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Central America was rife with revolutionary upheavals and repressive violence during the 1970s and 1980s. Popular demand for social justice collided with traditional agrarian, almost feudal, societies. The rapid expansion of commercial agriculture drove small peasants off the land and into urban areas where they did not have the skills to make a living, and lost their pride in indigenous traditions and their positions of worth in their local communities. Industrial development fostered the growth of the urban working class and middle class, creating professional and blue collar jobs, but the poor and uneducated remained disenfranchised, with extremely high infant mortality rates, and almost no healthcare. The usually conservative Catholic Church became an agent for justice, popular mobilization and change. People demanded democratic reforms in the authoritarian political system, long dominated by landed elites and protected by vicious dictators and their military. In Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the reformist wave was broken by more repression and the mass murder of local populations.Kate Banner, a trained midwife, travels to Chiapas, Mexico in 1981, to visit her best friend, Maggie. She meets a man, Mark Deaver, the son of a wealthy American woman who has settled there. Mark is an adventurer of sorts, who will eventually run guns for the Sandinistas. Kate believes they will return to the United States one day, or somewhere away from the violence in Central America, and make a life together. In the meantime, she works with some of the 100,000 Guatemalan refugees who fled over the border to Chiapas for asylum, to escape the violence in their homeland. She delivers babies, administers first aid, and assists doctors, whenever one happens to appear. While Kate had never thought of herself as a revolutionary, she was strongly impacted, as a young girl, by the Civil Rights Movement, the bombing of the Baptist Church in Birmingham, the murders of innocent students at Kent State University, the protests against the War in Vietnam, photographs of Vietnamese children screaming with napalm burning their backs. She remembers the nuns telling her to "remember that you have been called to live in freedom." "You shall love they neighbor as thyself." Although she never believed in armed struggle, like Mark - she did want to help the victims of the violence.Eight years after her arrival in Mexico, Kate is living in Sandinista held Nicaragua, working in a clinic for women and children. She and Maggie are members of a community of activists, dedicated to helping the people of war-torn Nicaragua. Unfortunately, her relationship with Mark has been on the wane for some time, which causes her a great deal of anguish. While she still loves him, he has never really met her needs, or even knows what they are. She has finally come to grips with the futility of their relationship, and acknowledges the pivotal moment she has arrived at in her life. It is time to move on. After a hurricane hits, Kate delivers a baby in the bottom of a swamped boat. When the mother dies, Kate packs the few possessions she has. After years of service, she is physically and emotionally exhausted, and very sad. It is time to leave for the US. She wants Maggie to accompany her to Antigua, Guatemala, and stay with some close friends they haven't seen in a while. Then - on to Michigan. Maggie, however, has ideas of her own. She wants to travel into the countryside with Bob, the new man in her life, and will meet up with Kate in Antigua.Kate's journey north, into the seething politics and secret wars of Guatemala, will provide the most difficult challenges she has ever faced. She will also meet people who will change her life forever, and find grace and love where she never thought to.This is a story as powerful and compelling as you will ever read. Patricia Henley's masterful narrative and elegant prose illuminate the characters she brings to life on the page - people determined to stand-up for their rights to live free. She infuses "Hummingbird House" with passion, beauty, outrage, despair and hope. The novel concludes with these moving lines, "We see with quite clear eyes the war beneath the wars. If you pass this story along, make sure you get it straight. What little balm we have, we have against all odds. Do not walk away in sorrow. Do not be consoled."JANA
