After four or five hours travelling precariously down the road that hugs the Andes mountain going south, we arrive at Santo Domingo de Los Colorados. I can’t be precise about the timing of the journey as most people who travel this route have a love, hate relationship with the road. On the one hand the views are spectacular, and the small communities of people selling their wares on the side of the roads are colourful and friendly. On the other hand you feel that you might be meeting your Maker a little sooner than anticipated.
We were staying at the Colorado Hotel, near the centre of the city on a huge roundabout, where roads purposefully wind off in different directions and the army come out in force on parade early in the morning on a regular basis. It was the contrast of the noise invading your ear drums every second to the forgotten world of the barrio communities that really struck me. So much so that I wrote a song about it and performed it for the first time to the gathered team at our evening meeting.
The song, now recorded on one of my albums is entitled “Heavy Heart.”
“Noise fills the air, invading your ears
A cover up to the silence of your tears
A lonely heart lost inside
Another cog in the system!
Noise fills the air, keep your mind in jail,
Shouting for attention, distractions doomed to fail,
But when you walk in their shoes, there’s nothing to hide
Another cog in the system
And I wonder who is really free,
Is it them or is it me?
Could I ever love with eyes so bright
And see the stars on the darkest night
Could I touch the wind and feel the rain,
And love my brother through the pain,
Will I take my heavy heart home again?
Noise fills the air invading your space,
Systems of oppression keeping you in your place,
When will we learn to love one another?
We have so much to discover
We trade prisons of poverty, for prisons of wealth
Play games of monopoly, with a nation’s health
A child in suburbia, could be a child on the street,
One governed by possessions, one with no shoes on their feet
For one time has no meaning, for the other it’s nine to five,
One lives for achievement, the other achieves by staying alive!
And I wonder who is really free,
Is it them or is it me?
Could I ever love with eyes so bright
And see the stars on the darkest night
Could I touch the wind and feel the rain,
And love my brother through the pain,
Will I take my heavy heart home again?”
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I sang the song for the first time at our team meeting that evening in the Colorado Hotel. I recorded it on one of my albums, “Fighting Back,” and it has become a favouriate of many.
We were doing some building work to support Latin Link missionaries John and a Brenda Hart…. And also running culturally sensitive mission programmes in one of the Barrios close to the hotel.
It was there that I met Chapilo.
He was loosing his eyesight even though the disease he had was curable with the right medication. A doctor on our team diagnosed the problem and we arranged for him to be treated. A year later, when we returned to the barrio, Chapilo was the first one to greet us!
How do you help a million needy children?
