Tom's Miskito Mission

Pray for Our Teachers

While the church is, by Jesus’ definition, the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Ghost through whose “living stones” the work of edifying itself is to be accomplished, the self portrait that the institutional church on the lower Coco River paints is very rudimentary, monochrome, and incomplete. Mirroring the social structure of the environment, in which the only people who have “work” are government employees, the church recognizes those in official positions such as pastor, choir director, and youth leader as workers in the vineyard of the Lord, and even these “jobs” are learned by mimicking the way they have seen them being carried out as long as they can remember, without much critical adaptation as a response to scripture, the voice of the Holy Spirit, or the pressing need in front of them. The people of the river have become accustomed to defining Christian “spiritual activity” in the narrow context of singing or speaking from a pulpit. Little attention is being given to what a life of faith looks like outside the church meeting.

Nutie and I intend to see new life breathed into the churches of the river, life which will overflow into the daily activities of the villagers. Instead of people limiting themselves to asking us to pray for their “spiritual life” (i.e. that they might lead worship, preach, or be merely respected Christians recognized by their regular church attendance), we yearn for the day when people everywhere on the river will ask God directly and daily to fill their regular lives with the Holy Spirit’s empowerment. We realize that getting there is a process. There needs to be a connect between church life and the rest of life.

Presently, God has given Nutie and I some 60 Seek the Lamb school teachers to mentor spiritually and professionally. Among this group we have pastors, youth leaders, Sunday school teachers, and others who have yet to experience a vibrant relationship with God. Wherever they’re at as teachers or in their walk with God, we believe that they are, presently or potentially, key to the spiritual transformation of the Wangki, the Coco River. Rural teachers are historically recognized in Central America as people duty bound to be community leaders, as disseminators of knowledge and understanding not only to school children but also to the adults in the village. Seek the Lamb supports several teachers in each of the villages along the river, and has charged them to teach Miskito children the Bible as well as academics, and to get involved with a church in their community if they are not doing so presently.

We feel responsible to be faithful with what the Lord has placed in our hands. As such we have begun to pray daily for those whose lives He has already given us an opportunity to touch. We also know that if we might enlist our support partners in the USA to pray with us to this end, God will respond in a powerful way. We’re starting small, with a group of 14, praying for 2 each day. We will add more as the Lord provides us with a door of direct ministry into their lives. You may read and use their biographies on this blog to assist you in your prayer. Our prayer diary is as follows for the remainder of August:

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Pelayo Solano David

 

On June 3, 1971 when he was born, Pelayo briefly enjoyed the role of “plaisni” or youngest child, who in Miskito culture is the primary object of attention in the family. Nevertheless, the following year he became an older brother, and eventually settled into his place as the fourth oldest of 12 siblings born to Biando Solano and Justina David in the village of Klar.

According to statistics, children in the middle of the pack tend to have greater difficulty finding themselves in life, but God chose Pelayo from before he was born, so that when he was little his mother gave him to be a pair of eyes for his blind grandmother.  While this task did not seem like fun to his brothers and sisters, Pelayo obeyed and cheerfully accompanied her each day in her routines. One of his chores was to guide her along the forest path to church in Bilwas Karma every Sunday morning, since she was a Christian and there was no church in Klar. So it was that Pelayo grew up in the things of God.

 

Pelayo came to know the Lord when he was twelve and a half. He was painfully shy, and could not bring himself to speak to people outside of his immediate family. But because he had a good singing voice, one Sunday he was thrust before the entire church and obliged to perform. Although still a boy, he called out to Jesus, and the Lord set him free, giving him not only the courage to do so but also a special gift of praise and exhortation. At the age of 14 he became vice president of his youth group, and at 16, because of his literacy skills, the general secretary of his church. 

Pelayo is the only Seek the Lamb supported teacher in his native village of Klar, where he serves as the Principal. Watching him interact with the other teachers in a seminar, he seems quiet and a little aloof, not plunging into the cheerful banter or joining himself readily to any of the various cliques that naturally occur when you bring 60 people together for 4 or 5 days. With his elegant appearance--dark and slim with more African features, head and shoulders taller than his peers--he cuts a figure that you suppose would command respect, rather than that of someone with a reason to be shy. Obviously he’s not haughty, so his reticence makes him almost enigmatic. When asked to lead worship or a Bible study, however, he comes alive, and you see an engaging and authoritative personality. Then you see the man who has been for so many years the Moravian youth leader of the entire district from the rapids of Carrizal to Kip at the mouth of the River Wangki.

Last year, amidst the objections of Moravian youth and hierarchy alike, Pelayo stepped down as district youth supervisor. He had trained a younger man to replace him, and knew that his disciple was ready to lead. With his wife Johana, a Sunday school teacher, Pelayo is in the process of beginning a ministry with 8 to 12 year olds along the river. Presently he has 42 children in Klar, and he is praying the ministry will take off.

Pelayo and Johana have 2 girls of their own. When asked about his prayer needs, he joyfully told us a success story about the process of training his daughter to obey her mother cheerfully, just as he once cheerfully obeyed the command to serve his godly grandmother.  He would ask you to pray that the Lord continue to give him wisdom in parenting, and that he and Johana might be useful in mentoring other fathers and mothers.

Benjamín Felipe Brown

While children in the clearing between the thatched huts of the Brown clan were happily singing and dancing the “Tambaku” songs of the Christmas season on the evening of December 27, 1965, Leacinda de Felipe was groaning and giving birth to  her child Benjamín. Although her circumstances were indeed humble, at least it was home, not a manger.

Benjamín finished grade school in his native village of Klampa before it was demolished in the troubles of the counterrevolution. Although Francisco Felipe had 9 children to support, he managed to send Benjamín to Luxemburg High School in Puerto Cabezas,

Benjamín has been a school teacher for 22 years, 18 of them with Project Ezra. He presently teaches 4th grade and is the assistant principal of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Elementary School in Klampa.

As a child, he was very involved in the Catholic Church. As he grew, he became a Sunday school teacher and then a lay pastor. Several years ago, however, he experienced a spiritual awakening involving a very strong encounter with God, and now pastors an interdenominational church in Klampa, the only one of its kind on the lower Coco River, that has been supported by a missionary outreach called the “Messiah Ministry.”

In 2008 Benjamín passed through a brief but fiery trial of the kind you only read about in anthologies of Christian heros of the past, or in “Voice of the Martyrs” literature. One day while he was conducting a church meeting he was abruptly interrupted by a man brandishing a bottle of Ron Plata, who threatened to kill him if he continued preaching the gospel in this church. The intruder, recognized as someone who had been involved with the drug traffic which has been affecting the region, was ushered out of the church, while everyone began praying.

Some time later the same man, together with an armed accomplice, suddenly appeared in Benjamín’s classroom while it was in session. He put a gun to Benjamín’s head and told him it was time for him to die. Benjamín told the assailants that innocent children shouldn’t be forced to watch, and pleaded with them to do their business outside the classroom. In the seconds that followed, one of the men’s pants got caught on a bolt protruding from a child’s desk, causing his gun to fall to the floor. The teacher took the opportunity to make a dash for it. The gun pointed at his head went off but miraculously only grazed his flesh and the assailants chased after him, shooting. Somehow, Benjamín made it to his house; the two outlaws shot the door in and ordered him outside. His brother gave him a gun, saying, “I know you’re a man of God, but you don’t have to die like this. Die like a man.”

Benjamín was torn between his non-violent religious beliefs (different here, where the church does not support the death penalty) and the reality of the situation at hand, he started out of the house. He was shot at point blank range, but miraculously the bullet missed him. As the assailants continued to fire, he pointed his brother’s gun and fired one shot. One of the two men dropped to the ground, dead. The other fled into the woods.

Benjamín turned himself in and was exonerated of any wrongdoing, while the assailant who escaped is currently living in Puerto Cabezas, appearing publicly without consequence. Benjamín credits God for saving his life, and has redoubled his commitment to preaching the gospel, judging by the evidence that he must be having some effect.

Elvis Espinoza Belly

“I like this one,” she said, singling out Elvis in a group photo of Seek the Lamb teachers she had taken 3 years before when she had gone down to Nicaragua to help with a teachers’ conference. “He’s really special.”

Of all the Seek the Lamb teachers, Elvis is perhaps the one who consistently makes the most positive impression upon supporters from the United States who come to Nicaragua to visit the project. Elvis is always the first one to participate actively, whether it be in worship, academic discussion, or in just giving a personal opinion. He speaks knowledgeably and with confidence; it is evident that his command of Spanish, his 3 years of university training, time spent in Managua, and his experience in various occupations have all given him the advantage of a perspective to which most of his peers have never been privy. In addition, Elvis has a rare drive to do everything with a degree of excellence that is seldom found in the endeavors of people here in the region. He is indeed a key man and a difference maker, but also a very complex man over whose life there is a battle being fought in heavenly realms. As you read the following life story, we ask you to prayerfully consider the reality of the battlefield, and intercede on behalf of Elvis and of all the precious people of the lower Coco River.

 

After stating on his bio form that he was born on April 26, 1969 in Kiwastara, Rio Coco, Elvis writes, “I have no father.” In reality, the man named Gaetano Pérez engendered but never recognized Elvis as his son, and left his mother, Valentina Espinoza Belly, to raise him and give him the two surnames that all Nicaraguans bear as their full legal identity. Gaetano lives in Puerto Cabezas, and even though Elvis has seen him on the street there from time to time, the two have never spoken.

There is really no such thing as a ‘full-blooded Miskito,’ but Elvis looks and even acts somewhat like the Spanish speaking people from the interior of the country, with a harder edged, more drastic disposition. His maternal grandmother had “clear eyes,” and was the daughter of an Italian fruit company official whose last name was Belli. There are few Belli’s in Nicaragua; it is almost certain that Elvis is a relative of Humberto Belli, a refined man who served as Minister of Education in the reconciliation government of Violeta vda. de Chamorro in the post-contra years, who also wrote an oft quoted book that tells of the war against the church waged by the Sandinistas. How much has the sting of fatherlessness, disenfranchisement from the ranks of a privileged family, and the inheritance of a passionate character informed Elvis’ sense of identity as a member of a relatively dispassionate people group and given him the restless drive which causes his own peers to mark him as peculiar? One can’t presume to be able to calculate a formula for the myriad ingredients mixed into a composition so “fearfully and wonderfully made” by a Master Creator as is a human being; one can only hope to understand the context into which he as been poured and give grace, plenty of grace.

 

Elvis writes that, “In my childhood I had accepted Christ, but with time I stepped back out of the Christian life, and at this present time I do not find myself formally with Jesus Christ.”  This from a steady member of the Kiwastara Moravian Church who sings, plays guitar, and worships with passion and even abandon far exceeding the others. What’s up with that? Outspoken, self critical, refreshing. Most people here would either evade the question or else give an answer they think the missionaries would want to hear.

Elvis blazed through grade school in Kiwastara and went to Bilwi (Puerto Cabezas) for high school, which he successfully completed without interruption. After a stint as a teenage contra combatant he worked as a police lieutenant in Bilwi while studying law at CIUM-BIKU, the university founded by Morvavian missionaries. During this time he explains how he drifted away from God amidst a series of events which derailed his life.

 

Arnoldo Alemán, of the conservative “Partido Liberal Constitucional” (with which Elvis has been affiliated since the counter-revolution) was nearing the end of his period as President of Nicaragua, while the FSLN held control of the national police force. As elections approached, the order came from headquarters to confiscate all the automatic weapons which were still in the possession of the general populace of Puerto Cabezas. Elvis understood this as an attempt to keep the Miskito population from reviving the resistance in case the FSLN won the election, and since the AK-47’s which abounded in every house and hovel were not being used for any delinquent activities, he personally advised residents to keep their guns well hidden in the event of a sweep by security forces. “Out of envy,” some or one of the agents under his command told Elvis’ superiors about what he was doing. Elvis lost his job and had to quit school.

PLC leaders heard about what had happened and offered him a job at the party headquarters in Managua. They also had fired the official who had fired Elvis. PLC candidate Enrique Bolaños won the presidential election, but as the new President began to pursue prosecution for corruption of ex-President Alemán, things got nasty and he thought it necessary to get rid of all of Alemán’s people in the party headquarters, so once again Elvis found himself out of a job. He went to work for a private corporation in Managua but, convinced someone had performed witchcraft against him, he began to suffer from dementia. As he puts it, “I went crazy.” 

His mental problems took him back to the Miskito region known as RAAN to look for a witch doctor who could cure him. Diseases originating from Miskito witchcraft, he reasoned, do not have any medical cure; they must be handled with Miskito medicine. He knew a “sukya” in Auhya Pura who referred him to another sukya in Tuskru Sirpi named Joaquín Masanto who put him under a treatment of “pukni” (ritual cleansing in smoke) and gave him a bitter concoction to drink. Elvis recounts that he vomited up a ball of phlegm and was then given a series of dietary restrictions that included refraining from eating fish and certain meats. He quickly recovered and returned to his home village of Kiwastara. 

Shortly thereafter he began working with Seek the Lamb as a teacher at Sebastián Vega Elementary School in Kiwastara. He has worked excellently there for 4 years, and is presently school Director, teaching also the sixth grade.

In our time spent conversing with and ministering to Elvis, he has expressed a sincere desire to walk with God, but considers that his common law union and the very difficult relationship with the mother of his baby are obstacles to his accepting the Lord Jesus.  We have presented the gospel and encouraged him to prayerfully consider what we have said. There is a great deal of reinforcement for his religious understanding in his culture, even within the churches here, but we will not quit until we see the Son rise over this life. After all, he is one of the good ones. Please pray with us.

Beres Florencio Poveda

Beres was born in Sawa on January 10, 1969. When he was 4 years old his father passed away, leaving Evelita, his mother, 6 children to care for. Nevertheless, she was able to send Beres to complete his high school education.

Beres is now married to Patricia Vanegas, also a native of Sawa, They have 6 children, 3 boys and 3 girls.  He has been a Seek the Lamb teacher for 15 years.

Presently Beres teaches fifth grade at Sebastian Vega Elementary School in Kiwastara. This requires that he leave his wife and family behind in Sawa during the week. Every Sunday afternoon after church he hops into his dugout canoe and poles his way upriver along the banks of the Coco for 4 hours to get to the community where he works.  Every Friday afternoon after school he bails out his canoe with a metal soup bowl and paddles back downriver. “Down the stream” is indeed more “merrily” than upriver; the trip only takes 2 and a half hours, and he gets to see his wife and kids waiting for him along the bank of the river as he approaches.

Beres is a deacon in the Moravian Church of Sawa. Even though he was baptized as an infant, he confesses to have had a conversion experience and leads his family in prayer every day he is present. It is important to him that Jesus lives in his house when he is unable to be there.

At the 2009 teachers’ conference Beres revealed to us that he suffers from severe lower back pain as an ongoing condition. He looked very fragile to us; we felt powerfully constrained by the Holy Spirit to pray for him but also urged him to get himself to a doctor. He indicated fearfully that he wasn’t ready to incur simple medical expenses such as the cost of x-rays. Since we met with him at the end of the event when he was getting ready to travel back downriver with the rest of the teachers, we let him go, but feel strongly that the next time he comes to Waspam we ought to accompany him to a doctor if he is still experiencing pain. Please help us to pray for his physical well being. He is a beloved brother in the Lord and has served faithfully with us for 15 years.  

Olmaira Green Hurtado

Olmaira was born October 16, 1982, during the short window of calm between the Sandinista revolution and the beginning of the contra war. She and her eleven other brothers and sisters lived for a time as refugee children in Honduras. Olmaira went to first grade in the Honduran village of Klupki, returning to Sawa the following year. 

Her father is an English speaking black “creole” native of Bluefields and a nephew of former SF Giants slugger David Green. He learned Miskito when he married Olmaira’s mother, and went to live in her village.

Olmaira considers herself fortunate enough to have had steady work in a Christian environment for the past 5 years. She teaches pre-school in Living Creek, but says that next year she would like to teach first grade. 

Six years ago she fell in love with a young man and got pregnant. He left her to raise the baby by herself. The biggest disappointment in her life was having to deal with the feelings of jealousy and betrayal when he took up with another woman, since these emotions followed hard after the elation of believing she had been loved. Her son, Snaider Beer, has just turned five, and Olmaira still admits to having trouble trusting. She is asking God to help her, and we are blessed to have been given access into her life. Snaider now lives with his maternal grandmother in Klampa, and Olmaira returns on weekends to look after him. During the week, she shares a rented house in Living Creek with a thirteen year old student at the middle school, acting as her mentor. It takes her seven hours to paddle upriver to Klampa every Friday afternoon in the canoe she bought with her teacher’s pay. Olmaira is also a Sunday school teacher at her church in that village. Snaider’s favorite part of each week is being in his mother’s Sunday school class. 

Larry Suazo Cunningham

Larry Suazo is the son of veteran Seek the Lamb teacher Pablo Suazo and Rita Cunningham.  He was born in Waspam on January 21, 1979, almost six months to the day before the Sandinistas came to power. His father fled to Honduras when the Miskito resistance began, but his mother stayed in Bilwi, the Miskito name for Puerto Cabezas. Larry and his older brother went to live with their grandmother on the Coco River. It was there that he was able to finish primary school uninterrupted by the hostilities.  The fighting had died down some by the time he was ready to attend high school, so his mother brought him back to Bilwi. In 1997 he entered the university in that city, but his mother suddenly became ill and died, and he was forced to abandon his studies.

Larry went to work as a Seek the Lamb teacher in Sawa, and at the same time received an inservice training scholarship for non credentialed teachers which enabled him to obtain a Primary Education Teacher diploma, for which he is very grateful. He is now working on his Bachelor's degree in education from the Coastal University URACCAN in Puerto Cabezas. Presently a 6th grade teacher in Sawa, he has been at it for 12 years, is one of Seek the Lamb’s best and brightest teachers, and is an excellent writer.

Larry says he remembers being committed to a walk with the Lord as a child, but when he began high school in the port town of Bilwi he discovered the “freedom” to choose a different lifestyle, hanging out and partying with friends. He credits Seek the Lamb and his wife Brenda for straightening him out and bringing him back to the Lord. His most bitter memory is of his time as a new teacher, when he became infatuated with a young woman and had a baby out of wedlock. When the truth became evident, he was put on probation. He began to read his Bible, and found Hebrews 12:11, which says, “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” It was then that Larry rededicated his life to the Lord. Larry now uses his gifts as Secretary of the Moravian Church in Sawa, and is also the local census taker. 

Ever the teacher, Larry measures his dreams in terms of the spiritual and academic fruit he hopes to bring out in the children the Lord has given him. 

Pablo Suazo Jessy

Born on January 4, 1953, Pablo has worked with us as a school teacher for 23 years now and is the father of 3 Seek the Lamb teachers who grew up in our schools. Together with his son Larry, he is also the acting Secretary of the Moravian Church in Sawa.

The cruelty of how events surrounding the FSLN uprising and the ensuing “counterrevolution” played out in the lives of ordinary people is evidenced by Pablo’s story. Because they were young and hadn’t acquired the seniority necessary to choose where they would serve as government workers, Pablo and his wife Rita found themselves in different communities when the fledgling Sandinista junta began its ill-advised social engineering program with the Miskito people. He was working in Waspam on the Coco River, while Rita was stationed in Bilwi (Puerto Cabezas) with a newborn, and the risks of travel and the jungle clearing where they would live would be too much for a baby. Pablo and his three small children joined Rita’s mother in the reconstituted village of Sawa on the other side of the river. There Salt and Light helped the villagers organize a school in which to teach their children, naming Pablo as one of the first Project Ezra teachers. While the war raged on, he worked in the little bamboo school house and took care of his widowed mother-in-law. Years later after the fighting had quieted down, Rita showed up in Sawa to tell him that she had remarried. Quietly she told Pablo that he ought to look for someone else. 

Rita got sick and died suddenly in Bilwi, and was buried. Pablo married again and now has 8 children, including 2 orphans who he has adopted. Nicaraguan Sawa has been rebuilt with the help of refugee kids now grown, and even boasts a raised cement sidewalk where people can walk to church and to school without getting their shoes stuck in ankle deep mud. Pablo, the fourth grade teacher this year, has been bearing fruit there since before the rebirth was thought possible. 

Walter Povias Genack

Walter, the son of Manuel Povias and Angelina Jackson, was born on October 1, 1979, a few months after Daniel Ortega and the FSLN had taken over the government of Nicaragua. Manuel, a native of Bonanza, never intended to live with Walter’s mother, so Angelina went back to her little village of Sawa to have her first child with the support of her family. Before Walter was a year old, the Sandinistas razed the village; Angelina took her baby in her arms and ran into the jungle on the Honduran side of the Coco River. 

Walter spent most of the next 10 years in a makeshift hut a few hundred yards from the river’s edge. He could not bathe in the river all day long as you see children doing now, because of the frequent military patrols along the Nicaraguan bank.  The soldiers would have shot at him. The first Project Ezra school began in this atmosphere, and Walter, one of its first students, reached third grade before peace broke out and he returned to the Nicaraguan side of the river.

Except for a brief, happy period spent in the  UNHCR refugee camp at the coastal village of Prumhnitara, Walter considers his refugee childhood to be the most difficult time in his life. Since he had no father he was the man of the house. By age six he found himself helping his mother with the planting and other subsistence activities. He became expert at shooting iguanas, doves, chachalacas and other small animals with his slingshot. But they did without things like salt, which needed to be bought in a store.

Walter says that now is the happiest time of his life. “The kind of happiness you  experience as an adult,” he says, “is different than the happiness you have as a child. It’s hard to compare the two.” He became a teacher with Seek the Lamb nine years ago when he finished his studies as a “normalista” in Waspam. He got a little piece of land in Sawa from his mother and built a house on stilts some 40 feet from the river bank; on the siding his brother painted a mural of sorts: two colorful jaguars and a bust of a mother gazing down into the eyes of her baby. This year he finally succeeded in getting transferred to Miguel de Cervantes School in Sawa, and for the first time began living in his own house. He has a companion with whom he has lived for a year and a half in the common-law way typical of young Miskito couples. He would like to have a big family. Since they haven’t been able to have children, he sent his wife to a doctor, but tests showed that she had no fertility problems. Walter’s dream is to get “double-married”; that is, to undergo both civil and church ceremonies, and therefore be eligible to become a “Christian.” Walter and his wife presently attend the Moravian Church in Sawa.  

Walter is a kind, quiet, and open hearted young man who takes direction well. Although he teaches fifth grade, he says he’s more comfortable with the lower grades because younger children are freer and more interested in school than older children, who are already caught up in the confusion of becoming adults in this subsistence culture where the stages of life and responsibility begin so early.

We are certain that if Jesus Himself were to walk up to Walter and say, “Follow me,” he would do it. Pray that we might represent THIS Jesus to him, and that Walter and his family will soon follow.