If someone is poor, is struggling, is frightened, is without answers, what does it mean if someone from another place — someone who has resources, who does not have to come, but chooses to — comes to bear witness, to stand alongside?
For decades now, Alice Winters, a mission co-worker for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has worked as a theologian in Colombia. She teaches Bible and biblical languages at the School of Theology of the Reformed University of Colombia – training pastors and lay leaders who will serve Colombian churches.
And recently, Winters, who also is a lawyer, spoke at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, giving the annual Presler Lecture on Christian World Missions.
Her presentation also came during the time when Diego Higuita-Arango, executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC), has been traveling in the United States, visiting presbyteries to talk of the violence in his country. Higuita’s visit is part of the PC(USA)’s International Peacemakers program, through which peacemakers from around the world are invited to visit with U.S. Presbyterians to tell of the work they do with the poor and dispossessed.
This year, the 12 peacemakers come from countries as diverse as China and Syria, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Russia.
Higuita’s ministry has been based in the mountainous region of Urabá, where farmers often get caught up in the violence between the guerilla fighters and paramilitary forces supporting the government. The Presbyterian churches have tried to support the dispossessed, who often have been driven from their land into slums in the cities. Some church leaders have been targeted and arrested as a result. Higuita recently told the Presbyterian News Service that he is “afraid for my life all the time,” and that the factions “want to force you to choose (a side), and everyone is caught in the middle.”
Winters focused her Oct. 22 presentation on the idea of accompaniment — referring to a program of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship through which U.S. Presbyterians travel to Colombia for a month each to provide safety and demonstrate support.
The idea of accompaniment to those who are suffering is a form of evangelism, of “reaching out to others in the name of Jesus Christ,” Winters said.
She referred the audience to Leviticus 25, which discusses the idea of goel, a Hebrew word. Basically, the idea is that if any one of your kin or your clan falls into difficulty and must sell a piece of property, the goel will come and redeem what the relative has sold, Winters said. And if that person must sell himself or herself because of difficulty, the goel will come and redeem that person.
The idea is echoed in the book of Ruth, when Ruth’s husband’s relative, Boaz, marries her — providing redemption to a widow after her husband has died.
“The function of the goel is to watch out for the poorer members of the clan, the people who are vulnerable,” Winters said. “Basically the function of the goel in the tribal system of the ancient Hebrews is based on a total sense of solidarity. Everybody has a goel, everybody is a goel.”
Contrast that, she said, with what’s likely to happen in a U.S. church if a person reveals he’s lost his job and doesn’t know what to do. “We say, ‘Thank you for sharing, and we will pray for you.’ In Colombia and in the Bible, they put their hands in their pockets (for money), they put their necks on the block to share with those who are suffering. This is true solidarity, it is accompaniment.”
And the principle behind this kind of solidarity is the idea “that nobody should be getting rich out of someone else’s unfortunate suffering,” Winters said. “If someone is suffering, you don’t go in there and grab all you can get. You do everything you can to restore that person to the status of human dignity and participation in the society that was God’s will for that person from the beginning.”
Later in the Bible, God is seen as the goel, she said. It’s often translated as “God is our redeemer,” and what it means is that “God comes to God’s people and works for change, until God’s people are restored to their full position.”
Colombia today
Winters also laid out some of the background of Colombia’s troubled political history.
“The reality in Colombia today is the reality of violence,” she said. There are guerillas and paramilitary groups, “and in the middle you have the army. The guerilla groups have a vision for a different society, the army is trying to preserve the status quo, and the paramilitary groups are often detailed to do the dirty work that the army doesn’t want to get caught doing. And the people who suffer are the civil society of Colombia, especially people in rural communities.”
Many of the funds the U.S. government sends to Colombia to fight the war on drugs end up in the hands of the military, she said.
“That is one of the biggest misunderstandings in North America today,” Winters said. “Without a doubt, drugs are present in Colombia and represent an important problem. But the violence in Colombia is not drug violence. It is the struggle of poor people who have nothing but their land, who are being forcibly shoved off their land.”
She cited several reasons why subsistence farmers are losing their land.
In the south, pesticides used supposedly to destroy drug crops also are destroying other crops and polluting the rivers. The fertility of the farmland is being destroyed, which could make it easier for that land to be taken to build a highway that will connect powerful business interests in Brazil to the ports of the Pacific.
Near the border with Panama, land is being claimed for the possible construction of a new canal. “They do it by threats, by massacre, by murder of selected leaders in the community,” Winters said. “People will sell their land very cheap just to be able to get out of there and survive.”
And people are being pressured to leave so oil can be extracted through drilling, or so the fields can be shifted from producing food to producing palm oil – for the possibility of crops that could become alternate sources of fuel. “People are being driven off the land for export-driven crops,” which will not feed their families, Winters said.
Now, in the cities, “there are huge communities of what we call internally-displaced persons.” They have fled to the city, but there’s nothing there in the city for persons who have spent their lives growing corn and wheat out on their farms. “So these people are in desperate situations. Children who are not going to school, people who are living in shacks that they put together out of trash that they found in the … dumps.”
Accompaniment
When the accompaniers from the United States come, “the very first item is to affirm the human dignity of those people whose rights and hopes and dreams have been trampled upon,” Winters said.
And they try to help with programs to “enable the community to take its life in its own hands again. Help them to get land, help them find ways to organize and speak out about the situation that they are facing.” Work for better living conditions.
“And indicate to these communities that we’re willing to share risks and to share their dreams and hopes. They are not alone.”
Some have witnessed the massacre of their family members or friends, left their land and their homes, have walked for miles across the countryside to a strange city – a city that “pays no attention. Their story, their sufferings, mean nothing. … This is when the presence of the church reaching out and making contact is an important way of manifesting the love and the concern of God.”
Some Presbyterians — they’ve ranged in age from 18 to 80 — go to Colombia themselves to physically accompany the people. Others stay home, but work from afar to assist. They can financially support, for example, programs to send agricultural experts to Colombia to reclaim ravaged land for crops. They can provide scholarships for children to go to school, or for adults to attend college “to become the agricultural experts, the doctors, and the nurses” Colombia needs.
They can advocate changes in U.S. policy — some Presbyterians, for example, have been arrested in protests at the former School of the Americas.
Winters turned back to theology.
Jesus came to walk among the people, she said. “He was an accompanier. Jesus Christ lived the life of the people here, suffered what they suffered, and was the presence of God.”
