Honduras

In 1982 we partnered with a Honduran development maverick named Jose Elias Sanchez , who insisted that if we wanted to combat poverty at it's roots we had to teach farming. “Production must be increased so people can feed their families and the nation,” insisted Elias. First the soil and forests must be protected and rebuilt. Yet material change was not enough for Elias. Compost piles and contoured, soil and water-conserving ditches must be built and dug into people's minds or they have no lasting value for the land. People must conscientized, converted so that their “si” comes from the heart and head, leading to action. Elias recruited us a Honduran campesino sage, Fernando Andrade to help us set up an experimental farm and training center for teaching sustainable farming and preventive health to help rural people avoid migrating from country to city and from city to North America.

For six years we lived in rural Honduras , farming our own land, training village promoters in preventative health, intensive hillside agriculture and leading Bible studies. Courses happened under mango trees in what we called the Universidad del Campo (University of the Countryside). We founded Tierra Nueva (New Earth) together with longtime activists with the Omaha Catholic Worker, Larry and Joni Geer-Sell and a cadre of campesino promoters, who have continued to provide technical and pastoral support to small farmers since 1988. The teaching consists in practical alternatives to slash and burn that include composting, mulching and planting green manure crops instead of burning, as well as digging contoured ditches, building soil conserving barriers and planting to the contour instead of farming steep land unprotected from torrential tropical downpours. We organized women's groups, trained health workers and launched campaigns to teach intensive vegetable gardening, hygiene, nutrition and herbal medicine.

Together we witnessed first-hand God's creating “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isa 65) during a time when the United States was building military bases, pressuring countries to recruit the region's youth into the armed forces, conducting endless military maneuvers to train the region's armies and launching wars against the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Our farm was a hub of hospitality and training that both enriched and exhausted us. What most sustained us in the end was our growing practice of reading Scripture with the people.

Through trial and error we learned to read for the good news in the Bible with people who often felt at the receiving end of God's big stick. We learned to directly confront pervasive negative images of God through asking questions that helped people identify a liberating God at the heart of both the Biblical stories and their broken lives. Eventually we came to feel that we could best serve the people as pastoral agents, but felt we needed more training ourselves.

We left Honduras in 1989 and spent five years studying theology, raising children and making regular trips back to Honduras . As a result of our studies and continual work leading Bible studies we are convinced of the need for quality theological training to be offered to people at the margins. This requires deliberate, creative work as Biblical scholarship does not trickle down any more than do financial resources. Our own conversion “from below” in Honduras convinced us that mainstream churches and the Biblical studies and theological academy need direct contact with both marginalized people and nature for their spiritual health and survival. We felt called back into the mainstream church to serve as agents of call and empowerment for ministry. In 1994 we launched Tierra Nueva del Norte (New Earth of the North)-- an ecumenical ministry among migrant farm workers and other Latino immigrants in Washington State .