A reflection I shared this morning at my home church, Shalom Mennonite Congregation:
Good morning. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I was last with you all, receiving a blessing here in Westover park before setting off for a year in Mexico with MCC’s SALT program. Before I share a few reflections, I want to express my sincere gratitude for the support I have felt throughout this year from the Shalom community: for the financial assistance you gave to make this experience possible, for the emails and prayers, for supporting my parents and for believing in me and the work of MCC. It was an honor to follow in the footsteps of some of you who have spent time with MCC and it’s wonderful to be back with each of you again.
Knowing how to share this experience is a challenge. There are lots of ways to tell my story. I could have given you the one word version. When asked “How was your year,” I’ve been known to respond, “good.” But today, I will try to give you a version that falls somewhere between one word and a novel (hopefully closer to the one-word answer, though). The challenge to share with you all is a good one. It gives me the opportunity to intentionally process in a distinct way, and you, as a community that supported me, deserve to know what I’ve been up to. I hope that in speaking with you, I can share just a small portion of the joys, struggles, culture, and spirit I experienced in and with the Mexican pueblo and those I had the pleasure of walking with this year.
I assume all of you global citizens could locate our southern neighbor on a map, but this year, I gained a new appreciation of Mexico’s immensity. It is close to 2 million square kilometers, making it the 14th biggest country in the world. I spent most of my year in the southernmost state of Chiapas, about two and a half hours from the Guatemalan border. Mexico is comprised of 31 states and Chiapas is one of the most heavily populated by indigenous people. Additionally, the state government proudly claims that Chiapas is “no longer the poorest state in Mexico.” It has now risen one rung on the ladder in terms of socioeconomic indicators. I lived in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, the cultural capital of the state, known for its highland charm, Mayan influence, and the presence of social progressives from all over the world.
I worked at an MCC partner called INESIN doing primarily communications and administrative work. INESIN (Institute for Intercultural Studies and Research) works to promote peace through intercultural and interreligious encounter in a part of the country that has been affected (especially in the last 20 years) by extreme tension and even violence between Catholics, Protestants and those practicing Indigenous Mayan Spirituality. In essence, INESIN’s approach is to build relationships across religious divides through workshops, seminars, and courses of common interest, for example, preventing domestic violence, the study of Biblical languages, and discussion of migration issues. Even more than the translating, website development, and delegation planning work that I did, building relationships with a cross section of the Mexican population, participating in workshops and discussing the current political situation of Mexico with whoever happened to show up for our daily coffee break was the most powerful part of my time with INESIN.
I also lived with a truly incredibly host family who welcomed me with open arms and hearts. Each one had an affectionate way of addressing me. Liliana, a 36 year-old homemaker called me Kelina (coincidentally also a nickname my biological mother has been known to use). Gabriel, a 37 year-old law professor and Spanish teacher called me Keliciana and my then-first-grade brother Eduardo, called me Kelly Marie Miller. Leaving them just over three short weeks ago was a heart-wrenching experience and I still feel a stabbing sensation in my chest when I think of life continuing as normal in the Estrada-Lescieur home without me.
In my home this year, I sticky-tacked quotes, pictures and other memorabilia in a long strip to my bedroom wall. One passage sticky-tacked to my wall was Ecclesiastes 3:1-7:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
This well-known verse was a comfort to me throughout my term as I went through both mountain-top and valley experiences. It is also one I have come back to since leaving as I struggle with what feels like an all-too-abrupt transition that leaves little room for me to live in what we called at reorientation in Akron a “liminal space,” neither here nor there. On the morning of July 19, I was in Mexico and by noon of that same day, I was in the U.S. Though I know the realities of life in these two countries are connected, right now it’s hard to feel anything other than, “my reality in each place is so different.”
As I was preparing my reflection for you all, this verse spoke to my experience in a new way. I was more aware of the juxtapositions highlighted throughout the passage: birth and death, weeping and laughing, seeking and loosing, maintaining silence and speaking. One of my biggest philosophical struggles over the year dealt with complexity and juxtaposition. I had the profound sense of the holding the beautiful and the ugly at the same time, witnessing pain and joy, love and hate within the same people and even the same experience. I saw the good in the bad and the bad in the good many times this year. I saw contradictions and shades of grey every day in Mexico, even in the way I was living and I would like to share a few examples with you all:
First, for a long time, I said my host family was the best part of my experience in Mexico. More recently, as I came to appreciate even more what my fellow MCCers, work environment, friends and location contributed to my experience, I began to qualify the former statement with “my host family was one of the best parts of my experience.” Almost-daily card-playing and knitting with Liliana, political discussions and off-color jokes with Gabriel and cookie-baking and mostly good-natured sibling rivalry with Eduardo made me feel like such a part of the family. I would not have traded my experience with them for anything. However, each member of my family has been shaped by their cultural context in beautiful and not-so-beautiful ways that I was especially aware of as a cultural outsider. My host grandmother, Abuelita Betty, was known to make derogatory comments toward indigenous people. For example, she claimed that our frequent cockroach-visitors were a product of the indigenous people coming into the city. Liliana, when asking me about the specifics of how MCC financially supported me, said that in my situation, she would find way to shave a bit off the top for herself. Both of my host parents used frequent threats of corporal punishment as a behavior-modification technique with Eduardo and occasionally used a belt to discipline him. But despite some significant value-differences, I’m left with the overall sense that they are good people and awed at the mutual-care we developed for each other.
I witnessed contradictions on an institutional level, as well. The executive team at INESIN, an organization doing very respectable and valiant peace and reconciliation work, let go a friend and co-worker in December. I saw this process as unjust because it left no room for dialogue (a self-espoused INESIN mission) or a chance for my coworker to modify her “undesirable” behavior. Many of us who surrounded her were wounded by the process. Also, during this last year, MCC has implemented many institutional changes after several years of discernment. The New Wine, New Wineskins project, looking to reshape MCC in healthy and good ways, has also left many wounded and without jobs after many years of service to the institution. I believe deeply in both of these organizations. They are doing good things. But I also have seen the deep pain experienced by some employees.
A third example: one of my greatest unexpected pleasures this year was learning about the still-practiced spirituality of the Maya, indigenous to southern Mexico and Central America. I came to feel God’s presence kneeling around a Mayan alter, praying always to Mother-Father God and embodied my spirituality in new ways through dance, the spicy incense that enveloped my body, kissing the ground, listening to prayer in the Tseltal and Tsotsil languages. More than anything, I experience warm acceptance by many, even as an outsider. However, as in many religions, exclusivity is a dark side of this spiritual tradition. I frequently passed through Betania, a community not so far to the Southeast of San Cristobal that was originally comprised of exiles from the community of San Juan Chamula, a traditional Tsotsil community, who rejected those who did not fit into their box of spiritual and cultural norms. And still, I’m left with the sense that so much of this spiritual tradition is a truly beautiful expression of God’s presence in the world.
Number four: Mexico is home to the richest man in the world: Carlos Slim, business magnate of a telecommunications empire. Poverty is also a harsh reality in Mexico with around half the population living below the poverty line as defined by the World Bank. Being an outsider, I had the unique opportunity to navigate fairly easily between socio-economic groups and it wouldn’t be rare for me to spend a few days in a rural community, sleeping on the ground and eating a diet based almost entirely on beans and corn, and the next day be dining at one of San Cristobal’s tourist hotspots with financially privileged Mexicans covering my bill. Being able to experience Mexico with a wide variety of people gave me a more complex picture of life in Mexico, but it also brought up a lot of difficult questions about solidarity and privilege.
If I wanted to talk about national issues or the government, the list is endless and quite painful: drug violence, corrupt elections, land grabbing, mass murders, and human trafficking to name a few. But I want to talk about migration. My perspective on this issue was, in hindsight, quite limited a year ago. I won’t say that my understanding is anywhere close to comprehensive now, but I more clearly understand the danger and difficultly for Central Americans passing through Mexico en route to the US. No, crossing the desert or the Rio Grande at the US/Mexican border is not the most dangerous part of the journey for many migrants. The journey through Mexico for many is equally, if not more harrowing. I also leave Mexico with many more human faces and stories to attach to the issue. Stories of success and failure, of hope eternal and deep despair, of a mother desperately trying to find a way back into the States to get her young daughter, born in the US, medical treatment for a tumor in her nose and the story of a father who was quite successful in the US for eight years but won’t leave Mexico again in order to stay with his daughter, “the love of his life.”
So there you have a few of the complexities and contradictions I lived during the last year. The question I’m left with is, what good does it do to live these complexities, to have seen them and feel utterly confused? I have no answer. What I’m trying to do in the moment is to rejoice in the joy, bear witness to the pain and not shy away from naming these contradictions and those I will face as I adapt to a different reality.
I wanted to close my reflection by reading a poem called “Narrative Theology” by Padriag O Tuama, an Irish poet doing peace and reconciliation work. For me, it speaks of the power of an unfolding story in the face of questions, contradictions, pain and love. It speaks to my unfolding story, of which my time in Mexico will play a significant part, and the story each of you are living.
“Narrative Theology”
And I said to Him, “Are there answers to all of this?”
And He said, “The answer is in a story, and the story is being told.”
And I said, “But there is so much pain.”
And he answered, “Pain will happen.”
Then I said, “Will I ever find meaning?”
And He said, “You will find meaning where you give meaning.”
The answer is in a story, and the story is unfolding.
The question is not where, but how.
The question’s never finished or exhausted.
And the question’s in the asking not the answer.
The answer’s in the breathing of the question.
In the love of holding onto what was never whispered, never seen;
But what we dreamed of in the morning, but forgot while Venus crept around the nighttime of your sleeping.
The answer is in the living, not the knowing.
The answer is in the telling of the story; in the half-forgotten memory and all unfinished stories.
The answer is in the showing time of senses.
The answer is in the question, in the learning,
In the faded pages of writing, in the letters sent to lovers; in the paying for the other.
The answer is the generous, is the truthing, the absolutely truthful answer.
And forgiving is the giving of what you don’t deserve.
It’s what I’ll serve because you’re hungry, even though you may not know it.
The answer is in the living and the dying,
in the trying for redemption on an empty hill of crosses.
It’s the shoring up of hope and the gathering of losses.
It’s the looking for companions in the hills and in the glens.
It’s the waking up, and walking up and starting up again.
The answer is in the living and the trying.
And I said to the wise man, “What is the answer to all of this?”
He said, “The answer is in the story, and the story is just unfolding.”
So, what comes next in my story? I’ll be in the area until the end of August at which point, I’m moving back to Goshen. I’ll start a paralegal position at an organization called Just Help that provides civil legal assistance to those who don’t qualify for pro bono aid, but can’t pay for full-priced legal services. I’ll be working with their family law and immigration cases to see if public interest law could be a part of my future. I’ll also be singing as part of a semi-professional choir and working to reengage the Goshen community I knew while in college and also trying to forge a new place in that community as a college grad.
