The Churches Serve in Managua
Diocesan Press Service. January 26, 1973 [73021]
Hugh McCullum, editor of The Canadian Churchman, Toronto.
(NOTE: The following article was written for The Canadian Churchman and the Diocesan Press Service by Hugh McCullum, editor of The Canadian Churchman, Toronto. He spent 10 days in Managua in order to give a firsthand report on relief work.)
It was hot and sunny that Sunday morning as I drove in a bashed-in taxi from Las Mercedes airport to find the tiny Anglican community in the capital city of Nicaragua.
I'd seen the cracked plaster and broken windows in the air terminal, and the runways crowded with American army vehicles and relief planes pouring aid into the ravaged city.
It was easy to believe there'd been a disaster there three weeks earlier.
Ten minutes later the disaster became desolation and destruction and death. In the centre of the city, Managua, a typical Central American lakefront city lay in ruin and the stench of rotting debris and burned out buildings assailed the nostrils.
I knew we'd never find the diocesan centre of Iglesia Episcopal de Nicaragua (the Anglican church) in the chaos that existed and none of the despairing, ragged people clogging the roads had ever heard of Episcopalians.
But we found it and an hour after arriving in a scene of total destruction I was listening to the gentle voice of a Central American priest celebrating the eucharist for the handful of faithful in an outdoor patio beside a wrecked chapel.
It was Sunday morning in Managua and the church, like the Nicaraguans, was struggling for some semblance of normality in a world that had suddenly collapsed.
The American Bishop, Ed Haynsworth was there and an American priest, Fr. Ray Riebs, from Cleveland, Ohio, who'd come to help was there. With their people they listened to the familiar words and received the sacrament from Fr. Luis Serrano, who'd been their parish priest for seven years and had returned from neighboring El Salvador to minister to them.
The faces were drawn and worried. Each day they felt the tremors and wondered if the horror might return. They were sleeping outside.
Fr. William Muniz, their parish priest, was at home exhausted, his house barely standing, 20 families living in tents on his lawn.
The fear and exhaustion and confusion were easily seen but it was still the eucharist and for a few minutes they took time out from the business of survival to pray.
It was soon over and Haynsworth and his people went quickly back to the work of recouping and participating in the long and short term rehabilitation and reconstruction of Managua's life.
The Episcopal diocese, an overseas jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., is small in number with much of its work centered on the Atlantic Coast among former West Indians. Two of its priests and its bishop are based at Managua and outside. two small congregations had concentrated their work in a downtown clinic called St. Luke's and an imaginative and successful, alcohol and drug addiction program which prior to the disaster had been the only project of its kind dealing with a serious social problem.
Today its one church is unuseable but the bishop feels it can be repaired. Muniz' home is only possibly repairable, the clinic is totally destroyed, the diocesan centre is useable but has been placed inside the area the government has cordoned off for safety reasons.
Only the bishop's home, well outside the earthquake area, is undamaged.
It is the same story for the other non-Roman Catholic churches. The Baptists, long leaders in Protestant mission work, have a totally destroyed hospital, once the city's best. The Moravians are without a building and the 20 or more, conservative, often fundamentalist, sects that make up the five percent of Managua's non-Roman Catholic population face a similar situation.
The Roman Catholic church is typically Latin American, comprising most of the population but suffering from a severe clergy shortage, sparse church attendance (few people go to church other than to be baptized, married or buried) and a debilitating ultra conservatism.
Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo is a new breed of Roman Catholic, only recently appointed to his archdiocese and already in conflict with the ruling Somoza family.
On the surface the church situation is not promising. But out of the disaster has come a new sense of purpose and oneness that may well spell out a role of real importance and influence for Managuans from the Christian community.
Where there was nothing remotely resembling a council of churches the evangelicals have formed CEPAD, a committee of aid for the "damnificados" made up of 26 evangelical denominations under the chairmanship of a dynamic young doctor, Gustavo Parajon.
Already CEPAD is a base for the work of Church World Service, the consortium of American churches directly concerned with emergency relief work ground the world.
The Primate's World Relief and Development Fund was the first Anglican Church to send money to Nicaragua when a $5, 000 emergency cheque was sent through Bishop Antonio Ramos of nearby Costa Rica. PWRDF and the Church Action for Emergency Aid (CAFEA) are directing their resources through Church World Service.
The Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief and Interchurch Aid of the Episcopal Church sent $10, 000 from its emergency reserves to aid the thousands of homeless survivors. In addition, the Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, Presiding Bishop, called on all diocesan bishops to consider a special offering during January for emergency relief, setting a goal of $100,000 for Nicaraguan Emergency Relief.
Money, medical services, food distribution and volunteers are already pouring in from member denominations for short term relief and CEPAD is working closely with other volunteer agencies in coordinating their efforts so that all people, rather than only church members, are helped.
Daily more than 5,000 people are directly helped by CEPAD.
Muniz, Serrano and Riebs, for example, concentrate on two areas of the city.
Muniz, who was alone during the first five days of the disaster because the bishop, who was at the Atlantic coast on pastoral visits was unable to get back to the wrecked city, is a small volatile Nicaraguan who has charge of the church's work in the downtown areas and is also active in the alcohol and drug addiction program.
He knows the city well and his influence goes far beyond the work of his small congregation. He is exhausted, frustrated and fearful of the future but his plans on the long range go far beyond merely feeding the hungry.
Serrano is cooler, a former Roman Catholic priest who knows well the problems of the urban Latin American church.
Rieb, a big, active, fluently Spanish speaking American, spent 13 years in South America. His genius for involvement and organization made Campo Luis Somoza one of the most active instant communities in the destroyed area.
Haynsworth, a bishop since 1969, is the chief pastor and coordinator for these diverse efforts. He attends numerous meetings to make sure that the money and resources of the Episcopal Church are used in a coordinated fashion and not proliferated in a purely denominational way.
"It would be very easy to spend $100,000 in a short time and never even see where it went, The churches have to work together, they have to work very closely with non-governmental agencies of all sorts, they have to think of long-term plans rather than just emergency aid and above all they have to be selective of the developmental projects they become involved in," he maintains.
Each day Serrano and Muniz spend their time with volunteer doctors taking the services of the destroyed St. Luke's clinic to the people of Bello Horizente, a suburban area that was almost totally destroyed. Here the people are living in cardboard shacks and tents and diarrhea among their children is epidemic.
While the medicines are distributed they talk with people, hear the constant complaints about government food distribution, distribute food to the neediest cases and help the people to psychologically cope with the realities of the disaster that surrounds them.
Their work and the organization that it involves, working in a city that has its whole infrastructure destroyed, in a situation where the government has arbitrarily taken over food distribution and supplies and is totally autocratic last long into the night. Daily they meet with the bishop and plan strategy. Daily they find that the plans made today become unworkable tomorrow because the situation is so chaotic.
Long range plans are mere dreams since all future planning depends on such government decisions as location of rebuilt areas, education, health, communication and government services.
In Camp Luis Somoza (named because it is across the street from a mansion once lived in by a former president of Nicaragua, one of the present ruling family's brothers) people are victims of total disaster.
In a tiny plot of ground 107 people are crowded into shacks of wood and canvas. They have been forced into a community, something they have never experienced before. They don't like it. They are suspicious, frightened of the future, avaricious about what few tiny possessions they have salvaged.
But Rieb got them organized. In the week he was there on loan from Ohio diocese, they cleaned the rubble, built latrines, formed their own community organization, started egg selling and bread-making projects (with capital coming from the Episcopal church) and slowly developed the idea of working together.
How long their community lasts or whether the government will move them out of the destroyed area remains to be seen but the glimmerings of a future can be seen.
All across Managua these tiny community projects are to be found, run by a variety of volunteer groups. Undoubtedly in the first flush of humanitarian concerns these emergency services will keep Managua alive.
But it is the long term that concerns Haynsworth and Obando. How to sustain the concern at home and overseas once the immediate needs are met, what happens to the spiritual lives of a people faced with almost total destruction, how to rebuild communities that will have stability and freedom, what will happen to thousands of unemployed, homeless people with endless food lines, how to have food-for-work projects that are not mere work camps are some of the questions these two men asked each other and their colleagues in CEPAD and other non-governmental agencies.
Not having the answers they called in experts in many fields to prepare some kind of long-term plan that could be developed by Nicaraguans for Nicaraguans with massive church and volunteer aid from outside.
It had to have several key ingredients. It had to be done locally, it had to be done ecumenically and cooperatively, it had to make cultural and political realities imperative so that no vestiges of North American colonialism could creep in, it had to be developmental in all its aspects.
The plan, of course, is not ready yet but the ingredients are there and the church invites the concerned peoples of the world to respond today with food, medicine and money but perhaps even more important to respond to the long-term needs of a church and nation ravaged by one of the worst disasters ever to hit this long neglected part of the world.