Faith Partners of the Americas Initiates New Project of Solidarity withand Indigenous Christians in Ecuador
Faith Partners of the Americas Trip to Ecuador : March 29—April 1, 2005
Report by Fred Morris
I flew on Copa Airlines to Panama and changed planes to Quito . Dr. Larry Hooper was not able to accompany me as we had planned, as his passport had been misplaced. I arrived at 9:30 p.m. and was greeted by the Rev. Israel Batista, General Secretary of CLAI (Latin American Council of Churches—which has more than 125 denominations in its membership).
On Wednesday, I met with Israel in the morning. We discussed the project at length. Then
after lunch we met with Rev. Marco Murillo, the
president of the Ecuadorian Federation of Indigenous Evangelical
Churches, FEINE,
an umbrella organization that represents 2,500 churches and more
than one million indigenous Ecuadorian evangelicals. (Check
out their website by clicking on FEINE)
Some background history: about 12% of the people of Ecuador are Protestants (Evangelicals) and the indigenous people represent about 40% of those. (The indigenous people are 25% of the total population.) Unlike in other places, the indigenous people's original religion was pretty much obliterated by the Spanish conquistadores and the Roman Catholic priests that came with them. They were forced to become Catholic, but the conversion never went very deep. In the past century missionaries, mostly from the US , took the Reformed message to the indigenous people. Perhaps more importantly, they taught them to read and gave them the Bible. The extraordinary growth of the Evangelical message among these people was pretty much done on their own in response to the Gospel message and today there are virtually no foreign missionaries working among them, but they are working aggressively to evangelize themselves. FEINE became the entity that has come to represent most of these Evangelical Christians among the indigenous people in Ecuador . Rev. Marco Murillo is a young man, about 35 years old, with an extraordinary leadership capacity. He has been the president of FEINE for several years.
We met in the offices of FEINE and planned our trip the next day to Cotopaxi (Quezapincha). He wanted to take us to two other places, Alausi and Guamote. He wanted to include these two places, as they are communities that have recently elected indigenous Evangelicals to be mayors and where, for the first time in the history of Ecuador , there are indigenous elected leaders. Marco said that there is a great need for assistance in the area of health care and a great openness on the part of these leaders to receive cooperation from outside. He responded very positively to my saying that we are not interested in establishing an institution or anything like that, but simply wanted to develop a relationship of solidarity and provide what support we could to meet what they regard as their needs.
At 6:30 a.m. they picked me up at the hotel and we headed south, stopping for breakfast along the way. We arrived at Quezapincha shortly after 9:00, where several of the indigenous leaders were waiting for us at the central plaza. After introductions and a brief conversation, (one of the indigenous leaders is part of the municipal leadership), it was decided that we should go to the official Health Clinic and talk with the people there.
Quezapincha is a municipality with 24,000 people and 18 indigenous evangelical churches and one Catholic church.
We were received by a young doctor, Dr. Michelle Torres,
a recent graduate from medical school who is serving a one-year
assignment at this Clinic. She was a little bit reluctant at first,
but when she
Thinking of Larry's questions, I asked her what were the most urgent needs among the people. She had no trouble answering. The most basic problem is the lack of potable water.
This results in a series of medical problems that need to be addressed. These are:
She also expressed a specific need for instruments to measure blood pressure for children (her cuffs are too large) and an urgent need for an examination table for her clinic.
She also said she has a mobile dental unit and that there is much work a dentist could do on our trip.
For the long run, there are two major needs: infrastructure to provide potable water for the community, as all of the above problems will return after cured if the water isn't purified before use. What they have now is in pipes, but a mixture of mud and water. The second major need is for a regional hospital to meet the needs not only of this community but of other communities.
Dr. Torres is very excited about the possibility of our coming with medical and dental personnel for a mission, especially if we can bring medicine.
She also said they need vitamin C and multiple vitamins, and some anti-fungal creams.
We
got back into our vehicle and drove for about another hour to Guamote,
another municipality whose mayor is an indigenous
Evangelical names Juan de Dios (John of God). Guamote
has about 40,000 inhabitants, all of whom are indigenous,
We met with the mayor in his office, together with some of his staff. They were enthralled at the idea of our coming with medical personnel for a week or so, and even more excited about the possibility of our establishing a relationship of solidarity with their communities to help meet some of their health needs.
Their medical personnel had the same list of immediate needs as Dr. Torres, and then the mid-term needs of:
We then drove for another hour, had a late lunch, and met with the mayor of Alausi, a municipality with 42,000 inhabitants and 148 communities and 25 Evangelical churches. The mayor, Clemente Taday, is the first indigenous mayor of the community and is dealing with the traditional racism that afflicts Ecuadorian society of the meztizos against the indigenous people.
He called in his medical personnel, who repeated basically the same menu of needs, starting with potable water, regional hospital and, of course, the specific needs listed by Dr. Torres.
The Rev. Israel Batista had mentioned on Wednesday that there are presently 250 Ecuadorian young people studying medicine in Cuba on scholarships. In our conversation we discovered that six or eight of them are indigenous from this region, but that there is no infrastructure to allow them to provide assistance when they return.
We then headed for Quito , stopping along the way to meet at the Regional Office of FEINE with the Regional Leader, Rev. Pedro Shigla. He expressed enthusiasm for the idea of our "medical caravan" and a long term relationship with the Indigenous Evangelical Churches.
We got back to Quito about 11:00 p.m. after having driven nearly 400 miles.
On Thursday, Israel and I met with Marco again in his office. They are requesting that we bring a total o 15 persons in August (11-21). They would like for our group to have 12 doctors and three dentists. They will provide Ecuadorian nurses to do workups to make better use of the doctors. They want to put four doctors and one dentist into each of these three municipalities for six days of clinical work. The churches in each of these areas will coordinate the patient flow. We could easily treat more than 1,000 patients in each locale.
We estimate that we would need between $20-25,000 (or even more) in medicine to meet the immediate needs to deal with Dr. Torres' list of urgent needs in the three places.
Through CLAI, I got the name and contact info for the head of UMCOR in New York who has been very successful in getting medicines donated by pharmaceutical companies for such needs and will be contacting him to see if he can get some or all of the medicines.
I also have a contact with the Merck Corporation through the Carter Peace Center that may be able to get some donated medicines.
Rev. Marco of FEINE has good relations with the Ministry of Health and will be contacting the Minister to get some support from the Ministry. This could provide some or all of the medicines, but it is not likely to be all.
We have put together a program for the time, August 11 to 21, which fits with their schedules and holidays, etc.. We will schedule meetings in Quito with the Minister of Education and the US Embassy, looking toward the middle- and long-term needs for potable water and a regional hospital. USAID could become a partner in these projects. I believe we need to contact Jim Towey in the Office of Faith Based Initiatives in the White House to see if we can get some support there for USAID participation in addressing the long-term needs.
FEINE has another project that it would like to have support from Faith Partners on.
They are in the middle of the construction of a four-story building to provide lodging and meeting rooms for "leadership development" of their people, both clergy and laity.
But as a result of this contact and of conversations with Israel and me, he wants to expand his vision to include receiving groups from the US and around Latin America for short-term programs (10 days or so) to work on developing a "Culture of Peace." The idea is to develop a curriculum/program that would involve spending 10-15 days at the Center for a Culture of Peace (final name to be decided), doing some specific studying on peace issues, conflict resolution, environmental issues, etc., mixed with some exciting tourism in Ecuador, starting with the "Middle of the World" monument in Quito, where the original populations placed a monument around the year 1,000 to mark where the Equator passes; mountains rising to nearly 20,000 feet, tropical jungles, beaches, thermal springs, etc., along with some study of Latin American history and culture. Another project for our consideration.
|
realized
that the local political leader was in our group she warmed up considerably.
When I explained that we are planning to take a team of US medical
personnel there in August, she warmed up even more. She is quite
concerned about the people in the region and quite frustrated by
the fact that she is one person for 24,000 people, and has virtually
no resources in terms of medicine. 
and
70% Evangelical. There are 180 small indigenous communities in the
municipality and about 40 churches. 