Bolivia (Church of England Paper Article)

It seemed a great idea, as Chairman of the Trust that each year puts on the Detling Summer Conference – a kind of New Wine event in the South East of England. I was invited by Compassion International to go and look at some of their projects. I knew they would be good. It was Tony Campolo who first put us in touch with Compassion International, and since then we have had an ongoing relationship with them.

When I was asked to go on a church leaders’ trip to view some of the projects, I was thrilled. When I learnt it was to be Bolivia, I was bemused. What was the purpose of taking us so far, to a land-locked country in the middle of South America, far away from the usual well-beaten tourist areas, or the usual charity projects route? We wouldn’t discover the answer to that question until we arrived.

First, we had to get there. There were three flights, including an extra one, because we were dodging a national general strike the following day. So altogether we were travelling about 35 hours, but it was fun. There were some great people - some of them people I’d known for years, and others I’d always wanted to meet.

Our first centre was the city that sits in the middle of Bolivia, Cochabamba, a city of a million people. It is spread out across the surface of a huge bowl surrounded by mountains. Travelling on our bus to visit the projects, it did not take long for the relative prosperity of the city to be lost behind us. Soon we were travelling through areas as miserably poor as anything I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world.

Finally we arrived at the area where the project was. The surface of the street was packed mud and stone. Many of the houses looked as though they had been transplanted from one of those westerns where people have strayed across the border into Mexico. But the street was lined with children, waving their flags and welcoming us. When we turned the corner, there were yet more children.


Finally we arrived at the project and were surrounded by children, some pretty, some plain, some lively, some painfully shy. But all of them curious. We went to visit the home of two of the children – a brother and sister - who lived about a quarter of a mile away, across the dried-up ditches and parched fields of an area that had been too long without rain.

When we arrived at the house, we were greeted by their mother. Her name was Concepcion. She stood on the packed mud floor of a mud and straw brick hovel. Her children clustered around, clutching at her skirts. Outside, the early summer temperature was already quite high. It can rise as high as 36 degrees Centigrade. At nights it can plummet to 0 degrees. There was no fireplace in the single living room, and no electricity. Water had to be fetched from a hundred metres away. Her husband was sick, but walked several kilometres every day to a back-breaking job that paid just enough to keep the family alive.

A single home-made ladder led to the upper room. The whole family slept up there, on the floor. The daily meal would be cooked over a wood fire in the open-air hearth outside, or over the single gas ring linked by a tube to the Calor gas cylinder.

We learned that she was about 25. She looked 45. Her eastern Andean origins showed in her coppery colour and high cheek bones. But it was her eyes that got to you. There was so little hope there. Only when she talked about the two children who were sponsored by first-world Christians did the burden lift a little. When one of us asked gently ‘Is there anything special we can pray for, for you?’ her voice became strangled by the attempt to hold back her tears. Through our interpreter she said ‘I would like to be able to own this house and the land that goes with it – but I do not see how that could be.’ We learned that tenants who stay in property for 10 years automatically gain rights to the house and land, so the landlord moves them on in the ninth year. There is no possibility of building a stable community, and no way to guarantee continuity of education for the children.

There were five of us visiting. She had done her best to clean up, and the family’s best blanket had been spread along a single plank balanced on bricks to form a seat for her guests. The family’s entire wardrobe of clothes was bundled over two ropes, hanging across the corners. When we asked how much it would cost to buy the property, we were told the princely sum of £2,000 would do it – just £2,000. It was shattering to realise that a sum of money that, in Britain, would be relatively small, would make such an enormous difference to this family. Now in lots of ways I’m a typical bloke; a bloke from a prosperous first-world country, where we worry about the stability of our banks, our mortgage payments, and the prospect of England’s football team ever winning anything. Suddenly my concerns seemed stupid, shallow and selfish. It was like God was saying, ‘Open your eyes, Eric. This is the stuff that breaks my heart. When is it going to touch yours?’

The following day we did it again; visited another project; went and visited another home. This time the family lived in a single concrete box that had been built into the base of a water tower. The two children sponsored in this home had only just started their involvement with Compassion and the mother was only beginning to appreciate how much difference this was going to make to those children, and to the whole family. Yet again, we came away humbled.

The next day we flew from Cochabamba to the capital, La Paz – the highest capital city in the world. Beautiful and amazing. A city set on steep valleys and surrounded by magnificent mountains. Once again, a visit to a project attached to a church – meeting with a pastor who has built a community – a little foretaste of the kingdom that is to come, built out of the lives of the poorest of the poor. Living stones, building an eternal kingdom.

This time our home visit takes us to the home of a girl called Naomi, who had nearly died from heart failure. But the entire project, the school community and the church all got together and raised for them the amazing sum of £3,000, to pay for her to go to hospital and to receive life-giving surgery; something that would never have been possible had it not been for the work of Compassion.

I looked at this beautiful girl, and reflected that Naomi had been someone through whom all sorts of people, who would not otherwise have made connections with each other, had done so. How like the one after whom she was named, through whom Ruth, the Moabite, met Boaz the Jew and gave birth to Jesse, the father of David, from whom came David’s greatest son, Jesus himself. Did she know how God would use her? Of course not. Does this girl know how God will use her? Of course not. But someone, somewhere in the world, has made it possible for this girl to live.

On the last day we came to the highest navigable lake in the world. A lake sacred to the Incas – Lake Titicaca. A place of such beauty that it takes your breath away. We journeyed on a boat across the lake. We’d been warned that this would be the coldest day of our trip. In fact, the sun blazed out of a cloudless sky, and I got sun-burnt.

We arrived at the island of Suriqui; in so many ways a perfect place, and yet a place of great need. I looked at the children and decided I would just have to sponsor two more. It really was the least I could do. In the sacred lake of Titicaca we discovered once again the Jesus who is there in the least of these.

We returned to London with unforgettable memories. I’m an ordinary bloke from a prosperous first-world country. I’ve never had much time for the guilt-mongers – the bleeding hearts and their collecting tins. But I’d been face to face with human need; with the poverty that blights the lives of little children and grinds the poor into the ground. Oh, they manage – they have to. It’s what they do. But don’t let’s excuse ourselves with the fondly maintained illusion that they are ‘happy with their lot’. It is breaking them down – human beings like you and me; made in the image of God.

I returned sobered, ashamed of a Christianity that justifies us in our affluence and does not compel us to generosity. We’ve got so much . . . and we give so little. If church is boring, it’s because it’s all words. We never do anything. It’s time to change all that. Sponsor a child. Go on a mission trip. Open your eyes and start to agitate for a church that makes a difference where it counts – among the poor. After all, Jesus did say ‘When you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me.’