As I’ve done a few other times this year, our officially suggested prompt for the month is going out the window so that I can talk about what’s really on my mind, and like February, this will not be without political opinion – please be advised, and if you are one of my supporting congregations and are making my updates available to the congregation members, feel free to substitute this one for a funny blog entry with photos of the kids at La Obra.
I have, at least in my blog, mentioned a certain character named Claudio. He’s in his late fifties and one of the two educadores in the Centro de Estudios. If you read the blog, he’s the thin, grey-haired man who looks remarkably like Don Quixote who appears in multiple photos. At the outset of the year, we were told by a lot of former volunteers that we might not be around many other people our age, and that it was pretty common for one’s best friends in one’s host country to be people much older or younger. I figured, after meeting the grupo de jóvenes in my first week in Uruguay that this wouldn’t be the case for me – I have had plenty of contact with other people in their early-to-mid twenties. However, as great as my grup de jóvenes friends have been, my two best friends have indeed been someone notably older (Claudio) and someone younger (Sebastián, who’s a week away from turning 17 and in fairness is a part of the grupo). Seba has been like the younger brother I never had this year, and some of my best memories from Uruguay are of the two of us joking around, acting like complete morons together, and despite ourselves, managing to have serious “man-talk” from time-to-time, too.
Claudio, obviously, hasn’t filled a brotherly role in my Uruguayan community, nor has he been a surrogate parent. He has been, however, the first one of these that I’ve had in a long time – a hero. The only other that I can think of in my life, or at least people I’ve known personally (I could rattle off a list of “heroes” who lived long before my time), was my Uncle Sam, who passed away in 2006. Claudio and Uncle Sam – two men as radically different as they are alike. Both tall, lanky grey-haired men from the country, both smokers, both enormous fans of caffeine-fueled story-telling and conversations, both incredible teachers of how to live and treat other human beings. The differences are as obvious, too – language, work (one stayed in the country, the other didn’t), generation, nationality, personal history. The latter aspect adds an element of irony to their duel position in my mind as heroes – Claudio’s life story has much to do with another, somewhat more globally well-known grey-haired, lanky Uncle Sam…but we’ll come back to that point.
Of course, it probably merits explanation why these two are heroes, whereas the many other amazing people in my life haven’t made it to that sphere yet. For me, it’s the mythologization, the way simple acts have become life-transformingly significant. Uncle Sam didn’t just give me ice cream as a kid: he treated me just like one of his own grandkids when he did it. It wasn’t just a bowl of Rocky Road; it was showing me with a scoop and a bowl how to love other human beings and make everyone feel equal and appreciated. Claudio, too – it wasn’t just teaching me how to serve mate or asking me literal hundreds of questions about life and politics in the United States or always taking the same bus even if it meant a few pesos more for the ticket; it was the openness to a stranger from a strange land, the willingness and ability to find value even in someone from a place that’s caused him so much pain.
I’ve hinted enough at what’s coming. Claudio and the United States have a very special relationship with each other. I’ve mentioned, at least in my blog, that Uruguay was governed by a brutally repressive military government from June 27th, 1973 to March 1st, 1985. I’ve mentioned that hundreds of Uruguayans “disappeared” during the dictatorship and are “reappearing” in shallow graves on military bases, that thousands more went into exile, and that thousands went to jail, where they were tortured by the military. I’ve even mentioned that the United States dirtied its hand in the matter, too, funding the military government (we even paid for its “death squad” of executioners, the people responsible for those disappeared and their shallow graves), and through the School of the Americas (as well as military advisors) training the Uruguayan military and national police in torture and interrogation methods. What I haven’t mentioned is why it bothers me so much, other than the very basic fact that it was morally unjustifiable and complete reprehensible.
Claudio was one of those prisoners. Too far left for the military government because he believed that people should have the right to free speech and free assembly, and because he used those freedoms to ask questions about the social inequalities of Uruguay, they put him in jail. They tortured him there, too. Those techniques you read about sometimes, the strapping jumper cables to people’s testicles, the water-boarding, the beatings – they’re not just abstractions. They didn’t end with the Inquisition. They happened in Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, and my country helped make it possible because, hey, at least the military government liked big American businesses and wasn’t keen on the Russians.
At the beginning of the month, I went to the Museum of Remembrance dedicated to preserving the story of what happened in the dictatorship. The section on the lead-up to the coup and the initial resistance (the general strike, the demonstrations, and so on) were tough, but I didn’t break. It was the section devoted to prison life that tore me in half. The jumpers – was one of them Claudio’s? The chess set made from bits of wood and broken nails – is this how he passed the time when he wasn’t being beaten? The prohibited book, written on cigarette rolling papers in handwriting so fine a magnifying glass is needed to read it – was this his reading material? I remembered, too, after seeing the book, how he told me once that he always appreciated Fahrenheit 451 because of its ending – the group of people who’d each memorized whole books and plays, and kept themselves entertained and intellectually stimulated by reciting them to one another. They did this in his prison. Claudio did this – memorized poems and books and plays to keep from going insane. I don’t know where he was imprisoned – in one of the smaller ones in the city, or in a makeshift one like the basketball stadium. I somehow imagine that, given his eye for the ironies in life, he was locked up in the largest of the prisons – it was located in a city called Libertad.
I don’t think it’s his personal tragedy that’s made him a hero to me, though. It’s how he responded to it. What easier response is there to torture and imprisonment than lose faith in God and other people and become a bitter, cynical shell of a human being? I don’t blame those who do, either. But that’s not what happened with Claudio. Call it the will of God, the triumph of the irrepressible human spirit, or even the sweetest revenge ever, but Claudio’s still there, working every day to better other people and work for a more just society, and the military government that tried to destroy him is long gone. THAT is heroic – to look the darkest things this universe can conjure up in the eye and say, in words and deeds, that you won’t let it win, not only in your own life, but in those of the people around, too.
After the museum, I went to La Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, an enormous church standing on one of the highest points in Montevideo. I see it every day, towering over some of the poorest neighbors in the entire country. It’s the theology of glory in a world of the cross. Before this year, I might have been able to appreciate it as an item removed from its context – a nice building, a good vista of the city. Now, however, I was struck as much by the poverty around the church and in the neighborhoods from which one can see it as I was by the building itself. I think I can thank my time with Claudio this year a little bit for a bit of new sight.
Beyond new heroes and their life stories, I think the most important lesson I’ve pulled this year from Claudio, or perhaps my faith-driven synthesis of lessons, deals with one detail I noticed at the church. It was locked – no one could come in. They were just too afraid of what might happen if the door wasn’t shut. In a country with incredibly low numbers of church participation, you’d think the priests would’ve been all but begging people to come inside, discover the transforming power of the Gospel for hearts and minds. But no. It was just locked up. And I wonder – are we that church? Do we really care enough about people suffering in this world to do something about it – to work on their behalf, to do something other than feel bad for them, to proclaim the Gospel with our lives and actions and not just flimsy paper tracts passed out on a street corner? Do we shut our doors to the undesirables, preferring the memory of our glory days to the risks of welcoming in people who don’t have nice clothes, who don’t have nice cars, who aren’t our skin color, who don’t speak our language?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just a 23 year old who feels too much and lets the Bible talk to him in ways that might make James Dobson accuse me of dragging biblical interpretation through the mud. Or maybe there’s a huge world out there of people suffering, in physical and spiritual poverty, and it’s our job, our highest calling and biggest responsibility, to work to change that. It’s our job to welcome in the stranger, rich and poor and white and black and brown and every other attribute equally, just like a crazy-looking Uruguayan welcomed this volunteer from his enemy’s camp and didn’t judge him based on where he came from, but recognized him as another child of God.
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