Walking to La Milpa

the long version

Marcos McPeek Villatoro left his home in Tennessee to work for several years as a lay missionary in rural Guatemala - a land ravaged by war and torn apart by violence and poverty. He and his wife lived in Poptun, an impoverished town on the edge of the jungle where townspeople lived in constant uncertainty, fearing the government's corrupt military, the guerillas who battled the military, and the threat of disease. Walking to La Milpa is a gripping account of the people Villatoro met along his journey, and the heart-warming, sometimes shocking situations in which he found himself. Villatoro recounts the amazing story of a baby abandoned in a cornfield which he and his wife nursed back to health. When they track down the baby's family they discover that his mother had gone insane and had been taken away to an asylum. Realizing that without his mother's milk the child won't survive, the villagers rally around the child as if he were their own, together nursing, clothing, and sheltering him. With compassion and humility, Villatoro takes the reader into a ravaged land held together by the strength and kinship of its native peoples.