Vultures and Butterflies: Living the Contradictions

by Susan Classen

Book by Classen, Susan

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Victoria (hotcocoaandbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have quite a heart for missions and adore reading stories, insights, struggles, and wonders that those who are missionaries endure or share. Susan was/is a missionary through Mennonite Central Committee in Bolivia and El Salvador daily dealing with the guerrilla warfare and the politics and government issues that they would go through. She shares how even though there is a lot of gruesome stuff she has seen while doing medical caring and helping guide people to Jesus, there is beauty there as well. She gives a lot of details and some hard things are in these stories that are very sad. She shares how she struggled a lot being in these places as her parents suffered and died during the turmoil of daily war she lived in. She definitely went through a vast amount of emotions while loving those at home and longing to be with them but seeing her family as those around her in El Salvador. It was a very touching story. I really had no idea what this was going to be about when I started to read it and I am pleasantly happy that I decided to read it.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Classen sums up many of the feelings I have been unable to name during my MCC term. While mine has been far less intense than was Classen's experience in the refugee camps during the El Salvadoran civil war, her observations are universal for anyone who feels strongly about accompanying the poor. Having lived in Honduras during a unique and tense time in its history -- the 2009 coup d'etat and its aftermath -- I can identify with the ubiquitous injustice, the nature of violence, and the power of coercion. Ultimately most middle class North American, no matter how much he or she sacrifices to live with the poor, end up having to "live out the contradictions" as Classen so succinctly puts it. We are part both part of the oppressors and the oppressed, both powerful and helpless. No matter what, after having lived in a neighborhood where poverty and violence pervades every day life for almost all of my neighbors, I, like Classen, will never be the same.