The deadliest fires in Chile’s history swept through its hilly, coastal center of Valparaiso in February. In an area gripped in a 10-year drought, 160 separate wildfires raged for a month.

When the embers cooled, MTW’s Viña del Mar team started look­ing for people to help, using MTW Compassion Fund donations.

They reached out first to people from their CEMIPRE ministry centers for the blind and visually impaired community. Were any of their people impacted?

Six families.

“We knew we could help more than six,” MTW missionary and CEMIPRE administrator Danielle Grotton says.

So they went to the burned-out places looking for more.

They contacted ministry partners, talked with pastors, and met families. That network prioritized widows, families with a member with a disability, and families with children who were temporarily split up to go to different shelters.

“We went where they told us to go,” she says.

In a charred building, they found a blind squatter named Fernando.

“Quite honestly, as a blind person myself, I’m not often sur­prised by what blind people can do,” CEMIPRE founder John Rug says. “But this one really freaked me out. His tools were destroyed in the fire so he asked if we could help replace his chainsaw and ax. I mean, I really freaked out.”

Fernando had gone through CEMIPRE training for the blind years before where he had learned job and life skills. He said,

“Well, John, you told me I could do anything I wanted to do, and [preparing firewood] is what I had always wanted to do.”

The MTW team replaced his chainsaw with the same model. He immediately started it up and then showed the team his surprising accuracy using the ax to split wood. With the new tools, he was able to provide for his family again.

The wildfires were followed by flooding so severe that it has made up for a decade of drought.

MTW relief teams from the U.S. arrived between those disasters to build structures. Next, CEMIPRE worked to provide beds so people were off the floor as winter approached.

Now, they are helping families—a total of 30 in all—get basic appliances.

“What we did was a drop in a bucket,” John says. But it helped them, and it helped us connect people with churches.

Slowly, they are returning to CEMIPRE’s own growing work.

Rescuing the Unseen

The fires forced an intensified season of a long-standing theme: The team goes looking for people who can’t go looking for them.

Often isolated and alone, blind residents don’t know that help or welcome is open to them.

And in a culture that can be as austere about disabilities as the Andes mountains, they learn that they are sought-after guests at Jesus’ banquet table.

CEMIPRE, the Presbyterian Ministry Center for those with disabilities in Chile’s central Valparaiso region, grew out of MTW’s local church-planting work more than 20 years ago. Team members John and Cathy Rug and David and Danielle Grotton serve both the center and the local Presbyterian churches, as well as partner with Gospel 360, a regional church planting network in urban areas.

Chile is a visually lush country, made up of beaches, moun­tains, high deserts, and skies smeared thick with stars. It’s an “astronomer’s paradise,” housing about half of the world’s as­tronomy infrastructure. Filled with soaring mountain ranges, it is a skiing and mountaineering paradise as well. Popular guides for the city of Valparaíso tout its steep funicular rail­ways and “labyrinth of cobbled alleys.” Delightful for tourists. Torture for the visually impaired.

Viña del Mar, where the original center is located, is itself a beautiful beach town ringed with hills and high-rise beach condos. But, as the Grottons put it, five blocks off the beach is where tourism dollars end and “where reality begins for most residents.” Highrise buildings mix with houses made of scraps on steep hillsides.

“Jesus said… ‘But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed’.” – Luke 14: 13-14a (NIV)

The Church Learns to See

CEMIPRE has grown slowly from one location to three, but this also feels like a drop in the bucket compared to the need.

“It’s slow because the Church needs to grow its vision. I want the Church to know that it is time to wake up,” John says.

“When Jesus tells us whom to invite for a feast, he tells us to look for the poor, the lame, the blind. That’s significant because we are seeing His priorities,” John says. “We like to spiritualize that to mean people who are spiritually poor, spiritually lame, and spiritually blind, but I don’t see that in the text. Jesus is dealing with the physical side of people as well as the spiritual side.”

Danielle adds, “It is slow, but it is happening.”

The center’s newest braille teacher is a woman who woke up.

She heard a church presentation about the center and signed up for its “Put Yourself in My Place” training program. Her passion grew, so she learned braille and started helping in different ways.

“She’s taking her vision for what God is doing back to her church, and her congregation’s eyes are opening as well,” Danielle says.

“Our prayer is that the Lord would continue to awaken the Chilean Church.

The Vision Gets Personal

John himself had to wake up to that bigger vision.

Blind from birth—he typed his seminary papers on a braille typewriter—he wanted nothing to do with ministries for people with disabilities.

Sure, he helped people who happened to be in his church, but he resented the assumption that disability ministry was automat­ically his niche to fill. “The hackles would go up on my neck,” he says. Instead, he became a cross-cultural church planter.

“It was a pride thing that the Lord had to crush. Which He did.”

A few years into his ministry, kids from the church youth group regularly came to his house just to use the pool, with an arms-crossed attitude. They registered little interest in relationships at church or in the gospel.

“I thought to myself, these kids need to learn to serve!”

The Lord prompted him, “Yes, but who will be their example?”

So John started teaching computer skills at a local school for the blind and saw the tremendous need.

“It became very clear to me that people with disabilities could die in their homes and nobody would ever know.”

He visited Cuba to see how the Church engaged in ministry to the blind. It inspired him to map that model into a Chilean context. For instance, the largest Protestant denomination in Chile emphasizes miraculous healing. When asked, John doesn’t hesitate but answers smoothly, as if he has had this conversation hundreds of times: People need to hear that the absence of a miracle is not a lack of God’s love.

“I recognize that God can do what He pleases, but often it pleases Him to say, ‘No, I have other plans.’”

Every disability has consequences, so the center works in Jesus’ name to reduce the spiritual, emotional, social, and professional consequences of disability that Jesus eliminated in His miracles.

Danielle gives a small sampling of a long list: overcoming fear of loud noises and moving objects, learning to use a cane, getting safely around a house, learning braille, and adapting to new communication tools that move people out of isolation.

They also have a lot of fun keeping people engaged with games, folk singing, and excursions.

Reaching the Hidden

It is growing in scope as well as size.

Marcela Molina is an occupational therapy student at a local university in Valparaiso and an intern at CEMIPRE. Effer­vescent and dedicated, she has wanted to work with the blind population since she was young when she would “practice” doing tasks with her eyes closed. The CEMIPRE occupational therapist has taken her blindfolded through the streets so she could experience using a cane. “Everything they taught us at school was wrong,” she says with a shake of her head. “It’s all from a book with no interaction. They didn’t even show us braille!” Centers like this are so rare that she didn’t know any existed before her internship.

Now, she is meeting people who have been isolated for years.

“They are hidden,” she says. “We don’t see them because they don’t come out from their homes. They don’t know how, and they feel like everything is against them,” she says, her young voice heavy.

“One man told me that he used to have a job and a wife and family. Now all that is gone, and he can’t even make a cup of tea.

“We help them to be able to walk outside again and feel the sun on their skin.”

CEMIPRE’s vision is to expand to reach the estimated 1.1 million vision-impaired people in the country. The services are critical, but the soul-satisfying piece is helping people see the tremendous love of the cross, the team says.

“Then, when they hear how much they are loved—wow!” John says with a laugh.

People who think of themselves as only a burden come to know that they are no less made in the image of God.

They discover that God, through His Church, is looking for them.