No Word on Fate of Clinic : Uprising: Crystal Cathedral members anxiously pray for safety of workers at hospital in Chiapas, Mexico, that church helped build 10 years ago.

The violent uprising that began recently in southern Mexico is drawing special attention at the Crystal Cathedral, where volunteers and missionaries from the church are praying for the safety of workers at a hospital the church helped build 10 years ago.

Church officials have heard that the eight employees of the remote clinic fled the area last week when rebels stormed several villages in the state of Chiapas to protest the government’s treatment of peasants in the area.

But since the outbreak began, the church has lost contact with the outpost, which is within 20 miles of the fierce fighting in the town of Ocosingo. The fate of the clinic is important to the Crystal Cathedral congregants, some of whom still keep close tabs on what they call “the Chiapas Project.” The church also sends an occasional volunteer to help at the rural health facility, though it no longer supports it with funds.

Late last week, Carla Sterk, a missionary who worked with Crystal Cathedral volunteers when they helped build the hospital in the early 1980s, reportedly left Michigan to return to the clinic area. Her trip had been scheduled before the uprising began at the beginning of the month.

Church officials said they are concerned about the fate of the clinic and its workers, as well as for Sterk. The location is so remote there is no telephone.

“It doesn’t surprise me that a missionary would want to go back. When people are missionaries, they set aside their own personal safety,” said Michael Nason, a spokesman for Crystal Cathedral. “When there is a crisis, missionaries are often more active.

“We would feel a very deep loss” if anything happened to the hospital and its personnel, added Nason. “There was such a sense of medical need in that part of the world.”

Bruce Hollenbeck, a Chiapas Project volunteer who now works as an administrative aide at the Crystal Cathedral, said he is disheartened to hear that the hospital could be endangered. “I think it’s terrible. . . . I’d be very sad if the hospital got destroyed. All the money and donations that went down there to keep it going would be for nothing, and we’d have to start all over again,” he said.

Philanthropists from the Crystal Cathedral were the driving force behind El Buen Pastor Hospital (The Good Shepard Hospital) in Chiapas, choosing the site because there was little or no medical care for the peasants living near the Guatemalan border.

Church members raised more than $500,000 for the project, and about 30 volunteers from the congregation traveled to the remote mountain area to help in the construction.

“As missionaries we tried . . . to meet the needs of these people who were not empowered by the government,” said Paul Hostetter, a former Crystal Cathedral congregant who oversaw the construction of the hospital and is now a religion professor in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Those running the clinic, like most of the patients, are local residents. A doctor and a nurse work full time at the five-building facility, which has 12 beds and an operating theater and has grown in the 10 years since it was set up. Patients often pay with a bag of corn or a chicken, though many are treated for free.

Today, El Buen Pastor Hospital is owned and operated by Mexican Medical Inc., a Spring Valley, Calif., organization that owns and manages other Christian hospitals in Mexico. Mel Peabody, president of the company, said he has been anxiously awaiting word from the doctor, Neftali Torres.

“All we can do is wait,” he said. An affiliated organization, which supplies the hospital with medical equipment, also has had no word from the local doctor or others at the clinic.

“I’m assuming at this stage of the game that no news is good news,” said Peabody, who was worried last week that the facility might have been occupied by the rebels or the Mexican army.

Hospital workers evacuated the area a week ago, fleeing to the nearby state of Tabasco along with many residents of nearby villages, Peabody said.

“The staff left because they were afraid for their lives. Government troops were arresting all the Indian workers in that area,” he said.

Now that fighting is believed to have stopped, Peabody hopes to hear this week from Dr. Torres that it is safe for the rest of the staff to return.

Some at the Crystal Cathedral say they are concerned about the clinic’s survival.

Hollenbeck, a volunteer who has been there seven times, said, “I’d probably go back down there and help rebuild” if it was needed.

When he visited Chiapas in 1989 to repaint the hospital, there were a new pharmacy, an X-ray room, dentistry equipment, a kitchen, four examining rooms, a water tank and living facilities for both staff and volunteers who come on missions from all over the United States and Canada. There is also a residential area for patients’ family members, who typically stay with them until they are well.

To Hollenbeck the recent rebellion comes as no surprise and stems from the indigenous peoples’ feelings of disenfranchisement from the Mexican government. From what Chiapas Project workers observed while there, tensions leading to the revolt had been building up for years.

Warren Duffy of Huntington Beach, who was director of special projects at Crystal Cathedral in 1980 and 1981, said he saw evidence of the impending rebellion even then. At the time, he was in Chiapas with a film crew, which made a documentary that raised $500,000 to build the hospital.

When he and his crew left the area, they were detained by armed guerrillas. “We were driving out (of the village) on this lonely jungle road,” said Duffy, who now runs an Irvine public relations and marketing firm and hosts a talk show on KKLA-Radio in Glendale. “A band of Indians dropped a log across the road. They were all armed. We couldn’t back up. We couldn’t move forward.”

They demanded money to allow the filmmakers to use the only road out of the area. “The driver negotiated a price so we could go through,” he said. “This is how they (get) money so they can conduct their revolution.

“These are the same people. They have the same concerns.”

Hollenbeck agreed. “The ones that are uprising,” he said, “decided they were going to do something and make the government wake up. They’ve just been put out of the land that they’ve had for hundreds and hundreds of years that belonged to their ancestors.”