Forgiving the enemy

Guatemala | OM International

Guatemala - ´It’s been a struggle´, says Pilar Castro. ´But a blessing at the same time.´ During a medical outreach in a rural area of the country, the leader of OM Guatemala and a team of volunteers experienced many difficulties. They didn’t choose the easiest region for this outreach. With a team of over forty people from Guatemala, the USA and Switzerland, Pilar went to Santa Elena, Petén.

It is one of the areas in which the majority of the inhabitants consists of returnees: people that fled to Mexico during the peak of Guatemala’s civil war and returned during the peace negotiations in 1995. For over a decade, they lived as refugees, being forced to leave their country behind during the bloody fight between the national army and the guerrilla’s.

From the 5th to the 12th of June, the OM team visited three communities in Santa Elena. Beforehand, Pilar and a few colleagues went there to check out the places where they were going to be working. ´On the way back, our bus was stopped by a mob´, she says. ´The rebels asked me aggressively to leave the bus. I told them we couldn’t and continued talking until at a fortunate moment, we were able to get away.´ In order to secure the travel during the medical trip, the team asked the National Civil Police to escort them from Guatemala City.

Firearms

There are many natural reserves in Petén. In the past, one of the reserves was invaded by families that had nowhere to live. However, the government didn’t allow them to stay there and sent the police and the army to evict them. According to some witnesses, the police acted very violently towards these families and unlike them, used firearms. Many families left, but 21 of them stayed to live there in huts. They are extremely poor.

´We visited these families when we came to Petén to prepare for the trip´, Pilar says. ´Afterwards, we have been praying and asking for offerings in order to be able to bring some food for these people. And thanks to God, He answered our prayers. We were able to bring a bag of food for each family.´

When, during the medical trip, the moment came to take these bags to the families, something unexpected occurred. ´All our cars were full. So I asked the police officers, who where escorting us, to take us to the families with the bags. At that time, I didn’t know about the eviction story yet.´

When Pilar and the team arrived and the families saw the police, the women and children in the community were paralysed by fear. ´The policemen that accompanied us didn’t know what had happened there before and they entered the community with confidence. Thanks to God most men were working at the time we arrived. We encountered mostly women and children.´

A pastor tried to explain that these policemen were good ones. ´I saw the face of every person´, says Pilar. ´There was pain and anger. And I didn’t know what to do, because many of our team members hadn’t arrived yet. We were there with only six team members and three policemen. They outnumbered us by far.´

Difference

The people of the community gave her the opportunity to explain what the team was doing. ´God placed something in my heart at that moment. I felt like the policemen needed to ask forgiveness for what their co-workers in the police had done to these families.´ For a moment, she kept quiet. ´In the days before I had been sharing about Christ to the policemen, but I wasn’t really sure if one of them really had accepted Him.´

Pilar decided to obey to what God had asked her to do. ´So I requested if they could ask these families to forgive them for what their fellow policemen had done.´ At that moment the other team members arrived and they started handing out the bags with food.

Amongst one of the people that accepted the food bags was a lady with a very angry face. Her name was Felipa. ´I greeted her and asked her what she thought she’d seen. She began to cry with anger. We talked and I told her that she needed to tell everything that made her feel bad to one of the policemen. She told me that was fine. I called the youngest policeman, but another one was closer – the same one that had laughed a bit when I talked about Christ to him.´

But God had it all planned out. ´The police officer apologised to Felipa and they cried together. He was even talking to her about God.´

Pilar is amazed by the way God worked in the lives of the people in the community and the policemen that escorted the team. ´The police in Guatemala is not respected´, she explains. ´There’s a lot of corruption and policemen tend to be abusive with the people.´

For the three men that escorted the OM team, the medical trip made a difference. ´At the end, they were very impressed by everything they had seen. They were glad to have participated with us. And they were happy with the way they had been treated by the team. They have learned a different way to do their job: under the guidance of God.´

Credit: OM International
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