"The Art of Playing Along"

Reading

Deep Brown Worn Eyes
by Jenny Behrens (former Accompanier)

The chicken bus is crowded three to a seat
and crammed in the aisle.
I shift my large hips to let the old man sit,
one hand grips his walking stick,
the other braces the seat in front of us.
His hands are delicate with extra skin,
the veins widening like a meandering river.
The bus turns sharply and his bracing hand slips,
it falls on my knee and remains.
I twitch uncomfortably, but soon stop
and let his clay-like hand mold my knee.
His back is hunched like a rolling hill,
being worn down by old age.
His life woven in his face,
each wrinkle unique and defined.
His deep brown worn eyes tell a story,
one of life, fear, and hope.
Life as a Mayan,
fear during the massacres,
and hope of peace for his people.
The bus abruptly stops.
His tired hand pushes down on my knee for support
as he lifts himself from the tattered seat.
He walks calmly and gently through
the crowded chicken bus,
while the /ayudante/ yells for him to walk faster.
He is unsteady as he steps off the bus
onto the side of the dusty road.
His ripened hands hold his machete,
past their day to be working the fields,
but his hands continue to feed his family.
I want to shout to him,
that everything will be okay,
But will it really?  I want to say yes,
but the history of violent massacres
is still lingering in their minds.
Maybe now in Guatemala, there can be hope,
hope for a secure and content life.
Perhaps I am just an optimistic,
glass-half-full kind of person,
but from the old man's deep brown worn eyes,
the Mayan people cannot suffer any longer

A Letter from UUCA’s Accompanier

Tad Hinnenkamp, our church's human rights accompanier in Guatemala, writes about every 8 weeks about what he is doing. Tad is 29 years old and comes from a small town in Minnesota. In his last letter, he has just come from the village of Chichupac on the 26^th anniversary of the worst of the state-sponsored massacres in that Mayan village.

These are Tad’s words:

I want to give a heartfelt thank you to the congregation. I am able to be an international human rights accompanier here because of the work of the group of people at UUCA providing me with sponsorship and moral support. I accompany threatened people from Chichupac and 11 other communities in the mountainous area around Rabinal.

In the early 1980s, these communities were brutally destroyed by the Guatemalan military under the dictatorships of Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt. In the past several years, indigenous people in 10 of these 11 communities have testified at the risk of their lives in national genocide cases against the former dictators.

The struggle to bring about justice is a slow, frustrating process. For the survivors of the genocide, for the orphaned and widowed, for the abused and tortured, for the terrorized and abandoned, the struggles for justice and reconciliation need to continue forward. The violence of the past must never be forgotten and the justice and dignity needed today must be demanded and confronted.

The indigenous people here all experienced horrific massacres and violent military incursions during the 1980s. Although the violence of the past has subsided, Guatemala continues to be a dangerous place for those struggling for human rights and justice.

It is my hope, as a human rights accompanier, that my physical presence provides some measure of security both to witnesses at genocide trials and to those who exhume massacre sites searching for members of their families. It is my hope that due to my presence, affected communities will have the needed space to organize in this national and international struggle. As an accompanier, I work as the "eyes and ears" of the international community, using my connections to educate others, and to mobilize my support network to pressure the Guatemalan and U.S. governments.

Later, in his letter, Tad talks about Miguel who is a founding member of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, a multi-community genocide witness organization. Miguel is also president of Chichupac's local governing committee. He is a born leader who witnessed the deaths of his parents, a brother, and a sister at the hands of the military.

As genocide survivor Miguel stated: "We can't say we have justice when there is none yet to be found. We can't move forward until we correct the injustices of the past."

Sermon:
“The Art of Playing Along”

It is hard to hear those words of Tad Hinnenkamp, sponsored by this church as a human rights accompanier in Guatemala – hard but necessary to hear. And it is so good to have the dancers and guests from Buckingham Village here with us today, as we celebrate the cultures of Guatemala. But this sermon will begin on the streets of San Francisco – or more precisely, in an apartment, on a bright, sunny afternoon in June. A group of us are sipping wine on the balcony; a few steps away, pasta bubbles on the stove. We are there to congratulate Bruce, who has most literally come in from the cold. On the wall of his new apartment hangs a familiar object, a crudely lettered cardboard sign, now carefully framed:

There are four lines:

ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
MISSED MY DINNER
HELP IF YOU CAN
THANK YOU

This was the sign Bruce had held as he begged for change during the last several of the 31 years he’d lived on the streets. Nearly every day, he’d stood next to the grave of Thomas Starr King at the corner of Franklin Street and Starr King Way, flashing that sign at motorists stopped at the light. He was well known to members of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, not just for his presence on their corner but for his terrifying outbursts – directed sometimes at church members or church staff who didn’t have change for him that day, or who offered him food he didn’t like.

Present on his new balcony that June afternoon were some of the ministers who had kept faith with Bruce over nine months of patient walking and reflecting.  They had accompanied Bruce as he struggled off of heroin and onto methadone, and then off methadone. They had shown up with him again and again in a protracted court battle to get Social Security Disability Income. They had helped him look for an apartment, and had stood up for him when questions arose about his lengthy criminal record.

It was foolish work. Bruce was not easy to walk with. He fell off the wagon, again and again. When he fell off, he would turn on his friends.

Then he’d come back, ask us to walk with him again. Most of the time, we would say yes.

The first of the Faithful Fools to get to know Bruce was Alex. He was a leader in the San Francisco UU church, a young adult who’d been tapped for service on the Board of Trustees. In Leadership Training at the Pacific Central District, he had learned a way of listening with no agenda, without trying to “fix” anything.

These were the ears he used to listen to Bruce, who would regale him with stories of his life on the streets. One day, Bruce was talking, and Alex heard something new. “I kept listening until finally I could see something I could do that might be of help to Bruce,” Alex recounted. “I told him I would go with him when he cashed his welfare check every month, and hold it for him -- give him ten dollars a day so he could get his fix and not have to panhandle from a place of desperation, and maybe he could stop yelling at people on the corner.”

Soon Bruce asked Alex if he could help him get off heroin and onto methadone, and that was when the real ride began. Alex spent more than a full day on the telephone until he finally found a free program that would take him. Bruce checked in -- but stayed only through the weekend.  “Too many rules,” he said.

There were many more hard stops along the way to that sweet, sunny afternoon in June. That’s how it sometimes goes, when you accompany someone.

I learned about accompaniment there on the streets of San Francisco, where the Faithful Fools Street Ministry accompanied me. I was a middle class, middle aged, white, privileged woman who was wanting to have an authentic encounter with the poverty that exists in San Francisco, as it exists in Arlington, alongside great wealth. I wanted to learn to bear witness to the whole of that painful reality that so defines the life experience of everyone in this country and maybe everyone in the world, certainly in Guatemala. I was asking to be broken open, and when you do that, you need someone to walk beside you.

“Accompaniment” is the word the Faithful Fools use, and it’s really the same thing as “bearing witness.” When I think of bearing witness I don’t think of bearing as a weight on my shoulders. I think of bearing as a woman bears a child, gives birth, giving birth to authentic witness. There is pain involved, and also joy.

One of the ways we bear witness to poverty as Faithful Fools is by walking alongside the thousands of persons who live on the streets of San Francisco – eating in the soup kitchens where they eat, sleeping on the streets or in shelters where they sleep. You’ve heard me talk about this before. Some people think it sounds like poverty tourism, but in my experience the people we meet on the streets don’t see it that way. They are glad to meet someone who is curious about their lives, someone who is trying to get a sense – a small sense, for sure – of what it is like to carry everything you own all day long, to have no money in your pocket except what you can beg from strangers, to be asked time and again to move along.

I want to tell you about two young men I met on my first overnight street retreat. On the second day of our four days outside, Ivan and Oswaldo showed up. Ivan’s uncle worked for Allende in Chile; his family fled that country after the military coup in which Allende was slain. Oswaldo was adopted out of Guatemala as an infant by a French Canadian couple. His birth parents had been murdered in one of the village massacres that happened in the 1980s. So they were two of the estimated 200,000 villagers, mostly Mayans, killed by government troops who wiped out whole villages in efforts to stamp out a guerilla insurgency. When Oswaldo learned this history, he ran away from his home in Canada. He told us he was living on the streets; he planned always to live on the streets; getting a job would be too much like buying into the worldwide economic system he blamed for the deaths of his birth parents.

Ivan and Oswaldo found each other in LA, and became traveling companions.

They hung out with us in San Francisco for a couple of days. They felt comfortable with us because Carmen, one of the founders of the Faithful Fools, had worked as a Franciscan sister in Nicaragua, so she knew the history of that region; she had a sense of what Oswaldo was feeling. That was years ago, but I think about them often. They were about the age of my son.

Earlier you heard the words of Tad Hinnenkamp, who is sponsored by this church as an accompanier to people in Guatemala. Tad is there to bear witness as people in the Rabinal district seek to understand the truth about those massacres. He is a human rights observer, and his presence offers some protection to people who remain under threat of reprisal. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch wrote that “the key to hope, even in distant corners of the world, is realizing there are things we can do to end atrocities and curb suffering.” When I read Tad’s letters from Guatemala, I see that to the protection he may be offering to survivors of genocide, he is also sowing hope by listening to the stories of the people he visits. Simply hearing them.

It must be hard to hear those stories. Sometimes I bet Tad wants to stop walking, but he goes on. That’s another thing about accompaniment: you can’t get overly attached to the result. You have to work at that; you can still care with all your being, but you have to be able to put it down.

What does it mean to accompany someone? In music, a definition I like is this: “the art of playing along with a soloist or ensemble, often known as the lead, in a supporting manner.” The accompanist, the accompanier, doesn’t try to run the show. He keeps the beat, maybe. She stays in tune, the way the two groups who danced for us today kept one another in mind as they performed their parts of the collaboration.

For Alex, being an accompanier to Bruce on the streets of San Francisco meant patient listening, waiting for the time when an opportunity would present itself. Not trying to take the lead, not even when Bruce seemed about to waltz off a cliff, again. Alex knew Bruce would never get well unless he was in charge of his own recovery.

For this church, being an accompanying community means five of our members are joining a Service Committee trip to Guatemala this month. We wish them Godspeed and look forward to their safe return so they can share with us what they’ve learned.

But we don’t have to travel 2,000 miles away to be accompaniers, and we don’t have to sleep on the streets, either. Members of this church accompany one another through life; that is part of what it means to join a community like this, the way people joined us today. And -- this church is reaching out to our neighbors just a couple of blocks away in the Buckingham community, and those neighbors are reaching back to us. Well over a hundred of our members have gotten involved in some way or other in this new UUCA-Buckingham relationship of mutual accompaniment – in Spanish-English conversation groups that are now happening at this church every Saturday, for example; in the dance collaboration that you saw here today, in cooking tutorials about Guatemalan food in our kitchen – and you can taste the results in Fellowship Hall after the service. In this reaching out, we are not solving the problems of structural inequity. We are getting to know one another as human beings, and who knows where that might lead?

What does it mean to accompany someone? Bruce says it was Alex’s nonjudgmental listening that helped him change his life. I think there’s also a quality of curiosity about it – Ven a cantar conmigo, Y déjate conocer É  “Come sing a song with me, that I might know your mind.” In this way we know one another; in this way, even when it’s hard to find -- even someone’s been on the streets for 31 years; even when it’s in distant corners of the world -- in this way we bring one another hope.