The next day we went to the Rio Lempa. We drove a windy road past other small villages. Then we had to walk. It was a short distance, but steep downhill and hot. I slid and scraped the palm of my hand, which bled. Now the scar is a rosy pink oval in peeled skin.
Salome, Pedro, Rosita, Pastor, Juana, Juana's daughter and baby granddaughter came with us. The river was brown-green and unimpressive. The slopes on either side were jungle green and stone. We looked from our side onto Honduras. They looked the same.
Where is the cross? the Valle Nuevo folks wanted to know. They walked up the river and found it. We followed. The cross was long metal piping painted yellow, red, and blue. It marked the spot where the people had crossed the river in 1981. Most did not know how to swim, so they had strung a rope across.
Salome stared at the water. It was the first time he had been back in 30 years. He told us about his brother who had been one of the few who could swim. His brother had crossed the Lempa many times, helping children get to Honduras. Finally, when he was too tired, he walked up the Honduran side and was shot by the Honduran military. They killed many of the men ages 15-40 because they assumed any man that age was a guerilla soldier.
The memories of the Valle Nuevo folks came mostly in fragments, hard to translate. They spoke them to each other in the shorthand of old friendship. They did tell us that the water had been much higher, much faster. The soldiers had let open the dams. Later they showed us further down the river, to a little inlet where shot or drowned bodies had washed to calmer waters.
“God was always with us,” Salome told me later, repeating a refrain I had heard at Valle Nuevo many times. “Always, always.” The intellectual dilemma of the problem of evil does not exist here. The question, “where was God?” never gets asked. God was crossing the Rio Lempa. God was living in a tent in Honduras. God was suffering with them.
We washed one another's feet below the cross in the river water. "This is how you redeem a place," David Janzen said. Juana and Anali cleaned my feet. The water was free of blood.
2 comments:
Beautiful writing, as usual. Miss you, my dear!
"They spoke them to each other in the shorthand of old friendship." Great phrase! This chapter of your trip is wonderfully dark and hopeful."The intellectual dilemma of the problem of evil does not exist here."
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