By Nathan Prewett
For the Tribune
SPRINGVILLE — “They’re wonderful and generous people,” said Springville First Baptist Church member Joe Whitten of a village in Ecuador in which the church has made 12 mission trips to since 2013. Specifically the location is in Gonzol, Ecuador, home to mountainous ranges that go thousands of feet in elevation.
“We’ve gone back to the same church group each time in Gonzol, Ecuador,” Whitten said. “Between 9,000 and 10,000 in the Andes, the little village. And when we first started going we were meeting in a little home church. And now they have a new building.
“One of the church builders inherited a lot in the village and donated to a church group and built what they call a community building because they can’t call it a church because they would have to have a state-approved minister.”
Whitten said that the mission trip aims to assisting people in Gonzol, as well as ministry and religious education for children in the village school as they had Bible study during some of their stays there. Pastors at Springville FBC have ministered at some of the worship services there.
“The Lord just opened the doors for harvest because of the relationships that have been built over the years,” Whitten said. “Several of us have been back, and more than once, people in the village have recognized us, so there’s been a relationship built and I believe that’s one of the reasons they were willing to open the schools open to us.”
Though there is much poverty in Ecuador, Whitten found that the little village they stayed in was not what he was expecting.
“I went prepared for poverty,” he said. “But what I saw of their conditions was like what I remember my grandparents talking about when they got married in 1916. Their homes were clean. The room where we met at the home church, it was very clean. They grow enough for their own needs and enough to take to the market at the little village. They’re very thrifty. They just reminded me of my grand parents and how they lived in 1916.”
Whitten and the others of the mission trip noticed that the people of the village have become fond of them over the years as they share a common faith. They are, he said, very welcoming to people outside of their community.
“They’re very friendly, they’re outgoing and the church group – since we’re all believers there’s that binding,” he said. “In that first worship service that we had, it was just an amazing sense of being bonded. It was just a sweet worship service.”
And hospitality was a mark of the people’s culture there. It’s not uncommon to be offered food and shelter by the people.
“They went out of their way to be hospitable, When lunch time came, we would work with them during the day. The ladies would help prepare the meals for us. Sometimes it was boiled corn. Usually it was potatoes and beans of some kind. Just a generous people, always welcoming us into their homes. You didn’t leave without being offered something.”
Whitten found himself amazed at the landscape in Ecuador. There the seasons are not like what we experience here in the U.S. Whereas we see multitudes of colors in leaves during the fall season until they die in the winter, Ecuador’s colors rarely change year round.
“Ecuador is known as the Land of Eternal Spring,” he said. “And that’s a good name for it. Up there the mountainsides do change sometimes from brilliant emerald green to a duller green. The seasons do change somewhat but the crops grow year round. The flowers are just extraordinary. The crops grow on the mountain side, as well as in the lower terrain.”
Whitten described a time in which he and others in the church group got together for a worship service. There is often a language barrier that requires a translator but more often than not, they find each other on the same page during their times together.
“We wanted to sing a song that they would know in Spanish, so we decided to sing ‘Amazing Grace’,” he said. “And the young man who played the keyboard for their singing wanted to play with us as we sang. He never found the right key but I don’t remember disharmony, I just remember a young man who wanted to join in the worship. It’s a beautiful memory to me.”