Rocky Cape Christian Community

Ramón Chaparro, his wife Rosalía Chavez, daughter Rita and grandsons Jesús Manuel and Miguel Ángel, La Esperanza village, Chihuahua, Mexico, in the mid-1980s.

 

 

 

Bouncing five and a half hours south along a dirt trail into the Sierra Madre, far down from Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua, Arthur Plett and I felt good and ready to sit in a mud-brick house, drink sweet coffee and help ourselves to piping hot taquitos in La Ezperanza village, in the fall of 1982. We had come to look up a contact who had written to us after listening to a Bible broadcast (done by area Mennonites) on his little battery-powered radio.  

 

We found him, and more.

 

Not knowing for sure where La Esperanza lay, Arthur and I had taken a circuitous route through deep canyons, along trails where no motorised vehicles ever came, nearly tipping us into the rushing torrent below, rickety gates so narrow we had to fold in our mirrors to squeeze through. Finally, driving into the village a big excitement greeted us -- all the children hurrying from everywhere to look, yet trying to conceal themselves as best they could. Women rushing inside. Curious stares of mixed fear and amazement. But the family of the boy who had written the letter received us with the best of Mexican courtesy and great joy.  

 

 

 

La Esperanza village in the 1980s, Ramón Chaparro's house on the right. 

 

Houses had dirt roofs and floors. All water came from the river far below, where people took their baths, the men and women by turns on Saturday evening. Tin cans with a wick provided lighting at night. Noboday had an outhouse, the chaparral (brush land) up from the village serving that purpose. Several hours' travel from the nearest telephone or electricity (not to mention TV), children grew up with full, active lives at home, helping one another farm on stoney fields, herding cattle, or gathering Palmito to make rope.

 

Our visit to La Esperanza led to many more, and we began holding meetings in the village, rows of eager children (after we won their shy confidence), sitting on the dirt-floored patio of the Palomino home, learning about the Bible, while more and more parents and young people hungrily took in the Word. For many generations the priest had only come to La Esperanza once a year, more or less, to baptise babies, bless the water pots and do whatever they paid him for. But Jesus' Gospel remained almost totally unknown. . . .

 

I say almost. Two ladies, having grown up in another village, far to the west, had indeed heard of it. And right from the start we got to know Ramón Chaparro.

 

Ramón asked us to his house and said he wanted to believe in Christ.

 

Do you know what that means?

 

"I want to be a Christian. I want to be part of your church. I don't know anything," he told us, "but I know who you are and I want to believe like you do."

 

At first we felt puzzled, not sure if either he or we understood what he was saying. It was just too sudden, and not at all like what one would expect in an isolated mountain village. Ramón was an old man with only one hand, work-worn and wrinkled. Was he perhaps also a bit confused?

 

Only after we heard Ramón's story did all the pieces come together and we stood in awe, once again, at how far God's ways stand higher than ours.  

 

 

In a deep, deep canyon (see the bridge at the bottom, crossing the river -- this picture was taken from the same road) yet another fifteen hours travel southwest of La Esperanza, Ramón Chaparro grew up in Cerro Colorado village. Snow covers the tops of these mountains in the winter time, while oranges and bananas flourish along the river in the canyon below.  

 

At an early age, Ramón's father -- a silver miner -- died. So, to support his widowed mother and siblings, he began to work as a child in the mines. Taking his place with the men, he early learned the men's ways. They talked roughly, fought, and stole where they could. They drank much, played naipe (gambled), and indulged in never-ending exploits with the women and girls.

 

On rowdy fiestas -- days dedicated to the patron saints of mountain villages -- young miners challenged one another with a particularly dangerous game. Holding a gelignite (dynamite) cap between their fingers, they lit a fuse and watched to see who dared hold it the longest. Generous draughts of tesgüino (home brewed corn liquor) made them reckless and when Ramón was in his early teens, it turned one fiesta into a bloody disaster.

 

Ramón, holding the burning fuse, turned to throw it from him. But right then a young girl came from that direction, around the corner of a building. In his tesgüino-befuddled state, he could not think quickly enough what to do and everything blew up in his hands, nearly killing him.    

 

Ramón's mother took him (already in his teens) and cared for him with everything she had, although they were nearly without an income -- the other children still too small to earn much. Kind villagers also helped the family, and took Ramón to see a doctor in Batopilas, the centre of the mining industry in the canyon. When the doctor found his mother had no money to pay him, he decided not to bother with one hand and chopped it off above the wrist. On the other hand he chopped his fingers off straight, leaving only the little one and his thumb intact.

 

 

Ramón Chaparro (on the right) with me on a street in Batopilas in the 1980s. By that time the town had a vehicle road -- the dirt trail, pictured above, snaking down into the canyon. But it still did not have electricity. Women did their washing alongside the river and the light of smoking oil lamps (tin cans with wicks) flickered on massive ceiling beams and mud-plastered walls of colonial houses while children played on cobble-stoned streets and the roar of the Río Fuerte, rushing down the canyon, filled the tropical night.  

 

For several years Ramón suffered intensely from his poorly-cared for wounds. His mother, having moved the family to Batopilas, did what she could, besides taking in laundry to support themselves. But over-worked and unwell herself, she turned sick and died.

 

Ramón, in his mid-teens, was devastated. Town officials took the little children and gave them new homes, but he would not leave his mother's grave. The night after the burial they begged him to come to the house and eat but he flung himself down on the newly covered mound, crying his heart out and refused to come. (His cousin, Micaela Yañez, still living in Batopilas twenty years ago, told us the story.) For the better part of a week he stayed at the grave, day and night. Concerned friends forced him to eat and finally dragged him away. But not knowing what to do with him, they had a merchant take him up to Estación Creel on a mule pack-train (several day's journey) from where they put him onto a train for Chihuahua. At least there, in the city, they thought, he could beg on the streets and survive.

 

 

For over four hundred years Batopilas's only access from the rest of Mexico was on foot, with cargo transported by burros down zig-zag trails into the canyon -- still the only way to get to hundreds of villages in the Sierra Madre, as shown by this picture taken in front of a hotel at Batopilas in the 1980s.  

 

 

 

Dragged to Chihuahua against his will, Ramon had no other desire but to die as quickly as possible. The life of a street begger,  nothing but a pawn in the hands of corrupt patrónes (Mexicans that manage scores of crippled and deformed people in organised beggar's rings) repulsed him. But the Lord reached down from heaven and had mercy on him.

 

Because he was still young and his wounds had never gotten properly fixed, kind people noticed him on the street and put him into a hospital. 

 

Who were they? Only God knows.

 

All Ramón remembered is that young people came to him, cared for him, and sang beautiful songs, as if he were in heaven itself. They went about in the hospital, like angels, talking to the sick and wounded, praying with them, telling them about Jesus. And as soon as he laid eyes on us, in La Esperanza village forty years later, Ramón knew it was people like us. "You sing their songs," he told us with conviction. "Your girls are just like they were, with their dresses and their head-coverings. It was you! "

 

Was it a group of Holdeman Mennonites perhaps?

 

This side of eternity we may never know. And it makes little difference. What we do know is that for forty years, Ramón Chaparro carried the fragrance of that act of mercy with him and it transformed his life. Even though he never met those people again, he left the hospital with new courage and the will to live.

 

With his wounds fixed up (no more bare bones sticking out and festering) Ramón learned how to work again, and did so with gusto. Using a dee-handled shovel, his stump arm shoved through the hole and grasping the shaft with his remaining thumb and little finger, he returned to work in the mines. Far to the south-west of Chihuahua, in the La Esperanza area (El Japón) he found work with one of the Shepherd sons, Canness, who had returned after the revolution to set up a mining company again.

 

There he married Rosalía Chavez and had a family. And there, forty years later, he met us, declared his faith in Christ, and got baptised. Eagerly, joyfully, just so thankful to God he lived to see the day.

 

 

Doña Rosalía, Ramón's wife, dipping water from the noria (sand-point well beside the river) with a draw sweep, at La Esperanza. The children are Kenton and Angela Plett -- mid-1980s.

 

When Don Ramón gave his life to the Lord he wanted to know all about it. Ever since his youth he had used tobacco, heavily. We told him the Lord Jesus would free him from that, if he asked him to. So he did, and the Lord took away his urge, on the spot. Even though he had gone through many smokes a day, from that moment onward he never took another one, and the very smell of tobacco became nauseous to him.

 

Of all the precious memories I have of Don Ramón, two stand out in particular. The day we broke bread together for the first time and washed one another's feet, being one of them.

 

The little meeting room at La Esperanza, with crude wooden benches and a dirt floor, added reality to washing one another's bare feet. The villagers had no proper dish for the occasion so they used one of the ladies' largest bowls (right after the meeting it re-appeared on the table with a salad in it). But what I remember is the great love, the carefulness and the tears running down Don Ramón's wrinkled face, as he took the opportunity to wash our feet, followed by our pleasure in doing the same for him, and welcoming him into the family of Christ.

 

Later some of my friends (Dave Hertzler and Dale Miller, Evelyn and Grace Mast) and I set out for Batopilas with Don Ramón, to visit his home area and his mother's grave for the first time since the 1940s. On our first attempt our vehicle broke down, many hours after we left the pavement, electricity and telephones behind us, but still about six hours from Batopilas. That trip would be a story of its own.

 

On our second attempt, with another crew, we managed to get Don Ramon to Batopilas and Cerro Colorado itself, travelling the last three hours by mule on a trail so narrow our feet (in the stirrups) hung out over the rocks and the river, thirty or more metres below.  

 

The reunions were incredible and emotional. Many of his childhood friends and relatives had no idea he was still alive. From little houses of mud bricks and thatch and sticks they came running. We found a sister and a brother still living. They hugged and cried and could not get done talking, Don Ramón telling them of all that happened, how he found the Lord and his people and the way to eternal life.

 

We left Mexico in 1987 and I never saw Don Ramón again (I heard that he died in the Lord several years later). But I look forward to meeting him again, in new heavens and a new earth, fully restored, with his right hand and all his fingers back on.

 

Praise God that his mercy, like the apostle said, triumphs over judgement (James 2:13)!

 

Peter

 

Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au