Visit to Bañado

On Saturday I took up the invitation offered me many, many months ago to spend a day in Bañado, home to the smaller and poorer sister congregation of the Lambaré church and perhaps the poorest neighborhood in Asunción. The pseudo-municipality of about 52,000 inhabitants stretches along the uneven coast of the Rio Paraguayo outside all the comfortable edges of mainstream society. Although so many people call Bañado home, it is formally unrecognized by the government and municipal maps (although they also receive formally unrecognized government water and electricity free of charge). The land here, frequently flooded by rains and soggy through and through, is free and up for the grabs. 70 percent of its inhabitants work as trash collectors, rummishing through wealthier neighborhoods searching for anything that can be recycled for money: plastic bags, pop bottles, newspapers, metal scraps. A mere glance at the neighborhood betrays the profession. Trash carts take the place of family automobiles in front of homes while piles of recyclables take the place of swingsets and sandboxes out back.

I was invited by Alberto, a young man my age, Bañado native, and extraordinary servant of Christ with the Apostolic Christian Church in the neighborhood. Although gifted with so many spiritual and intellectual talents, Alberto has been without steady work for nearly a year now. He started university a while back, but left to pursue a work opportunity and lost out on all his credits. Recognized as an honest and trustworthy leader among neighborhood youth, he helped found and organize several community programs with a former American Peace Corp member. Now that she has left and abandoned the work, however, Alberto remains fully invested in the work of the Bañado church.

The congregation is very poor, and most everything they have has been donated by North American brothers and sisters in Christ. The Canadian AC churches sent work teams and money to build the church building, and my family’s own Vesper Lake Bible Fellowship recently donated the fans, lights, and curtains that the building still lacked several years after its construction.

Although the community is very poor, however, it is a community that is committed to and dependent on living a life of faith. Several members meet every evening of the week to spend time in prayer, and several members rely on this prayer for their basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Somehow and with much sharing and charity, the people survive. When someone lacks food, a collection is taken up and God provides. When someone lacks a place to stay, someone opens up their house and God provides. Theirs is a life completely dependent on trust in divine providence.

The congregation also ministers to the neighborhood, sending out groups every Sunday to meet, greet, and pray with new families in the area. There is a weekly Sunday school along with a women’s ministry, and a youth group that often plays sports together on Saturday. Church life isn’t always rosy, but each one I spoke to had a great love for the Lord and a deep commitment to service and evangelism. In Bañado, there are only three evangelical churches and a couple more Catholic churches. The spiritual need, like the economic need, is great.

For all the poverty among the people of Bañado, however, there are signs of hope in community organization and international aid efforts. Alberto showed me a cooperative of women bakers, most deserted by their husbands, who have banded together for the work and profit of making bread. We also passed by the Catholic Church, where a donation from the government of Spain has permitted the building of a vibrant community center where reading and writing classes and public health campaigns are offered free of charge. There was also a community grocery store where the church offers food at bargain prices, a neighborhood pharmacy where the poor can buy medicine at discounted rates, and a library where the luxuries of books and internet are offered to those who would never have the access to knowledge elsewhere. There was even a small radio station, giving public service announcements and keeping the community informed of important news and events. I also got to meet a Catholic missionary from Chicago, an older gentleman with big spectacles and an even bigger heart, fighting drug addiction with the hope of the Gospel. He is a dear friend of Alberto’s, whose oldest sister is a drug addict and who often receives much help by way of the Catholic lay minister.

It was an amazing privilege to see the work of development going on in Bañado, first in the church and then in the community. Often times I wonder if North American aid and volunteer associations actually do their jobs and really accomplish anything at all, but after visiting Bañado I have no doubts. Community development in the poorest places is working. The American Peace Corp is good and effective, as are the donations of churches, civic groups, and governments. A most practical example of this was a school where boxes of school supplies, bought by North America families for those in poorer places, are distributed through an organization called Kids for Kids.

Overall, the day was a refreshing visit to a poor place where the work of God often partners with the development of man in bettering the lives of so many poor. I got to see so many organizations at work, so many projects put to good use, and churches using spiritual and economic resources for the good of their fellow man and the greater glory of their transcendent God. Although Bañado is a place of extreme poverty, it is also a place of extreme grace where the work of spiritual and economic redemption is plainly in sight.