LDS Members

Among these displaced and nearly starving Nivaclé are 500-plus members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — barely surviving in two isolated villages and in several scattered forest locations of the Chaco. Converted in their ancestral village of Mistolar beginning in 1980, but moved into what was to be a temporary community 25 miles from the small provincial capital and Mennonite town of Filadelfia -- a plot of 125 acres they named “Abundancia” (Bountiful)-- they have for the last 15 years been almost totally dependent on Church charity for their survival.

Conditions at Abundancia are deplorable. Fifty families huddle in mud-and-wattle, cardboard, plastic, or corrugated tin shacks along a 3/4-mile unpaved and usually muddy “street” that stretches back from a beautiful brick LDS church building constructed in 2002.  Because of achieving over 90% activity levels in Church meetings they qualified for such a building. Now they attend without eating, in thread-bare Deseret Industries clothing and often shoeless. Too far from potential jobs in Filadelfia or in the 15-mile-distant Mennonite town of Loma Plata, they live day to day with little hope or opportunity for progress.

 The LDS Church and, infrequently, international relief agencies, have provided limited amounts of food, clothing, and other essential supplies. Fast offering funds are used to purchase food, water in trucks, and medications. A local doctor attempts to make occasional visits to treat the most severe cases of illness and infection. But these families — many of whom have been sealed in the Asuncion Temple, and who are faithful members of the Church — need and are seeking help to become more self-reliant and to overcome the challenges under which their environment forces them to live.

 They want better education for their children; better ways to make a living; skills to qualify for jobs in towns and a means of getting to where jobs and medical care are available; a better quality of water for their villages; ways of growing crops and animals for food and to market; more suitable homes to protect them from intense heat and biting cold winds; and small enterprises that will enable them to make and sell handicrafts, clothing or other goods to neighboring villages and to visitors.

 As noted, Mennonite farmers provide occasional but poorly-paid field labor for those adults and children able to help with the harvest of crops April through June of each year.  Otherwise there is no employment available, and hence no family income. Few families would earn more than the local equivalent of $100 a year — woefully inadequate to feed and clothe family members and educate the children. Access to medical care is very limited. Food is scarce and at this writing water is almost non-existent in Abundancia: most families are barely surviving on the brink of starvation and suffer daily from illness and lack of energy because of poor nutrition and exposure to disease organisms.

 A study done in 2005 to determine what could be done to help them has resulted in steps being taken to improve conditions in Abundancia: the Church is preparing to build roof-based water ­catchment systems over individual family homes and renovating inoperative water reservoirs in the hope that these steps will alleviate the constant lack of water. Other of the recommendations made by the visiting missionary couple and visitors from BYU-Idaho and Rexburg are being considered.

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