Agros Blog

“It’s because of you! All of you!” Tomasa exclaims, peering into our video camera as if one born to beam before a waiting audience.

Moments earlier she’d described Agros, and partners like you who help us, as “a very fine meal, inviting us to the feast of our lives.”  How can it be that this woman, who years before had been shot and left to bleed while witnessing her two daughter’s deaths at the hands of her would-be killers during the civil war in Guatemala, could now beam with a confident bearing defying so many brutal moments?

The answer, I think, is found in the following account from Jacob Johnson, a dear friend of mine and to many of you, now studying in Argentina on a Rotary Fellowship after nearly two years living among Guatemala’s Ixil (pronounced ‘eesheel’) Indians, listening and recording their stories, including Tomasa’s:

“Hope was one of the few things left to Tomasa following the civil war that ravaged her people in the 1980s.  As bullets tore into her arm one terrible day in 1982, she witnessed the cold-blooded murder of two of her daughters while a third, struggling to escape, was kidnapped.  Surviving her wounds, Tomasa and her family also lost all their few physical possessions that brutal day.  Fleeing in grief she found her husband and remaining children, and spent the next seven years hiding out in the mountains.

Once they were finally resettled in their village, life remained an uphill struggle for survival as they tried to rebuild their lives while living under a nylon tarp.  They scraped by, as Tomasa’s war wounds kept her from working the fields as she always had since the time she was a little girl.

The family fought on in the hope that their circumstances would somehow improve, fighting off rounds of illness while barely eking out enough to eat.  Despite the hardships, Tomasa turned her sorrow into a spirit of gratitude.

Overflowing gratitude, a hallmark of her daily life which she now offers to Agros and those who support this ministry, since the day she first heard of their work among her people.  Through Agros’ work, all in her village of Batzchocolá now live more comfortably with a view to the future that overflows.

She tells me as we lean over her drying coffee harvest  “Agros is an excellent thing for us.  Excellent!  It is like looking at something delicious that you’re about to eat, something pleasant, bringing happiness with each bite.  It is something great.  You all have done wonders!”

Witnessing the contrast between her present life and the past horrors she’d just shared with me; a contrast made startling by a partnership of relentless hope; was a precious moment of clarity: this gratitude and generosity of grace, regardless of circumstance, is what it means to have life in abundance.”

To hear Tomasa’s story watch the short Agros video, “Restoring Lives”.

As we come into this New Year, we all, staff and villagers alike, know that without you, our faithful donors, the waiting “Tomasas” of the world will not be served, nor be able to tell us as she has of the great feast of life, the banquet table daily serving the main course of Hope, Gratitude and consequent Generosity. May your table overflow with extra portions of gratitude as you look back on 2009, and look forward towards 2010, knowing you’ve made a difference among thousands of the rural poor in Central America & Mexico…because, “Its because of you! All of you!”