Lorenzo Rosebaugh OMI
RIP 1935–2009

I returned yesterday from a week in Guatemala with a SOA Watch delegation. This was my second visit to Guatemala. The first visit was with Global Awareness Through Experience (GATE) in 2006. That visit was during Holy Week and was a true cultural experience meeting with Mayan people in the country. I recorded that visit in a pictorial essay called Buried in Guatemala. That title came from our experience of Good Friday, our last day, and how the people of Guatemala found such great joy in the suffering and death of Jesus. Good Friday was the biggest holiday of the year. During this visit I got to meet with my old friend, Lorenzo Rosebaugh from the Milwaukee 14 days. He was working with poor, dying and ill in Guatemala City.

This trip was to show solidarity with the Mayan people who have suffered and been suppressed in their struggle for freedom from the greed of mining industry, military and politicians. They have suffered at the hands of military trained at the School of Americas at Fort Benning Ga. We met with people imprisoned and tortured in the struggle for rights of the people. This time I saw my friend Lorenzo’s picture on a poster outside of a meeting room with the Bishop of a province. He had been killed, martyred as they say, in 2009 in Guatemala.

On our last day a poem was read to us from Julia Esquival, a Guatemalan woman who had been in exile and someone we met at our first visit. The poem is called “They Have Threatened us with Resurrection” and it makes a good title for my reflections on this journey. The reflections and pictures will come soon but for now here is the full poem below.

They Have Threatened us with Resurrection:
by Julia Esquivel

There is something here within us
which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest,
which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside,
it is the silent, warm weeping
of Indian woman without their husbands,
it is the sad gaze of the children
fixed there beyond memory,
in the very pupil of our eyes
which during sleep, though closed, keep watch
with each contraction of the heart
in every awakening…
What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with resurrection!
Because at each nightfall,
though exhausted from the endless inventory
of killings since 1954,
yet we continue to love life,
and do not accept their death!
…Becasue in their marathon of Hope,
there are always others to relieve us
in bearing the courage necessary
to arrive at the goal which lies beyond death…
Accompany us then on this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
You will then know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with resurrection!
To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep
to live while dying
and to already know oneself resurrected!

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