Colombia!
(Field report of the Liahona Children’s Foundation’s work, July 14-25, 2014)

Tuesday, July 15. Left LA for Bogota via Aero-Mexico with my grandson, Emmett Rees.

Wednesday, July 16. We caught an early afternoon flight to Popayan where we were met by Sean McClellan, a BYU student volunteer who has been working for Foundation this summer in South America (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala). Sean is a very resourceful young man and an excellent translator and coordinator. Unfortunately, because our flight from Bogota was delayed flight, we missed the screening which had been attended by the wife of the governor of Popayan province and some nurses from the health center. 134 children were screened of whom 77 qualified as malnourished. Lyn and Diana, two of our coordinators from Peru, conducted screenings in Ipiales the day before and found 11 out of 27 children malnourished.

Thursday, July 17. Met Luz Londoňo, the Foundation’s coordinator from Ecuador, and then drove four hours to Palmira where we screened 52 kids, a number of whom qualified for the program. One little girl, Samantha, especially alarmed me as soon as I saw her. Not only was she severely under weight and height, but it was clear that she had suffered more serious effects of malnutrition. When we interviewed her mother, we were told that when she was pregnant with her daughter, she had had severe food insecurity herself, sometimes going days without eating. While the mother has recovered, the child clearly has not. Unlike other children, during the screening she showed no emotion. It was a graphic demonstration of the cost of not addressing malnutrition as early as possible. To see it face-to-face is sobering. We gave the bishop some money to provide immediate help for this little girl.

Samantha

Friday, July 18. Breakfast and a forty minute van ride to a stake outside of Cali. Wonderful local leaders and missionaries who joined in helping us with the screenings. Not many children showed up for the screening but some still qualified for the program.

Emmett, Bob and Rowens weighing and measuring children

Obviously, parents are concerned about the health of their children. It is sometimes stressful for them to discover that their child is malnourished, although the converse is also true: some mothers seem disappointed to discover that their child doesn’t qualify for the program, probably because they are aware of the scarcity of food in the home. During one screening a mother wept when her child did not qualify since she felt the child was not well. When we realized the child had a wet diaper, we re-weighed her and discovered that she was indeed malnourished.

Mother receiving news that her child is malnourished.

Saturday, July 19. Took an early bus to Medellin. The bus was comfortable and air conditioned which made the trip pleasant. Traveling across the country was like watching nine hours of a moving National Graphic special–fascinating sights of local farms, rivers, enormous mountains, and lots of local color. We had one half hour rest top for lunch/dinner in the late afternoon and arrived in Medellin around 9:00 p.m.

 Medellin

After arriving in Medellin, we took taxis to Luz’s mother’s home which is located in a neighborhood high on one of the mountainsides that frame the basin in which Medellin sits. Even higher up displaced people build shacks and shanties, apparently, without any permits.

Sunday, July 20. Luz, Diana and Lyn came to take us to church. After Church we met the newly- selected coordinator for this particular stake, Gumercinda Tresplacios, a lovely pediatric nurse who teaches at the university. She had just gotten back in the middle of the night from a
twelve-hour bus ride from the temple in Bogota and was very tired but absolutely bright and energetic. (We are fortunate to find amazingly capable women to be our coordinators).

After church, we took the Metro to the gondola station and then rode the gondola up to the neighborhood where Luz’s family lives. When we walked onto the street from the gondola station, we met an enormously loud procession of large trucks, buses, minibuses, taxis, and cars festooned with ribbons and banners and honking their horns. It was the annual Virgin of the Cars festival.. We encountered them several other times throughout the day. Apparently, this and other festivities are part of Colombia’s Independence Day celebration.

Virgin of the Cars Festival

After walking back to Luz’s neighborhood, we had a big lunch at her aunt’s home. After lunch, we went to the stake center to conduct another screening. This one was set up at the last minute so we didn’t have many children to evaluate. It was also clear that this was a middle-to- upper-middle class stake. None of the seven children we screened was malnourished. At the screening we met a doctor, Edwardo Pastoranas, a former stake president and really wonderful man who told us of a region northwest of Medellin where there is a very high level of malnutrition. It is in a “red zone” meaning it is dangerous. The Mormon population there consists of two small branches of all black members (descendants of slaves brought over centuries earlier). They have no chapels and so meet in “house churches.” We don’t have time to go there ourselves but will arrange for Dr. Pastoranas and his daughter (another of our coordinators) to go later. Apparently, it is only safe to reach by plane.

Dr. Pastoranas, has been working at the behest of the mission president to set up a malnutrition program in this region and so he was very interested in our work and hopeful that we could find some way of working together. We spent well over an hour with him trying to understand the resources for addressing malnutrition in Colombia. He said the government has a program and in fact manufactures a product to address malnutrition, but he said it was plagued by problems including corruption (some of those who are charged with distributing the supplement for free end up charging for it) and waste (apparently much of the material does not get to the children in need and sits unused and has to be destroyed—or sold past its expiration date). Nevertheless, without the Colombian program, as inefficient as it apparently is, many children would be far worse off than they are.

Violence in Colombia. In the past, Colombia was notorious due to the powerful drug cartels who operated here. It is much less so these days, thanks to an investment of trillions of dollars by both the Colombian and U.S. governments to counter the cartels. Many families have been effected by the violence from gangs and a violent culture. Luz has been robbed a couple of times at knifepoint and one of our coordinators was repeatedly stabbed in a robbery. Luz lost two brothers to violence. One was a member of a drug gang who was shot and killed by the police and another who was abducted, tortured and murdered in a satanic-like killing. I asked Luz’s mother how she dealt with such enormous losses. She said, “When my older son was killed, I was in despair and it was terrible losing my younger son, but when I joined the Church, I understood for the first time that I would see my sons again in the next life, and that has given me great hope and joy.”

Monday, July 21. Our hotel is just a couple of blocks from the Botero Museum, an impressive museum of modern art that features sculpture and paintings of Colombia’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero. The plaza in front of the museum is full of his large sculptures which, like his paintings, portray people and animals in his characteristic voluminous style.

The museum has an amazingly creative interactive children museum with lots of things to engage children’s imaginations, as the following illustrates:

The museum also has some ancient Colombian and Aztec art, as can be seen from the following:

Who knew that these ancient American artisans imagined Goofy before Disney and Bart Simpson before Matt Groennig!

Tuesday, July 22. Luz, her mother, and cousin took us on a long gondola ride to the top of a mountain to visit see a large national park.

Gondola to Parc Arvi from Medellin

Emmett at Parc Arvi

“The poor you have always with you.”

“Are we not all beggars? asks King Benjamin. One of the most difficult things here is encountering people who either beg or who are so destitute-looking that one has an instinctive response to help. Right after arriving in Medellin, we passed a woman, obviously an indigenous Indian , sitting on the sidewalk with a baby in her arms. Both mother and child were dirty and obviously very poor. I gave her some money and then Luz informed me that most such people are tied to gangs who use them to make money (apparently they have to give part of what they receive to the gangs). She said they often drug the babies so they sleep and are not disruptive. My feeling is that even if they only get part of what people give them, that’s better than nothing, although I know not everyone would agree with my sentiments. Seeing the family below, I asked permission to photograph them before giving them some money.

Many beggars come up to us on the street, or, worse, when we are sitting at an open street food place. Some are so thin they look like refugees from Aushwitz or Buchenwald. As in many countries, thousands sleep under the bridges or any place they can find shelter. How to respond is one of the moral dilemmas one faces, especially in the developing world. Last night as we ate a hearty meal at a sidewalk café, an obviously emaciated youg man asked us for something to eat. We took part of what we were eating and gave it to him. I keep thinking about him, about the blind man in front of the museum from whom we bought some peanuts, and all of the other people who could be, as Mother Teresa would say, “Jesus in disguise.” Somewhere between always responding to such people and never doing so is a balance to be struck. That the line is difficult to draw shouldn’t prevent us from drawing it somewhere. This moral dilemma is at the heart of King Benjamin’s sermon.

Ironically, there is abundant evidence of abundance in Colombia. Colombia (and South and Central America in general), produce a marvelus array of fruits and begetables, some of them exotic and delicious. The discrpancy between the rich and poor, however, means that the poor often are left out of such richess. I was struck by a news report of a tribe in Africa who harvest a product for export that none of them had ever tasted because they couldn’t afford to buy it.

Wednesday, July 23. Luz, Diana and Lyn met us at the hotel and then we went to a market where Colombian arts and crafts are sold. We then went back to the hotel and worked until it was time to go to another screening. The children in this stake were obviously less well off than the one we screened on Sunday. We screened 42 children, a third of whom were malnourished, including three children from Luz’s own extended family. The screening gave us an opportunity
to train the local coordinator (the pediatric nurse) who actually needed nothing more than an introduction to our protocol.

 Liahona Team: Sean, Gymer, Bob, Diana, Lyn, Emmett, and Luz

Thursday, July 24. Emmett and I said goodbye to Colombia, flying from Medellin to Bogota, on to Mexico City and further on to Los Angeles Friday morning. It has been an interesting, productive and enjoyable trip. Working with these sweet children and their parents and leaders is immensely rewarding.

Liahona has NutriTours whereby individuals, couples and families can participate in our work. There are literally hundreds of stakes in the developing world left to screen, stakes in which some children are starving and even dying. It will take enormous effort, time, and resources to bring the Church’s malnourished children to an acceptable level of health—and to prevent the severely malnourished from dying.

The foundation depends on the generous contributions of individuals who share its concern for these vulnerable children. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes just one individual contributing at least $50 to rescued one malnourished child for an entire year, and just $500 to help such a child survive the critical first five years of life.

During the Great Depression, President Heber J. Grant and his counselors, J. Reuben Clark and David O. McKay, established what later became the Welfare Program of the Church. President Clark made it clear that “such a program was the result of a revelation to President Grant and President Grant was emphatic about the Church’s commitment. As Presiding Bishop David Burton reported in a 2011 general conference address: “The commitment of Church leaders to relieve human suffering was as certain as it was irrevocable. President Grant wanted “a system that would . . . reach out and take care of the people no matter what the cost.” He said he would even go so far as to “close the seminaries, shut down missionary work for a period of time, or even close the temples, but they would not let the people go hungry.”

This is the challenge for the institutional Church and for all its members.