My Experience at Peace Camp

Mena Ulloa, Sarah Burkett , Beatriz Ulloa have fun at Peace Camp in Winstom-Salem, NC, in the year 2000.

Our first experience in the Summer Conference (Peace Camp) was in the year 2000. My mother, being the first Baptist woman ordained to the pastorate in Mexico that year (her pastoral ordination on March of 2000 was attended by a small delegation of BPFNA, all women), received an invitation to be a preacher at that year's conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This invitation was extended to my sister and me. Although my parents had been familiar with BPFNA since the 1990s, and my father even served on the BPFNA Board of Directors. But for us, it was our first interaction with the organization. We felt excitement, expectation, and perhaps a little nervousness, as I don't think we had ever been in a place where the language spoken for an entire week was different from our own.

It was then that we met Sarah Burkett, who welcomed us as if we had known each other all our lives. In that space, she became an excellent friend and companion for us as we ventured into a new and unfamiliar place (and a different language). It has now been 24 years since that beautiful experience, and it has been kept deep in our hearts.

Mena reconnects with Sarah at Peace Camp in 2015.

Fifteen years later, in 2015, I had the opportunity to return to a Summer Conference, where I reconnected with Sarah and her family, as well as loved ones who still remembered me, and I remembered them. By that time, I was already a member of the BPFNA Board of Directors. 

Who would have imagined that since that year 2000, when I had my first personal experience with BPFNA, in 2011 I would be invited to join the Board of Directors during a trip to Chiapas with a small BPFNA delegation? Then, in 2016, I officially started working as part of the organization's staff to organize the first Summer Conference in Mexico (2017). Since then, we have continued on this journey, having worked on a Global Baptist Peace Conference in Colombia and four more Summer Conferences (three of them virtual and the first one in person in Puerto Rico).

I am sure that all this has not been pure coincidence. Undoubtedly, each experience and encounter has been part of a path that has led us to where we are today, I am sure. If it had not been for that summer conference in 2000 maybe I would not be here, or maybe I would, I do not know. What I do know is that everything I experienced in that summer conference marked me and left a seed in my heart that over the years has been nurtured by the other experiences I have had with BPFNA, this great peacemaking family that has welcomed and embraced me. And I'll always be grateful.