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As we celebrate Mennonite Central Committee’s centennial year, I was curious to learn more about the organization’s presence in Honduras. According to the common narrative, 2020 is MCC’s fortieth anniversary in the country. What conveniently round numbers! I wanted the details, so I dug through the office archives in San Pedro Sula and reached out to people involved in the early years. This is what I learned.
It turns out MCC has been in Honduras since well before 1980. As far back as 1965, MCC stationed Voluntary Service personnel in Tegucigalpa. When Hurricane Fifi hit in 1974, MCC coordinated disaster relief efforts through Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS, then a part of MCC). A young Ovidio Flores had recently moved to the city and, inspired by the Mennonites’ social witness, began attending a small Mennonite house church. Now an elder member of the Central Evangelical Mennonite Church in San Pedro Sula, he recalls working alongside MDS relief workers with other young members of the denomination, the Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church (IEMH, by its initials in Spanish). Together, they cleaned houses buried by the storm in Choloma, about 20 minutes north of San Pedro Sula.
When El Salvador erupted in civil war in late 1979, refugees fleeing the conflict began to settle along the rivers that divide El Salvador and Honduras. Moved by a sense of Christian charity, several IEMH churches close to the border—including the congregations in Mapulaca, Lempira and San Marcos, Ocotepeque—began offering migrants food, clothing and shelter. It was a massive undertaking. As refugees flooded in, the overwhelmed churches began asking for international support. At their invitation, MCC sent remaining hurricane relief supplies from a warehouse in La Ceiba, Atlántida and mobilized several short-term workers to help. A more permanent country program wouldn’t open until several years later, when MCC and the IEMH realized the refugees would be there longer than originally expected.
In the meantime, both the Honduran government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noticed the Mennonite churches’ aid efforts. The government, which shared friendly diplomatic relations with the Salvadoran regime, was critical. It told Mennonite volunteers to stop helping Salvadoran “subversives.” Nevertheless, emboldened by their faith and newfound relationships with Salvadoran refugees, Honduran Mennonites continued providing aid despite the warning.
The UNHCR, on the other hand, was impressed by this relief work and entrusted the IEMH with refugee program funds in certain regions as organizations like World Vision, Caritas and the Evangelical Committee for National Development and Emergencies (CEDEN, by its initials in Spanish) coordinated responses elsewhere. Despite resistance from the refugee residents of the informal riverside settlements, both the government and UNHCR pushed to resettle them to ostensibly more secure refugee camps on land purchased by the UNHCR farther from the border.
One of these locations was La Mesa, a plateau unpopulated except for the tiny community of Mesa Grande, a few miles from San Marcos. César Flores, currently an MCC Area Director for Central America and Haiti, was a volunteer in the refugee relief effort as a member of the San Marcos congregation. He remembers the night in late 1981 when the first group of migrants arrived. “We didn’t have anything ready. Everyone slept outside. The next day tarps arrived, and we began building [the shelters].” Over the coming months, refugees continued to arrive and some of the initial short-term workers stayed on with MCC. Together with the IEMH, they oversaw the construction of more permanent housing, a water system, schools, workshops, latrines and warehouses.
In 1983, realizing a more permanent presence in the country was needed, MCC asked Linda Shelly, an MCC worker with field experience in Latin America and administrative experience in Akron, Pennsylvania, to serve as the country representative for Honduras. A program office was opened in a rented house in San Marcos near the home of Luis Flores, the IEMH refugee response coordinator.
Long-term MCC workers continued to manage the logistics of camp construction and maintenance. Many refugees were agriculturalists and grew vegetables to supplement food aid, including MCC canned meat. These gardens allowed parents to pass their agricultural knowledge and skills to their children and to produce much of what they needed. Camp residents also gained vocational skills through UNHCR-funded workshops—largely run by Caritas—that taught mechanics, sewing, shoemaking, blacksmithing, welding and carpentry. Refugees also worked alongside IEMH and MCC workers on camp construction projects. MCC organized the provision of material aid, including comforters that shielded from the chill of the mesa, which was far colder than that of the refugees’ homes in El Salvador. MCC also coordinated groups of visitors to the camps. “The Salvadoran refugees in La Mesa had a very clear commitment and desire to share their story and to be heard,” Shelly recalls. “There was a Catholic Church pastoral team in the camps that really wanted visitors to come. And there were a lot of people interested in visiting the camps and understanding the situation.” During the year of 1985 alone, 222 people visited the camps with an average of one group per week. The pastoral team, which offered spiritual support to residents, relayed refugees’ stories to visitors and coordinated spaces for guests to hear directly from refugees. The trauma of losing family members in El Salvador, the dangers of crossing the river into Honduras and the harrowing truck ride from the border to the mesa underscored refugees’ message to US visitors: “Please advocate for us,” US visitors heard them say. “Tell your government to stop providing military aid to that of El Salvador. Look at the human cost.”
Meanwhile, the Honduran government continued to threaten the IEMH’s work with Salvadoran refugees. Shelly remembers an occasion when she and Luis Flores were asked to meet with a Honduran official. Flores explained that the Mennonites’ work flowed from their beliefs and history, while Shelly described MCC’s relief efforts in other areas of the world to illustrate that the work wasn’t political—Mennonites were helping refugees no matter who was fleeing or who was in power.
Even so, the Honduran army would detain volunteers and question their motives. Once, three Mennonites including Lucas Bonilla, pastor of the Mennonite church in San Marcos, were kidnapped and held by the army in the village of Belén, Lempira. They were tortured and interrogated. The president of the IEMH along with Ovidio Flores, who by then directed the denomination’s service arm, and an MCC worker went to the village to vouch for them. Flores recalls the soldiers’ questions about what the church was doing and why. “Look at the other churches,” the soldiers said. “They stay in their buildings and dedicate themselves to singing and reading the Bible.” The Mennonite leaders had 20 minutes to defend the three detainees. After meeting, the church president had to submit proof of the denomination’s ideological stance so that Bonilla and the others would finally be released.
Honduran Mennonite workers and the churches involved in refugee work faced not only threats from the government and military, but also resentment from other Mennonite congregations farther from the border who didn’t understand why the denomination was responding to refugees. Luke Schrock-Hurst, an MCC service worker in the camps, recalls the murmurs in the national church at the time about the lack of aid for struggling Honduran Mennonites. The churches working with refugees took time to study the Bible to see if their commitment to the aid work was justified. Their conclusion was a resounding, “Yes, and.”
In the mid-1980s, Ovidio Flores and several others made a proposal at the national assembly. Why not create an organization that could help congregations reach out and serve their own communities as well as Salvadoran refugees? The connections with donors and other nonprofits that Flores had from his time in leadership of CEDEN could help the new organization get off the ground. The idea took off. The resulting Social Action Commission of the IEMH (CAS, by its initials in Spanish) began to coordinate the denomination’s service efforts. The commission increased the church’s capacity to effect change—and not only for refugees. Envy of the camps’ sewing machines and bolts of cloth from the UNHCR dissipated as the CAS began offering sewing classes in Honduran communities, too. Starting in border pueblos and expanding eastward, CAS supported Honduran churches’ efforts to extend vocational trainings, aid and education to their local communities—very much like what the refugees received in the camps.
Representatives of MCC and the IEMH traveled to Anabaptist congregations across Honduras to share about the refugee work, the work of CAS and their theological motivations. They hoped to offer a compelling and inclusive Christian counternarrative to the anti-refugee positions common in the media.
Repatriation was always the goal of many of the migrants. Even before the Salvadoran Civil War ended in 1992, refugees had begun returning to their homes. By 1986, individual Salvadorans choosing to return to their homeland outnumbered new refugees entering the camps. Mass repatriation occurred later in the decade and in the early 1990s. Many crossed the border on roads the IEMH and MCC had helped build with UNHCR funds.
Even after the camps emptied, the Honduran Mennonites’ dedication to caring for their communities remained. “In Honduras,” says Shelly, “the experience with the Salvadoran refugees was huge in terms of the church developing that commitment to walk with people in justice and peace.” In the following years, the IEMH continued to build on this legacy as CAS became a separate nonprofit organization. The Mennonite Social Action Commission (CASM, by its initials in Spanish) continued to grow into a nationally-recognized relief and development organization with whom MCC continues to partner to provide vocational training and other assistance to migrants.
MCC has been present in Honduras for at least 55 years. But in 1980—now 40 years ago—both Salvadoran refugees and MCC workers began arriving in the western departments of Intibucá, Lempira and Ocotepeque, motivating and motivated by the social action of Honduran Mennonite churches. MCC’s accompaniment in Honduras has taken many forms over the past half century. Whatever the next century holds, MCC is grateful to walk with the Honduran people and the Mennonite church to offer relief, development and peace in the name of Christ.
Lily Mast is currently serving as Digital Communications Specialist with the MCC Honduras office.