Dear friends,<\/p>\n
Juan Lopez is 11 years old and totally blind. Yet he rides his bike to school every day by having his 9-year old sister Yarelly perch on the back of the bike and signal him which way to steer. She does that by pinching his shoulder. If she pinches his right shoulder, he goes right. The harder the pinch, the sharper the turn. And so on. Their route to school includes a section of a well traveled highway, but that doesn\u2019t bother Juan. It\u2019s normal for him.<\/p>\n
Juan lives in Zipolite, a small town on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I met him in December, when I traveled there to do a story for\u00a0response<\/em>, the magazine of United Methodist Women, on how people in another land were dealing with disabilities. For the same issue, I traveled to Missouri in January to look at how a United Methodist community center deals with disability issues.<\/p>\n For me, Juan personalizes what I appreciate about mission when it\u2019s done right. God\u2019s mission isn\u2019t about what we do. It\u2019s about what others do to discover the fullness of life promised them in the Gospels. As with\u00a0Juan and Yarelly, mission often takes place when the poor act in solidarity with each other. Our role is encouraging and facilitating that. Such a practice\u00a0of mission doesn\u2019t create dependency, but\u00a0rather builds sustainability and independence.<\/p>\n I just returned from two weeks in the Philippines, where, among other activities, I worked\u00a0on a story about people in the Manila North Cemetery, where thousands of poor families dwell in and between the tombs and mausoleums of the city’s wealthy. They are often discriminated against, and many of their children don’t go to school because they’re too hungry to study and they’re often called \u201cvampires\u201d by their classmates. Thanks to support from United Methodist Women, a Philippine NGO provides classroom education\u2013and meals\u2013to kids from the cemetery at a nearby United Methodist Church. I\u00a0wanted to document life in the cemetery, but since city officials don’t think it projects a proper image of the country, photographers are banned. So cemetery residents had to smuggle me in over the back wall, using small stairways inside people’s homes.<\/p>\n