December 1, 2006
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We hope this finds you enjoying God’s blessings in the celebration of Christmas, or as you begin a new year. At the Lima Recinto of the Universidad Biblica Latinoamericana we are looking forward to a celebration at the end of our academic year. This year, for the first time, we have a group of six students who are receiving degrees. They are the first to move through our programs as a group, so this is our first “graduating class”!
Each of their journeys are interesting and worthy of the telling. In this letter I want to share with you the journey of Marisol Ale Diaz.
Photo of a young woman standing behind a dais.
Marisol Ale Diaz is one of six students in the first graduating
class of the Lima Recinto of the Latinamerican Biblical University.
In a very real sense, her journey begins with her grandmother, who was killed by her husband when Marisol’s mother was still a child. She had been one of the early converts to the evangelical church in Cajamarca, in the north of Peru. Marisol’s mother was taken by friends to Lima to save her life. She carried with her the songs and the teachings of Jesus and the faith in Him which sustained her in the years to come.
She became a live-in maid in Lima, receiving a roof over her head and food to eat in exchange for housework. Still in her teens, she formed a family, and Marisol was born. Marisol was carried to Sunday school in a local Baptist church. When Marisol was still a child, her father moved out. Her mother had already been earning money by traveling to rural areas to sell things from Lima, and bringing products from the rural areas back to Lima to sell. Now she began to do this for one or two months at a time. This left Marisol and her younger sister to care for themselves. The two girls not only cooked and cleaned, they also managed to graduate from high school, no small accomplishment in a country where many girls do not go beyond an elementary education. Marisol then went to Argentina and studied nursing while she worked caring for critically ill elderly persons. Back home, a change came to the family, as Marisol’s father received Jesus into his life in a Pentecostal church. Marisol’s sister soon followed, and began to write to Marisol about the wonder of Jesus as living, everyday Savior and Lord. Marisol began reading the Bible in a new way. She reached the point where she, too, was ready to accept Jesus, and visited Peru to pray with her father for this wonder.
When the woman she was caring for in Argentina died, Marisol returned to Peru. She soon began participating in a local Pentecostal church along with other families of “internal immigrants” from other parts of Peru who had moved to Villa El Salvador to build houses and lives in the desert sands south of Lima. She was quickly given responsibilities for Christian education in Sunday school and in new-member classes. The pastor there had studied at the UBL in Costa Rica, and when Marisol wanted to learn more, he put her in contact with the newly formed Recinto in Lima.
The road to graduation has seen its share of struggles for Marisol. She did not come to theological studies with a liberal arts background, nor even a good high school education. At first, she was being asked for analytical and writing skills that no one had ever asked of her. She persevered, and has learned those skills so well that she is already a published author­in a Costa Rican magazine with ties to the UBL there. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that she would be one of two students to “survive” the first course in Hebrew I taught in Lima. Survival seems to be something she and her mother learned to do in the school of hard knocks. Fortunately, Jesus is not absent from that school.
Marisol is helping with my Hebrew classes now. She is looking for other ways to share what she has learned as a professor. She brings to that not only a keen mind and the formal learning, but also a sense of what it takes to “learn how to learn” at a university level.
Opportunities for women professors in church institutions are not automatic in Peru. Her own local church, in fact, does not allow her the privilege of preaching. Still, I get the feeling that Marisol is not easily discouraged, and as the Lord opens doors she will be ready to step through them.
May God continue to bless her in her ministry, as well as you all in yours.
Shalom,
Harry and Debbie Horne
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