Big Juan and Little Juan

On my second trip to Iquitos in 2003, I met an 18 year old kid named Juan. So handsome and charismatic, with a smile that would light up the Boulevard on the darkest of nights, and the ability to speak relatively fluent English, he easily charmed many gringos visiting Iquitos - that is until he stole from them (money, shoes, shirts, caps, whatever was within easy reach when they weren't watching), or they saw him falling down drunk (or high, or both, as the case may be). Suddenly he wasn't cute anymore, and he became more of a street thug than a dirt-poor kid down on his luck. Juan is one of 6 children born into extreme poverty to a mother who died of cancer when he was in his early teens, and a father who daily went about the business of drinking himself to death (and unfortunately did just that earlier this year) for as long as Juan can remember. For most of his life he's been roaming the streets, searching for a place to belong, and getting into trouble. He's known all over town and pretty much no one has anything good to say about him - locals and gringos alike - with the exception of those who are just like him. Now, at age 25, he seems even more troubled and more lost than he was when we first came to know each other.

Juan typically spends what little money he may have of his own for drugs and alcohol (eating is low on his list of priorities), so when I am with him it is usually in a restaurant, as it is my habit to feed him. As I sat at Ari's Burger last Friday (a popular open-air restaurant on the Plaza de Armas) watching him savor every bite of his plate of rice mixed with shrimp, chicken, and pork and a side of fried plantains, he said he'd heard I was living in Iquitos now. As you might imagine, Juan isn't known for his honesty; he tells people what they want to hear, very little of which is ever true. I have always been aware of this, but the look on his face was priceless as I recalled, out loud, all the lies I knew for certain he'd told me throughout the years. He was fuming mad at first and about to get up and leave the table when I said, "Today we start over. Whatever happens, whatever you do, no matter how bad it is, even if you think I'm going to be furious (which I probably will), you must tell me the truth." He agreed (do I think for one minute that he's going to suddenly be honest? - not on your life, but we had to start somewhere), and we began a conversation that would lead me into a mighty internal struggle for many days to come, teach me more about sharing than I've ever learned from anyone in my life, and bring me face-to-face with not only his need for a Savior, but even more so, my own.

It was almost like he was relieved when I invoked the honesty policy as he poured out the 'not-so-good' things he'd done since the last time I saw him. (By the way, the last time I had seen him was more than 2 years ago, prior to his tour of duty in the Peruvian Army, when Frank Gonda and I were taking him to a medical clinic to get the gaping hole in his forehead stitched up after one of his drunken brawls, which had also left him without his 4 beautiful, pearly white front teeth, and I was MAD.) When he finished purging, he said he didn't expect me to understand, because I'd probably never done anything really bad in my life. He also said he knew God wasn't interested in him because God doesn't have any use for people who can't change, and, no matter how hard he tried to change, he always seemed to fall back into his old ways. Raw honesty - that's what was on the table; gone were the well-rehearsed responses he'd fed to countless members of U.S. church mission teams, tickling their ears, making some of them believe they'd actually gotten through to him. There's neither space nor reason to recount all the details of our conversation, but I assured him that plenty of skeletons reside in my closet and told him if God required people to successfully change themselves before they could come to Him, then Heaven would be an empty place. He pressed me further asking what God would say if he messed up again that same night, and I told him God would say the same thing to Juan Sangama that He says to Pam McAbee when she messes up every day of her life - He would say that His mercies are new every morning and His grace abounds and He would invite Juan, just as He invites Pam and everyone else in the world, to lay our burdens on Him and let Him be about the business of saving us. He didn't believe me.

Meanwhile, a filthy, shoeless, little boy with quarter sized holes in the chest of his sleeveless t-shirt and rips in his threadbare shorts paused in front of our table (we were sitting at one of the tables closest to the street) to watch Juan eat. Without missing a beat, Juan signaled for the waitress to bring another plate, fork, and glass and, in the midst of this intense conversation, raked a pile of rice onto the plate, added a couple of slices of fried bananas, and poured the rest of his drink into the extra cup. He held up his hand to me indicating a pause in our discussion, invited the little boy, a total stranger, (also named Juan as we later found out) to sit down, put the food in front of him, and told him to eat. Little Juan told us that he is 7 years old and lives on the corner of Raymondi and Nauta streets (which means that he sleeps on the street underneath a cardboard box) and that his mom won't let him live at her house in Belen (the section of town where the poorest of the poor live) because she has too many other kids and he is old enough to take care of himself - he hasn't seen her in months and she never comes looking for him. Little Juan ate until he was full, then stood up, looked me in the eyes and said "Gracias," smiled, and walked away. Before his meal was over, Big Juan would invite yet another stranger to join us and would share his food a second time. Never have I ever been so unselfish.

Three hours later, Juan insisted on walking the 7 blocks with me to El Jardin. The last thing he wanted to know for that day was if we could get together regularly to talk now that I called the jungle my home. The answer, of course, was yes. We didn't bother to make any plans; though Iquitos is a city of nearly half a million people, it is a small, isolated place, and people aren't hard to find. All I have to do is walk up to the Plaza or Boulevard, ask anyone if they have seen him, then come back home. Later that day or the next, whenever I venture out again, he will be waiting for me. We said our 'see-you-laters,' and as the heavy iron gate slammed shut between us, I felt like I was carrying the equivalent of its weight into the house with me.

Inside, I sat on my couch for another 3 hours - just sat - pondering - things like why a 7 year old is considered old enough to fend for himself, why a 25 year old grows a little more hopeless every day, how anyone can really help in a substantial way in the face of such huge generational and cultural problems, why I am here and ultimately what good I can do, where God is in all of this, where the church is in all of this - then the tears began. I told a friend later that what I'd seen and experienced was nothing new - it is the reality of daily life here - I see it every time I leave the house. But on Friday, it was like I was seeing it all again for the very first time. In The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne says, "When we look through the eyes of Jesus, we see new things in people. In the murderers, we see our own hatred. In the addicts, we see our own addictions. In the saints, we catch a glimpse of our own holiness. We can see our own brokenness, our own violence, our own ability to destroy, and we can see our own sacredness, our own capacity to love and forgive. When we realize that we are both wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way" (264). Maybe that's what happened. Maybe in Juan I saw everything that is good and bad about me all at the same time. Maybe for the first time I quit silently, subconsciously judging him (in the same way that others did openly, making mine a more grievous offense). Maybe I realized "No one is beyond redemption" (253). And maybe, just maybe, for one brief moment, I had the ability to love as God loves.