Table Talk in the Shadow of Seven Volcanoes

The conversation came at the end of a long day of celebration and in the shadow of seven volcanoes. Our hosts were Ricardo and Mary, a forestry engineer and a university professor respectively, who live in a beautiful Eden about 45 minutes outside of Temuco, Chile. Surrounding their home are seven volcanoes, one of which erupted in a blaze of fire and smoke on New Year's Day. We enjoyed walking around among the gorgeous trees and flowers and, of course, we shared a meal together.

The bulk of the day had been spent in El Cajon in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Baptist Union of Chile, complete with a baptism of a dozen people or so along the banks of the very river where those first Chilean Baptists had gathered in 1908. The crowd was so thick that I couldn't even see the baptizands, so I held my camera up high over the crowd and clicked away in various directions hoping to get something approaching a decent record of the event. One guy thought it was a pretty good idea and asked me to do the same thing with his camera. We shared in the Lord's Supper, dined once again on charred asado or grilled beef, and even enjoyed some traditional dancing by a group from Concepcion.

Now at the end of the day, we were sitting around Ricardo and Mary's table reflecting together about life and faith. Ricardo and Mary shared with us their work among the Mapuche people, the original inhabitants of the Auracania region of Chile and parts of Argentina. When Ricardo and Mary moved to their new home in this part of rural Chile, Mapuche from the local church helped them to dig a well. Now Ricardo and Mary are working among the people, assisting with dental care and in many other significant ways. The Mapuche are subsistence farmers who barely eke out a living and who are experiencing the realities of extreme poverty.

Our conversation turned to the challenges of working together with a group of people to sustain themselves and their families without creating dependency upon what outsiders might bring to the table. We talked about assets-based approaches to meeting human need where the focus is on the assets of a group and not upon the challenges that the group faces. What do we have? How can we use what we have to improve our lives?

It's the same challenge that churches in the United States face as we attempt to assist with human need in the shadows of our steeples. Clothes closets and food pantries are good band-aid approaches to the challenges of poverty. But the real opportunity to transform lives occurs not with band-aids but in working together with people in the midst of poverty to identify the assets that they bring to the table, the strengths that come from within themselves that enable them to move toward a better and more sustainable life.

It struck me on the ride home across the beautiful landscape of southern Chile that the ministry that Ricardo and Mary are carrying on among the Mapuche is not a one-way street. They are in this thing together with the Mapuche as Christian brothers and sisters. I'd almost forgotten (at least for a moment) in my concern for the extreme poverty in which the Mapuche find themselves, that it was the Mapuche, after all, who dropped what they were doing and came over to help Ricardo and Mary dig a well so that they could have water in their new home.