Mennonite Central Committee

First Person: Pedro Acosta Fernandez

From the March/April 2007 issue of "a Common Place"

Never had we faced anything like this and nobody knew what to do. It was 1996. There had been a massacre by one of Colombia’s many armed groups at a village in the mountains and dozens of families were reportedly fleeing toward our town, Tierralta, in northwest Colombia.

I had come home from college for the weekend and found church leaders, the town council and pastors meeting at my church, all trying to figure out where to put 66 families.

Some people said they should camp out in front of the mayor’s office because it’s the mayor’s responsibility to deal with them. Others said to put them in the school in case of rain. A pastor said why doesn’t everybody take two families and house them in their homes.

No one could agree, and eventually the meeting ended without resolution. Everyone left but a few young people.

We decided it was our responsibility to figure out what to do. We thought and we said, here we are in the church. And the church is the house of God. And the people are the children of God. So if they are coming, where should they go? They should go to the house of their Father.

When the pastor came back, families were entering the church and making themselves at home. He said, “What’s going on?”

“Well, the children of God are coming home,” the young people told him.

So I witnessed this all.

The church was full of these families crying. One woman was particularly desperate because her son had been killed and she couldn’t bury him because she had to flee. Another man was devastated because everything he worked for all his life was destroyed and he knew he could never return.

From that moment on, I knew I didn’t have any excuse not to work with displaced people.

Those of us who helped had no training to do this work. The reality itself sensitized us to the need. Church members brought rice, plantains and yucca. They donated clothing.

Some people from the church said the families needed to leave so members could worship God there. We said, “No, this is church. Come. Enter. Listen and pray with these brothers and sisters. This is worship.”

And for two weeks that’s what happened.

Only the story doesn’t end there. Over the next few years it would repeat itself. We received groups of 40, 50 displaced people, over and over again. They would come with their pigs, their cats — even pulpits they had salvaged from their churches.

By 1999, I was going up into the mountains to help communities as they fled attacks from paramilitary forces. There was this air of absolute desperation as everyone tried to get away.

When people left their villages, they took what they could save from the church. They would tie the pulpit to two long poles and carry it down through the mountains. It was a sacred symbol for them that they were not going to leave their faith.

These experiences changed me. They changed my church.

Before, we did a fast for the vulnerable and a few scattered activities through the year. But this changed our way of seeing the Gospel. It changed our way of living and of communicating the Gospel, which is now through service.

For us, service has become a way of evangelizing. It’s a way of showing God’s love, communicating God’s love. Our faith is being built by these experiences.

But for years now, we’ve had the same question — How do we make visible this suffering we have seen? We would be attending to this flood of displaced people, asking ourselves: When will this be known by people in other parts of Colombia and in the wider world?

In 2005, I was asked to help coordinate a human rights project with MCC worker Janna Hunter-Bowman. The project documents abuses taking place and shows how church members are courageously living out their faith despite the violence (see excerpts below). Volunteers gather testimonies. It is dangerous work, but they say it is worth it. One told us this was like lifting a veil of silence that had hung over our country.

On behalf of those who collect stories, on behalf of those who have been harmed, we hope the brothers and sisters of faith in the United States can talk to their members of Congress. Ask your representatives and senators to move away from a U.S. policy toward Colombia that is based on military support. Advocate instead for one that helps create conditions for a negotiated, sustainable peace based on truth and justice.

We hope people in the United States and Canada will carefully read about the horrors that are happening to people in Colombia. We hope you will be multipliers of these testimonies, helping others understand that death and fear — along with courageous hope and bold peacemaking — continue to be daily realities of the church in Colombia.

Pedro Acosta Fernandez, 34, pictured above on right, lives in Sincelejo, Colombia. He is a member of Christ the King Church in Tierralta. Church members purchased land for that first group of displaced people that arrived at the church. As more displaced people came, the church continued to help them resettle with some financial support from MCC. The church has resettled 140 families to date and is currently assisting an additional 160 families.