they were ready to take over one of our schools—Kiwastara, which was our largest school in 1991 and about an hour upriver from the rest of our schools. We had five teachers in Kiwastara, but when the 1992 school year started, only one Ministry of Education teacher was present.
This was not a good sign. Eventually two more showed up. When we asked the Ministry why they assigned only three teachers to Kiwastara, they informed us that due to lack of funds, they could only cover first, second, and third grade. This was disappointing to us, but it gave us an indication that maybe we could not turn over the schools as quickly as we anticipated.
This was confirmed at the beginning of the 1993 school year when the Ministry discussed with us the possibility of us placing Project Ezra schools in more villages. The following year, 1994, began with Project Ezra primary schools in seven villages with over 500 children attending. It was then that the Ministry formally asked us to place schools in three more villages.
It certainly didn’t seem like the doors were closing. Quite the opposite was happening. Laura and I began to consider that maybe we were here for the “long haul.” Central America had begun feeling more and more like “home,” especially after the birth of our son Lukas Nehemiah in September 1992 in La Ceiba.
A big event occurred in the summer and fall of 1993 when Ron Bross, a co-founder of the project, returned after four years at the university for a visit. While he was here, we began writing a Bible curriculum on the life of Jesus for use in the Project Ezra schools. Before this, we had used Bible lessons by Kenneth Taylor, Billy Graham, and a series of lessons that I had written in Spanish. This new curriculum was an opportunity for us to zero in on some of the issues in the Miskito culture. Ron and I prepared 30 weeks of lessons. Then he, Truman, and Laura translated this 30-week curriculum into Miskito.
Now we have a culturally sensitive Bible curriculum focusing on the life and teachings of Jesus for use in our primary schools and our adult education program. This is the only work of its kind that we know of in the Miskito language.
We are teaching the “Owner’s Manual” to our children and adults in a way that is culturally and linguistically effective. Many of them are recognizing the value of this book and the application that it has to their life, and are dusting off their own copies and reading. Slowly we are beginning to see some incorporation of these guiding principles into their lives.
There is an old proverb that says:
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.”
There is a new proverb that says:
“Teach children how to read and write
and you have prepared them for life in this world;
Teach children how to read and write and the Word of God
and you have better prepared them for life in this world,
as well as the world to come.”
(GMB 1994)
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