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Maya girls play basketball in the western highlands of Guatemala.

 

                                                         2 July 2014
Dear friends,

I recently spent several days in Zimbabwe documenting the lives of several people living with disabilities, and I came home feeling blessed by those who had allowed me into their lives for a few hours. Here's an image of a guy named Blessing. He has a small stand in a Harare market and lives nearby in a condemned apartment building, one of eight people in a tiny one-room apartment. The place was dark and crowded and smelled horrible, yet Blessing navigated through it with an ordinary sense of grace and humor which left me feeling, well, blessed. He and others sent me home with the line between being abled and being disabled a lot fuzzier, but with my understanding of grace a bit clearer.

Blessing Manditsera lives in a condemned apartment building not far from his stand in the Mbare Market in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Like Blessing, many of those I met were people who saw their disabilities as challenges to be calmly embraced. They weren’t looking for pity, nor did they view their daily struggles as in any way heroic. Their attitude pushed me to avoid creating false narratives–what some have called "disability porn"–that romanticize others’ problems as a way to generate cheap inspiration for ourselves. Rather than wanting us to feel sorry for them, the people I worked with would prefer simple solidarity. Not surprisingly, several of them are involved with groups doing public education about disability rights, as well as organizing for better physical access in schools, government buildings, commercial shops, and public transport.

As with all of my assignments, I’m always looking for new ways to tell visual stories. In one school for children with disabilities in Harare, I attached a camera to the front of two of the children’s wheelchairs to afford a more intimate look at their lives. My equipment miraculously survived all the crashes. Here's Innocent Chikomo zipping along a hallway in the school.

I confess: making images of people living life to its fullest is probably more fun than I’m supposed to have. But if such images can help break people out of the boxes where we usually assign them, all the better. During a May assignment in the highlands of Guatemala, I spent several days documenting the lives of rural Maya women. Many of those pictures look like the iconic images you’d expect: women weaving beautiful textiles and so on. For me, some of the best images of the trip came from a basketball game where Maya women in one village engaged in a very vigorous game with lots of laughing and rather ruthless competition. Such images help break many of the stereotypes we might have about indigenous women. That’s a good thing, because stereotypes, whether about indigenous folks, or people living with disabilities, or whoever, can really distort our perspective on the world, and thus the decisions we make about activities like mission.


Before going to Guatemala, I was in South Sudan for a month documenting the political and humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the fighting that broke out in December. I traveled around the country, documenting the lives of displaced people eating tree leaves to survive or hiding in crowded camps, afraid of the ethnic violence outside. The experience left me discouraged. This was my sixth trip to South Sudan, and much of the hope that many of us felt with the country’s independence in 2011 has been replaced with a sober realism that corruption and greed, at times fostered by outside economic interests, can destabilize even the most hopeful political experiments. Yet at the same time I was once again impressed and encouraged by the churches’ commitment to continue to accompany the country, especially the most poor and vulnerable of its people, as it passes through difficult days. The church is deeply involved not only in responding to dramatic humanitarian needs, but also in building reconciliation and working for justice in a complicated and difficult political landscape.

Bewen Yuot, a Dinka woman who was displaced by fighting near her home in Bentieu, South Sudan, today lives with relatives in Ajuong Thok, on the edge of a camp filled with thousands of refugees from Sudan's Nuba Mountains.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be teaching a course on mission at the Western Jurisdiction Course of Study in Claremont, then heading to Australia to cover the presence of faith communities at the International AIDS Conference. In August I’ll travel to Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia to look at a variety of church-sponsored work, then in September I’ll return to Haiti for a short visit. All this traveling is possible because of the support you provide for me as a missionary, as well as your support of humanitarian work through groups like Church World Service and United Methodist Women. I appreciate your support and prayers, and pray for your deep engagement in mission in your local community. This is a wonderful adventure for all of us. Thanks for making it all possible!

                                                                                      Paul

Maya women in Guatemala
Check out a video by Paul

My annual conference asked me for a short video report on my ministry, so I prepared a two minute look at what I do. It was shown during the annual conference session in June, and you can watch it online. You can also see a similar short video report from my wife, Lyda Pierce, who is a missionary currently assigned to the National Hispanic Plan.
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Singer Lah Tere performs during a worship service at the 2014 United Methodist Women's Assembly.

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