The Work Begins

We had our first official independent act of real work this afternoon and we are on a high! We met with folks from the Proyecto Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Project), an agency of the Honduran Mennonite church whose office is here in La Ceiba. Even though we haven’t graduated from language study we wanted to take the opportunity while in La Ceiba to introduce ourselves and get to know this agency better. We assumed the meeting would basically be a Hello and How are you meeting…. But we soon got into some serious discussions about the role of PPYJ in disaster situations including a history of their work following Hurricane Mitch.

We met with Odina Murillo, the director and Karen Flores, a young woman who recently joined PPYJ. Karen speaks English fluently and was there to help, but most of the meeting took place in Spanish! Granted, Odina spoke slowly and clearly for our benefit, but it was affirming to be able to hold a rather involved discussion with some weighty concepts and to be able to understand virtually everything she had to share. We struggled more with trying to explain our roles and ideas, but even that went surprisingly well. (Of course, sometimes we have trouble explaining our roles and ideas in English!).

Odina and Karen are women of passion doing a very difficult work in a country afflicted by the ways of violence and a long history of injustice. Their description of the work of PPYJ, directed by Odina, post-Hurricane Mitch was phenomenal. They took on the work of trauma counseling for victims of the hurricane. The project was funded by MCC, training was provided by Semilla (a Guatemalan seminary/training facility), and carried out for a full year by PPYJ. Their work has had an ongoing impact as persons counseled have related that they used what they learned to help others who have suffered other non-disaster related losses in the meantime.

For us this is exciting as it fits right in with one component of our assignment: determining disaster response resources (“capacities”) already in place that can be mobilized in case of a disaster. When we posed that question to Odina, her response was something akin to “you betcha”….accompanied by a big wide grin.

So, meeting #1 was a success…. At least in our eyes.

I should mention that we didn’t go into the meeting cold. We had met Odina and Karen on Saturday at a national meeting of the Honduran Mennonite church. We went with Darrin, Andrew and Amanda, who did a great job introducing us to pastors and other folks. I told Kathy there was something different about this crowd. They just looked….. well “Mennonite”. I don’t know what it was, but I sensed a lot of mennonism. Hey, we even met another PPYJer, Marvin Trail, whose last name in Spanish sounds a lot like our last name in Spanish, “trojy-ir”. That’s a sign, no?