Bear Witness: Dr. Kurt Alan Ver Beek on Justice, Violence, and Faith in Honduras

What does it mean to live out brave faith in the world’s most violent neighborhoods? In this episode of Faithful Politics, we sit down with Dr. Kurt Alan Ver Beek, a sociologist, missionary, and co-founder of the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ) in Honduras. Dr. Ver Beek’s decades of work tackling systemic corruption, homicide reduction, and police reform are the focus of Ross Halperin’s book Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land.

From moving his family into one of Honduras’s toughest neighborhoods to helping lead a national police purge that cut homicide rates by nearly 70%, Dr. Ver Beek shares the risks, faith, and persistence behind real change. This conversation dives into Christian courage, the challenges of confronting drug trafficking and corrupt systems, and how ordinary people can build trust where institutions have failed.

Guest Bio

Dr. Kurt Alan Ver Beek is a sociologist, missionary, and co-founder of the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ), a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the vulnerable in Honduras. For more than 30 years, he and his wife Joanne have lived in one of Tegucigalpa’s most dangerous neighborhoods, working alongside local leaders to reduce homicide, reform policing, and advocate for systemic justice. Ver Beek’s leadership helped drive Honduras’s historic police purge, which dismissed thousands of corrupt officers and introduced new accountability structures. His work is profiled in Ross Halperin’s book Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land (available on Amazon).

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're joining us on YouTube, we are so glad to have you with us. I'm your political host, Wright, and I'm joined by my ever faithful, faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? doing great, thanks Will. Today, we are joined by one of the central characters in a recent book called Bare Witness, the Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land. We are joined by Dr. Curt Allen-Verbeek to tell us all about his work and why there's a book actually written about the work that he's doing. Welcome to the show, Dr. Curt. Hopefully that's the last time they'll call me Dr. Kurtz. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. so... Yeah, so let's just jump right into this. So, Bare Witness, The Pursuit of Justice in a Violet Land, written by a independent journalist, Ross Halperin. You are the focus of this book. Give us kind of the 30,000-foot view of what it is that you were doing in Honduras. And... um Why is there a book written about it? Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. And so the book is written by Ross. Seven years ago, he heard me speak at an event where I was describing our work on homicides, like reducing homicides in the neighborhood that Carlos and I live in. And he got fascinated, said he wanted to come down for a couple of weeks and write an article. And then it turned into, he was hoping to maybe do like a New York Times Sunday story, like a more extended version. And then seven years later, it turned into a book. We didn't commission the book. He just got excited about writing it and uh spent the last seven years researching interviewing everybody we knew Visiting our projects and and and overall I really like the book. I think it's a fascinating read There's a few things like I would have written differently We didn't get to read it till it was done, but it's uh It reads like a novel and I think it's a it's a fun read That is, uh that's really, really cool. And I just love the spirit of the story and how you guys were able to, you know, go down there and make changes, use. kind of that Christian, your Christian values, your Christian identity, and to actually make a change in the world as opposed to just going to church or just having your regular old life. And most Christians kind of live life and they go to church maybe, m and that's not a shot, that's just the reality. um They might read the Bible some, at least in America, right? I'm talking about American context. Or whatever it may be. And then that's it. They don't think about anything else. But you were different. And I would love to explore a little bit with you why you were different. What was it about? I mean, I know you did work in sociology, but what was it about your experience there that created this impetus and this need to... to make a difference. Well, that's a good question. I do think some of it was like from high school on. My wife similarly felt very privileged and felt like we needed to do something to help other people. So I think there was something, I don't know if we were born with that, raised with that, grew up with that in church. I grew up in a church where... We were called to be change agents to transform the world, which is different than some churches that want to be separated from the world. I feel like that's what every church should do. But anyway, go ahead. And, uh but I think some of it was just circumstances. like the, the ASJ mission statement, the ASJ is the organization that we started, Carlos and I and Joanne, my wife, we have a mission statement which says we want to be brave Christians making the Honduran systems work for the most vulnerable. And I think like all three of those pieces are not very common. So like brave Christians. ah I think like if you guys went out in the street in Virginia, Washington DC and asked people to describe Christians, like they'd say a bunch of words, right? Nice, compassionate, loving, hypocritical, depends who you're talking to, right? I would bet money that no one would say brave, right? But if you read the prophets, Jesus, apostles, like brave is a mean, they were so brave, right? They would go into the face of violence. They knew they were going to be killed. They'd go before a king to tell him the bad news. And they were brave. So we've been calling ourselves, first of all, but the Honduran church and the US church to be brave. And I think the book tells several big stories about like, how we did it, but none of them, we didn't start out seeking to be brave. We just started out like try to figure out somebody's killing our neighbors. Like we gotta do something and it just happened. uh You've mentioned Carlos um already twice, and I'd love for you just to tell our audience a little bit, like, who is this Carlos person? um how did you two find each other? What was it that kind of made your partnership work? Yeah, so Carlos is my best friend and sort of co-conspirator in all of this. um So we moved to Honduras, moved to Central America in 86, moved to Honduras in 1988. and the very first couple of months we were there we met Carlos. He was working, so we both worked for Christian sort of community organizations, so like helping poor people at a community level. And Carlos and Joanne and I worked out of the same office and he was young and single, we were young, no kids, and so we started going to the movies together and just... uh Probably of all the Hondurans we met, was the person that we just felt like the most fun, most comfortable. So we did quite a bit of hanging out together back in the late eighties. ah And then sort of fast forward some years, he moved into this neighborhood called Nueva Suyapa, which is, we found out later, was the most violent neighborhood in a violent country. we thought that was really cool. We had been going to church in that neighborhood for a bunch of years and we'd always kind of toyed with the idea of moving there, but we thought it would be hard and we wouldn't like it, but we kind of wanted to anyway. And then Carlos did it. And so we were fascinated, like Carlos moved into this neighborhood. Like, that's really cool. And so again, like it wasn't, we tried to be brave or something. We were just like, maybe a little bit. And so we decided to move up there too. ah And so in 2000, we moved there. We still live there. So 25 years later, we're still, we decided to move for one year. We said, we probably won't like it. It's going to be dangerous. We had two kids, like this will be hard on them, hard on us, but we'll do it for a year. And our kids grew up there. My son has a tattoo on his arm of Nueva Suyapa. That's how much he loves living there. Carlos' son has a whole sleeve tattooed of Nueva Suyapa on his shoulder. So all of our kids did. And then, I don't know, I can jump into one of the stories if you like to tell you. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, my question was gonna be about, yeah, I would love for you to kind of describe the conditions of Honduras and the conditions of that neighborhood. And, you know, you can be as detailed as you want. But I mean, what you say was violent, what does that mean? What was going on? What was... what was happening, give us a sense of the conditions. You know, I I moved from Ohio to the mean streets of short pump Virginia, where there's probably as little crime as you can get in some way. And so the idea of taking my kids and taking them into, I don't know, gilpin court or maybe what's one, I don't know, well, um there's several. you there's in Richmond though, one of the really more crime, em you know, hotspots of Richmond and feel a lot of trepidation about that. And yet you guys did it. The Lord kept you safe and even brought a love. So I'd love to, you know, what was going on there that you were facing so people could get a real accurate sense of what that decision meant. So I think Carlos and I both and our families both moved into this neighborhood somewhat out of commitment. So Carlos was going to a church in a middle class neighborhood in Honduras and they wanted to do something. for poor people. Let's just describe it fairly superficially like that. And this neighborhood was sort of known to be like one of the roughest, and I'll go into a little more what that means. And so Carlos's church decided to start a school there. So that's, he moved up, they built a school and he lived in the school and he was a principal. And then we had gone to church in that same neighborhood for eight years. So we knew the people in our church and we really liked it. Then we moved up to a house right behind the school where Carlos was, so we were neighbors. And ah maybe I'll start with the positives. So like super cool people. I Hondurans, I love Hondurans in general, but the people in our neighborhood, like friendly, show up at their house and you know, it's never like, oh, why didn't you call first? It's always like, come in, let's have coffee. You want a Coke, you know, I'll run and get a little cookie from the store. Like just loving, poor, but resilient. ah A lot of the women in our church have, not a lot, but several have sons in jail. They love those sons. Those sons had good moms. They got in trouble hanging out with the wrong kids. They have one kid who's finishing her psychology degree and the other son from the university and the other son's in jail. She was a good mom to all those kids. So beautiful people, loving people, friendly. ah Yeah, I love my church. But at the same time, like schools that miss half of the days of school because teachers don't show up. uh a medical clinic that almost always is out of medicine. uh And then violence. the way we started, we didn't move up there with any intention of this. But one, our kids went to Carlos's school, and one day they're coming home from, or they went to school and got sent right home again. And we didn't know why, but Carlos came over a little while later and said that the dads of two of our kids' classmates had been killed. And he sold fruits and vegetables out of the back of a pickup. So 4.30 in the morning, he was going down to pick up fruits and vegetables. And three guys with ski masks showed up, took his money, a couple hundred dollars, and shot him in the head right in front of his wife. And so the wife showed up at Carlos's office later that day and said, we know who did it. I have three witnesses and they're willing to testify. It's three guys that live right down the street from us. so like, what do we do? Let's go get them. And so Carlos comes to me, he's like, what do we do? And so we didn't know, and we called a couple friends and they said, don't go to the police, right? Like if you go to the local police station, they may go and tell the people who, the bad guys, instead of arresting them, or anyways, just be careful, don't do that. So they said, give us a week or so and we'll figure things out. And one week turned into several weeks and we never got that person we could trust to do that with. And then these three bad guys shot an off duty cop and then the cops responded in mass. There was a helicopter and everything. Two of them were arrested and one got killed. And then Carlos and I were sitting around and saying like, you know, that was just terrible. Those guys, and Carlos goes, not just your kid's classmate's dad, but they killed X and Y and Z. And then I was like, I didn't even know about X, Y, and Z. I knew about A, B, and C by my church. And so we did a little research, and we figured out that they had killed at least 13 people after we knew who they were. Like in those few weeks they had killed 13 people and we could have stopped them, right? We could have saved 13 lives. And so we felt like this huge weight and we were like, we gotta do something. So again, like being brave, but it wasn't like we were out looking for this. It was just like, we gotta do something. And so we said, what if we had a ex-cop or a cop who was a Christian, just somebody we could trust who would be our bridge of trust between us and the police? Because a cop knows who's the good cops and who's the bad cops, but we didn't know that. So we hired a guy. uh and a lawyer and they started working on that and we would connect victims to these guys and these guys would connect them to good cops and they would help do the basically a private investigator for poor people. In the year that we started that we had almost 50 homicides in our neighborhood of 25,000 people. So that's 200 homicides per 100,000 like off the charts violence and three years later it was down to eight. which eight is still big, it's still way too many. But in three years with two guys, we did that in our own neighborhood. And then that started to get the attention of people and we started doing it in other neighborhoods and that's basically how we got started with all this violence work. That is just incredible. And I want to dig a little bit more into kind of this secret group, if you will, um that you helped create. Because it sounds like it's made quite the impact. Not nearly like the 100 % success rate that you would like, but 200 to eight, or whatever the number. It's unfortunate for the Yate, but great for all the other people that still have their lives. So can you talk just a little bit about how did this relationship, this pairing of the private investigator kind of looking into who the good cops are, how did that operation run day to day? And what involvement did you and Carlos of have in it? So secret group, you just said, that's what Ross calls it in the book, that's the name we have. We called it the secret group because Carlos and I lived in the same neighborhood. So we tried to keep it confidential because if the bad guys knew we were doing this, like our kids, we went to church there, school there, we were walking around in the streets and we were afraid of violence against us. um Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. we were just trying to figure something out. I think what we, the interesting piece we figured out was this system works based on trust. And it stopped working because there was no trust. So people who were victims didn't trust the police. We didn't trust the police. So then we wouldn't tell them the information they needed. And then in the end, we also figured out the police didn't trust the neighborhood. So the police didn't trust neighbors and they would, you and you hear this in other sorts of crimes, domestic violence, for example, people will initially be willing to report, put their husband in jail. But then a few weeks later, they're reconciled and they don't want them to go to jail anymore. Same sorts of things here. So people initially after the crime are willing to testify, but a few weeks later they aren't. And then the police say, risked my life to arrest this guy. I broke into his house. He's armed. He's a gang member and I arrested him. And now two weeks later he's out on the street. And so the cops get frustrated. But then the neighborhood sees they arrested him and two weeks later he's out on the street. They think the cops are crooked. The cops aren't crooked, but the victims weren't willing to testify. So you can see how that distrust fuels itself. So really we were just doing basic stuff like we were building up that trust. were making it like Carlos and I was role is not out on the street because that may have gotten us killed but Just supporting these two people, making sure that they got connected with witnesses, with victims who were willing, sometimes vouching for them. Like you can trust these guys, we know them, because we knew lots of neighborhood people. And then in the end, making sure that they got to the police and we started to get to know people in the police and in the attorney general's office, in the courts. And all of that actually provided the foundation for the other big story in the book, which is the police purge. But what we were learning was something that there's been books written about in the States. There's a guy named David Kennedy in New York who's done this same sort of work in the US. He wrote a book called Don't Shoot. And I read Don't Shoot. maybe two or three years after we started this, what we call the Peace and Justice Project. And I started reading it at Christmas vacation. My kids were there and we were at the beach. like 24 hours, I just couldn't write. I just read this book. I didn't go on the beach because it was telling the same story of what we had learned and what we were doing. And then we became a part of a bigger network saying like what we did and what we learned was not unique. These are. problems that are happening all over the world in the US and in Honduras. We could learn from them. They could learn from us. Actually, that's so David Kennedy invited me to New York to talk about our work and Ross was there and that's how Ross learned about our work and decided to write the book. Well, I'm glad you wrote the book and what's funny, this is sort of like insider baseball. We interviewed another person just last month about their book. It's called Bearing Witness. And I was like, Josh, we got to make sure we don't mix these two authors up because this one is what the church can learn from early abolitionists. You know, also like a pretty significant topic, but you know, kind of. very different than the one that we're going to be talking to Kurt about. But I am curious about what's the legal system like there in Honduras? ah Does it have kind of the same corrupt veneer that people view like law enforcement there? Yes, so, uh, do you want me to do the, tell a little bit of the police purge at the same time? That's a good feed in. So I think as we did this community level work, we ended up figuring out a whole bunch of things, but connected to your question. There were really good cops. Like we worked with. fabulous cops like who were trying to do their job well and really good lawyers and really good judges. Like there are really good people in the system. I would say the majority. But there were also not good ones. And in Honduras, a lot of that is driven by drugs. So especially in the 2010 area. All the cocaine is produced in Columbia. and it's all going to the US mostly, and it would stop in Honduras. Honduras was the jumping off point. It was often sent in large shipments to Honduras and then repackaged into trucks and pickups and all sorts of other things to get it into the US. So Honduras had tons of drugs and then those drug traffickers would pay off cops to sometimes look the other way and sometimes to actually be part of their operation. So, 2000, so I want to say there's really good cops, but there were also a minority who were super corrupt and often killing people and working for and with the drug traffickers. And so in 2011, 2012, Honduras had the highest homicide rate in the world. Higher than Colombia, higher than Iraq, higher than Afghanistan, higher than Mexico. Had 90 homicides per every 100,000 people. So the US's average is eight. Like with you guys, it's probably four. So Honduras was 90. So ASJ and then we pulled together the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, World Vision, a whole bunch. We created this big alliance and we called it the Alliance for Peace and Justice. The main thing we said is you got to purge the police. That's the word we use. Clean up the police force, but we used a strong word, purge. You got to purge these drug traffickers out. That was risky, to say this stuff in public out loud. ah And we ended up saying it for four years from 2012 to 2016. Every month we would be holding events, press conferences, going on TV and the radio, newspaper, talking about things that we were learning. And the government was resistant and the police were super resistant. Like the police said, we don't need to be purged. Of course they would. But in 2016, the president of Honduras called Carlos. And he said, let's see if you have the cojones. This is exactly what he said. Let's see if you have the cojones to do what you've been whining about for the last four years. uh so Carlos said, yeah. Carlos said, let's give me a day to think. So we pulled all those people together. That's something that's not in the book. Ross, to simplify the story, it's like Carlos and I decided, but we had the head of the National University, Protestant head of the Protestant Church, pastor, and we all got together and we said, should we do this or not? And we said, yeah, I mean, for four years, we know this needs to be done. For four years, we've been pushing the government to do it. went, now they're giving an opportunity to be a part of it. It's going to be hard. It's going to be. dangerous, but we're going to do it. And so we did. They formed a six person commission. Carlos and one of our staff members and then two pastors were on the commission. ah And the first two weeks, they fired all nine of the chief of police in the country. So you can imagine that, right? Like in Virginia or in Chicago to just take out the top people. own doge. Yes, we've actually had a few people say that ASJ is kind of like the doge of Honduras, which there are at least similarities. I would never... Sands the billions of dollars that you have in your account, right? Or are you hiding something from us? power, yes. We are not Tesla. But, so they, in the first two weeks, they reviewed all of the chief of police and they fired all of them. They said, all of you have, and then they went down all the way from top to bottom over two and a half years. They fired 6,000 out of the 13,000 cops. So almost half the police force. They designed a new training program and they designed now about 12,000 new cops have been trained. It was designed with the Swiss government. So it's got to be good, right? The Swiss were involved. And uh a third of the cadets had to be women. So it's getting women into the police force, younger police, better trained police. So not only getting rid of the old stuff, but bringing in new and better. and last year the homicide rate was down to 22. So from 90 to 22, which is still high, but like Chicago, the south side of Chicago is over 22. So like now we're in the ballpark of where we wanna be and keep bringing this down. This work was... very risky and difficult and dangerous. So one of the commissioners, one of the pastors was going to get groceries with his wife and two SUVs pulled up in front of his house. Six guys with M16s pulled out and started shooting. They killed one of his bodyguards. They shot another one eight times. He and his wife were not hit, uh but ended up having to leave the country because of it. Carlos got multiple death threats. He still gets death threats because of this. So it's purged police, it's drug traffickers, people who are angry about their power being taken away from them. So very hard, very dangerous, but also very cool to be a part of reducing the homicide rate in the country by 70%. I mean, that's unbelievable. That's an amazing statistic, one to be very proud of and to really talk about and like zero in on how this actually happened. Please. I'm just thinking, especially because you're talking. pastor, that Honduras has a national association of Protestants. So all the Protestants are part of this group. The pastor that was on the purge commission was the president of that group. So he's the president of the Protestants in Honduras and he's a pastor of a big church. He ended up firing police officers that went to his own church. Like, when do you ever hear of something like that, right? um And the reason, and he's a cool person, you could interview him sometime, but the reason he said is that uh one of the reforming chiefs a few years earlier had gone to his church, he had married him. And before he took the position of, he became like the head of the DEA in Honduras, he went to the pastor and said, do you think I should take this job or not? It's going to be super dangerous fighting drug trafficking in Honduras. And the pastor said, you have to. And two months later, the drug traffickers killed him. So he felt like this was God giving him a chance to clean up. man. the people who had killed someone from his church. And so when he had to fire, he fired police officers that went to his own church, he felt like this is a part of, God put him in this place to kind of fix what had happened to his former congregation member. I mean, that's unbelievable. There's so many things that are swirling in my head, you know, like the power dynamics that are at work in a situation like this, the people that are getting angry that they lose power, the people... gaining power, those who are willing to use violence and force versus those who aren't are just normal people. But then they, those who are willing to use violence and force then tend to get what they want in these corrupt systems, right? Like you're saying, like a minority and yet this minority was driving the whole system of people and the whole system of law enforcement. And you just get a couple of people that are willing to do the dirty work, quote unquote, I mean, be violent, and then they drive that fear, that power, it fuels it. And I would love to just kind of hear from you. So what do you think is the difference between a good cop and a bad cop? And I guess what I mean is like, is it that the bad cop, is it that they just had a situation that came to them, they had a weakness? where they made a decision once that then put them into a place where they felt like they had to be there or they got, you know, we tend to simplify, even though the label's good and bad, right? Tend to simplify. And I'm not saying people aren't responsible for what they do. Of course, I think they are and I think they should be held accountable. But what do you think is the difference? As a sociologist trained looking at this, what are the factors that drive Thinking about Honduras and then spreading that out in a wider basis, extrapolating to other populations as much as we can, why do some turn out good and some turn out bad? um Growing up in essentially the same system. It's a good question. personally, I love the idea of the bell curve and that we're all distributed on a bell curve in all sorts of ways, height to weight to sort of moral character. So I think the police are no different. There's a, the two ends are not that many people, but some of them, there's a end that's super good. And no matter what happens, they're going to do the right thing. And then there's another. And there's another group that's the other tail that are bad and pretty much no matter what they're going to try and get away with stuff. And then there's this huge chunk in the middle that kind of moves. And I think much of that movement depends on their structures, the bosses around them, the things that kind of they don't want to get fired. They don't want it. So they just kind of do whichever the leadership and the structures around them push them to do. So, I think initially we thought all the cops were bad and quite quickly learned that wasn't true. Then we started to think that all the ones that were doing bad things like wanted to be. And we also learned that wasn't true. So the drug traffickers, know, Will gets named a regional chief of police. The next day somebody shows up at his office who he may or may not know as a drug trafficker with a suitcase and it's full of cash and he puts it on your desk and he says, you know, I don't need you to do anything. I just need you to make sure there's no cops. on this section of highway tomorrow, you know, at nine o'clock at night. And that's all you got to do. And you're like, no, well, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a good cop. I don't want to do that. And like, then he pulls out a couple of pictures of your kids and your wife. Like we know your kids go to this school. Here they are getting off the bus. Here they are at soccer practice. would be really a shame if something happened to your kids. Right. So you got, you got a carrot and you got a stick and now what do you do? Right. So those ones on the far right will say forget it, you know, and what they do is they call their boss usually and say transfer me somewhere else. Like I'm not gonna get my kids killed over this. Maybe some really crazy ones will just try and fight them off, right, but that's very difficult. And then the worst ones were they didn't even need to show them the picture. They were happy to take the cash. But then that whole middle chunk says, am I, you know, if I don't take this cash, the next guy's going to, we're just going to do this. And once they got you in your pocket, it's hard to get back out. So I think that helped us to understand that if we could move that structure, if we could change the leadership, like that was the most important piece. You're not, you're not going to try. transform this big middle part of the bell into these really honest ones, but you can move the system by changing the leadership and changing the reward structure. You know, Kurt, you're clearly a person of faith and I could tell that your faith provided you the boldness, um the bravery to do the work that you're doing. But I have to ask, was there a point when your boldness was like, what the heck am I doing here? uh And is it all worth it? I'm sure those questions went through your head. I'd love for you just to talk about it. All the time. You're like currently still right now. That's funny. So I think the worst was when Dionisio was killed. uh So our lawyer was on his way to court to defend some security guards and cleaning women who were getting paid half of what they were supposed to, systematically stealing half their wages. Poorest people, people lived in our neighborhood ah and the owner of the security company. uh hired a couple of guys to kill him, right? And, you know, like, what are we doing? We felt responsible. We were, you know, partially responsible. Should we have done more to keep him safe? Like, are they going to kill us next? Are they going to go after more of our staff? So Carlos and I often talk about before Dionisio and after Dionisio. Like Dionisio, rose colored glasses were removed when Dionisio was killed. And we understood like this had real consequences for us, for others. um Yeah. And then like the police purge was very scary when the attempt was made on the pastors. life and his wife. We all left Honduras for a couple weeks, came up to the US just to kind of let the temperature go down, but went back to Honduras fully expecting there to be more things like that. And there weren't, but that's what we expected. uh Right now there's sort of a political crisis in Honduras. The party in power is very unpopular. There's two opposition, so we have elections in November, so in four months. The two opposition candidates have like a, they each have about 30 % polling at 30. The government's candidate is polling at 15. So it doesn't look like she's gonna win. And it looks like the government is willing to do almost anything to stay in power. So then you think like, oh, this, you know, we've been doing this for 20 years. And this government could pull that down. We could end up with a Venezuela or a Nicaragua or a Cuba. Yeah. And I think that that's where our faith gives, partly it's our personality, honestly, I think like optimistic, uh stubborn, persistent. ah But I think also it's our faith that gives depth to our commitment that says like, keep going. One of my sayings I say is that God calls us to be faithful, not successful. Right? So can I just be, can I just keep doing this and hopefully something good will happen, right? And we've seen it. Like we have seen huge changes in all of Honduras. So we know that's possible, regularly it feels hard. That's, I think you just hit something so profound where, you know, we all have these individual callings that we have, a makeup of the, composite of our personalities, our experiences, right? Their genetics, the opportunities we've been given, all of that. And we all have this... uh We all have a calling. Certainly every Christian, I think, has a calling. Not first to Jesus to follow him. Then to justice and to transforming the world around them. And you know, I hear your story and I think about like, man, like what would I do if my children were threatened? What would I do if someone came and put a fricking, you know, a suitcase filled with cash?$100,000 or whatever, just on my desk say, hey, you can have this, or we'll kill your kids. Those are your two options. Like extremes, right? I mean, that's kind of the point, I'm assuming, is you bring the extreme to put someone in such a place, a fight or flight, such a place of not being really be able to think. It's just instinctual and they're gonna go with survival instincts, which makes sense in a lot of ways. you know, on an individual level, but you hit on this thing like all of us, we have to make this decision of what we're doing. Are we doing what God wants us to do? And then are we going to continue to do it? I'm speaking now for Christians, right? We're going to continue to do it regardless if it looks successful to us on the outside. And that's a hard thing to balance because it takes feeling like you're hearing God, feeling like there's a conviction, feeling like God is asking to do something. um And then you have the externals. It's like the internal versus the external, constantly battling back and forth. um You know, I haven't ever had my children threatened. But Ashley and I, you know, my wife and I, we moved here. um We started a church. It hasn't had the success that I imagined that it would. uh Sorry about that. Other opportunities have come. The podcast, number one, that's a huge one. I also have some other opportunities to work with pastors and things doing what I love. So in a lot of ways, I would say I'm very blessed, that idea of success versus faithfulness, that hits the core of my struggle. in my own life of what do I keep doing and what do I reconsider and think about? And I would love for you to just dig into that a little bit more in your own experience. How have you navigated through that? mean, to have someone that you care about, a staff member, mean, if I had a staff member get murdered, um man, that would make me wanna quit. And I can only imagine. how you felt, I can't even imagine. And the pressure and the burden and like, well, God, if you're asking me to do this, then why would that have happened? And that cost and yet we serve a God who sent his son and his son suffered and died and was executed by the Roman government. And it's like the tension there is so deep. It's like hard to stay in it, but I think we have to jump into it and wrestle around with it a little bit. And I would love to just dig into that a little bit more. Like, how did you discern the difference between success and faithfulness? And how do you keep doing that? yeah, good question. Probably various things I've described show like I don't feel like I'm super great Christian, super great at discernment. ah I feel like most of the time things get put in front of us and we have to decide what to do with them, right? It isn't... I'm out looking and I'm going back and praying and reflecting, deciding yes or no. It's like something gets thrown in your lap and you gotta figure out what to do with it. uh I love one of our colleagues, Omar Rivera, has a quote and he says, you want to change the world, you better have a really good team. So I'm a strong believer in discernment, like with others. Not everybody would call it discernment, but just let's figure this out. And one of the... blessings of working in alliance, you know, with the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church and the National University and people from all different sectors and it ended up people that I really love and respect. Like they're all really smart people, lots of them smarter than me. So when we, you know, like are we going to be a part of this police purge or not? We all get together and we decide together and there was there was good reasons not to do it and ended up to set, but I don't feel then like I had to decide this and it's all on me. ah My wife is fabulous. And most of the time braver than me. I actually think women are braver than men in general. It's showed out time and time again in our work. ah So yeah, I think there's an element of prayer, there's an element of thinking about reflecting, but for me lot of it is trying to respond to what God puts in front of me and then to have smart people, good people I really trust around me that we're deciding together. em 10 years from now or 20, whatever, whatever timeframe makes the most sense. uh How would you want the work you and Carlos did to be remembered um as far as, you know, the impact that it made in the communities that you all have been working in? So we're working on a 20 year vision for ASJ in our different topics, security, health, education. And where it's fun. because one of the questions that we're asking ourselves, like, what could we imagine in 20 years? Could we imagine that Honduras was one of the safest and most peaceful places in the Americas in 20 years? And you can imagine it, right? It's a little country. I it's the size of Tennessee. It's probably smaller than Virginia. And if there was, like, everybody came together and said, let's clean this all up. you could do it, right? Or like, let's have the best education system in the Americas, or at least in Latin America in 20 years, we could do that. So... my ideal, like what I would like it to be remembered is that we set the foundations in place to like transform the country. So like 20 years from now, Honduras would be this little Switzerland of Latin America where people would want to leave Chicago and move to Honduras because it was this beautiful, kind of like Costa Rica, right? Like Costa Rica at least has that image. Yeah, but I do think another thing I often say is that the church in Hunder is like Gulliver on the beach. and it's all tied down by little tiny midgets with strings and thread. And if the church was awoken, 90 % of Hondurans say they're Christian, about half and half Catholic and Protestant. Like if you could wake that giant up and that giant started really trying to, wanted to fix the education and healthcare, like nothing could hold it back. So yeah, I guess by both of those answers, I'm describing that I'm not content, right? wouldn't, 20 years from now, I wouldn't want somebody to say, yeah, they did good things and it's just stayed like that. I would say like what we're doing is the beginning, I hope, it's the beginning of something, which I'm not all that satisfied with, but that there's a uh ton of work to do and I hope like. we start and the next generation takes up that mantle of continuing to fight for the education, police, healthcare system that God wants, the 100 people deserve. ah That would make me very happy. That's awesome. Well, if somebody listening or watching this wants to connect with the mission that you're on and the work that you're doing or donate money, I'm sure that the work you're doing probably doesn't come free. uh Like how can they connect with you and your work? Yeah, so the easiest way is the English language website is ASJUS. ASJUS for United States. And that's English.org. So you can go there. The book is on Amazon. uh So don't buy the other one. Well, you could buy the other one too, but it's Bear Witness, not Bearing Witness. yeah, yeah. Bear a Witness by Ross Helprin. On our website, the ASJ US website, there's also a page that talks about the book and interviews Carlos, interviews me, interviews Ross, that gives you, I actually would suggest doing that before you buy the book. because the book just jumps right into the story. It doesn't say who Ross is and who Kurt is and who Carlos is. So if you're thinking about buying the book, maybe go to the website first and read a little or listen to a couple of short four or five minute interviews before you buy the book. Well, thank you so much, Kurt. This was phenomenal chat. I really appreciate the work you're doing, just putting yourself out there and actually making a difference. I think that we can sometimes be our own worst critics. But from the outside looking in, it seems like the work that you're doing has an impact and it's not easy. We just want to thank you for doing what you're doing. uh And to our audience and listeners, hey, thanks again for stopping by. Make sure you like and subscribe and do all that stuff that, um yeah, I guess hacks the algorithm. I'm not really sure. Like, I'm not sure why you should like and subscribe except just to help make our channel get bigger. But there you go. But thanks again for everything. And as always, keep your conversations not right or left, but up and we'll see you next time. Take care.