A Revisionist's History: Mission Trips on the Altiplano

Over the years a tradition seems to have sprung up among parents of missionaries. These parents often travel to the country or state in which their missionary served when the mission ends. Prior to returning to the United States, they tour the mission with their son or daughter. Once the parents have forked over the Georges to pilgrimage all the way to the field of service, it then becomes the privilege of the missionary to shepherd her wide-eyed parents through the areas in which she served.

Anyway, I’m not really as negative as all that. I believe most parents really do want to see the mission their children knew. Fortunately, most kids are more than willing to accommodate them.


I remember once, during my mission getting off a bus on a high windswept plateau in the Guatemalan Highlands. The setting sun slid slowly off the Western horizon without bothering to color the sky. At 10,000 to 12,000 feet, the wind has a tendency to picar the nose and cheeks—even in Central America. The scene was undeniably beautiful in an incomprehensibly lonely sort of way. I contemplated the thousands of miles that separated me from my home, shivered, and tried to burrow more deeply into my wool army-surplus jacket.

I don’t remember exactly why I was there or where I was going, but I will never forget what happened next. Just at that moment, at the end of the day and at what might have been mistaken for the end of the world, isolated and alone as we were there in the twilight, a 1996 Ford Taurus (a frightening car in and of itself, as far as looks are concerned) approached from the south, slowed, and turned off this isolated stretch of the Panamerican Highway onto the dirt road headed to San Bartolo.


A dozen questions crossed my mind in that instant, where did that car come from? Had someone driven it down from the States? I had NEVER seen a Ford Taurus in Guatemala. To this day, I’m not certain how that Ford got there. I’m not aware of single Ford dealer in the entire country.

The typical Chapín had little use for a full-size sedan of any make. And for good reason, the roads in Guatemala—if they may be termed such—would shred a Taurus in less time than it would take a new missionary to consider contracting dengue rather than spending two years in this raw, third-world country. Simply put, most American vehicles simply weren’t up to the rigors of Guatemalan life.

Anyway, there we stood lamely staring west, as this Taurus pulled up and stopped. One of the windows lowered and we found ourselves staring into faces of two very ordinary, middle-aged North Americans: American Gothic in a Ford Taurus rambling through the Guatemalan hinterland.

A recently-released “sister missionary” jumped out of the back and greeted one of the other missionaries in the group. Evidently, they had served in a different zone together. I gathered that she had convinced her parents to leave what I was guessing was a modest home in Utah and retrace her Guatemalan adventure. Glancing back into the front seat, I wondered how badly they really wanted to experience la pura vida. They seemed a little nervous, but eager enough.

Honestly, I was shocked and more than a little worried (and not just for the car). What they couldn’t have known, what I barely understood myself at the time, was that the hills that stretched off in every direction from our windswept intersection harbored more than its share of skeletons in the none-too-distant past.

They wouldn’t travel too much farther down the road on which we currently stood before they’d enter a wide expanse of rugged, remote hills devoid of pavement, electricity and in many locations, running water. The people of those hills not only didn’t speak English, they didn’t speak Spanish.

This people had been the primary target of government violence, kidnapping, mass murder, and no-doubt much worse during a 20-year civil war that had “ended” only two months previous. In fact, the village in which they planned to overnight had been the stage for some very serious mob violence and lynchings not even a month in the past.

No, these clear-faced Americans knew nothing about that. But then, the hand of God often shelters the good, naïve, and even—on occasion—the reckless alike. I had certainly been the receiving end of that principle.

The concept of the mission trip must have been fairly entrenched by the time I wrapped up my two-year stint in Guatemala because dad sua sponte broached the issue in a letter I received a few months before coming home. At the time, he offered me the choice of a mountain bike or a mission trip. For someone who was ready to leave Guate far behind, this seemed like a great deal. I took the bike and counted myself lucky.