Rainbow Network founder Keith Jaspers leaves legacy in Nicaragua, North America

The very best human being I have ever known died today (Nov. 8, 2023). Keith Jaspers, the founder of The Rainbow Network, former candidate for Congress, former farmer, hotel owner, and one of my dear friends died after a three-year battle with cancer. The world didn't deserve him yet few who worked with him ever knew what a giant they were in the presence of. The world is impoverished by his death.

Every person we know, we know from our own perspective and none of us can speak objectively about anyone. So, please, permit me to speak of Keith existentially, from my perspective, and I can only hope that in so doing, you can catch a glimpse of the man I have known these past 20-plus years.

Keith knew of me through my newspaper articles and my community activism in causes related to social justice and poverty. When we ran into one another in various meetings, he kept asking me to come to Nicaragua with him, to see the work he was starting there. I had gone a lot of places with what churches too easily call “mission trips” and I had little reason to believe that what Keith was doing in Nicaragua was significantly different from what I had been a part of in Appalachia, or Ecuador, or Mexico. But he was persistent, and patient, and I finally said, “I’ll see if a dozen people from my church are interested in going. If there are a dozen people willing to come along, I’ll make time to go with you.”

I believe that there were about 25 people who immediately volunteered to pay their own way and to go and see what the Rainbow Network was doing.

Hot, dusty, impoverished and war-ravaged Nicaragua looks a lot like the rural poverty we see in other parts of the world, but our week on the ground gave us a chance to help build little cinder-block houses, see elementary schools, meet some high school scholarship students and recipients of small business loans. We also got to shadow some doctors who either ride horses or drive jeeps deep into the jungle treating illnesses that physicians in North America never see.

It took me a few years to realize the genius of the system Keith had devised, through trial and error, using his own family money, to get it figured out. In his time of working with Habitat International, Keith had realized that there are times that just giving someone a house creates more problems than it solves. Keith could see that a homeowner also needed a reliable income, and there are barriers that keep people in poverty, like illiteracy, untreated illness, or malnutrition. And as much as we can applaud helping one person at a time, in most poor countries, that approach also creates serious problems.

Keith found a way to enter into a kind of contract with small communities in which everyone participated, everyone who received benefits also volunteered to help everyone else. Helping to give food and education to children, business opportunities to adults, medical attention, and housing opportunities for everyone, Keith changed village after village with remarkable success stories. This was his idea. You can’t find another non-governmental agency doing it this way or, I would argue, with his level of success.

On the other side of the equation, he was giving North Americans, in churches, in businesses, in civic groups, the opportunity to be a part of doing something that changed the lives of the poor in rural Nicaragua while it also changed those of us who were involved. I was a volunteer, a donor, a fundraiser, an “evangelist” for the cause, a board member, and for a brief time, I was an employee, working as the interim director of Rainbow during a time of staff transition for Rainbow and a vocational transition in my own life.

I didn’t like working for Keith. He had impossible expectations. He had an inflexible demand for results. He had a bad habit of showing up at the office five minutes before time to go home and casually ask me to join him for coffee and a donut and maybe two or three hours of hashing through projects, ideas, and what he wanted me to get done before I went to bed. He was encouraging, and generous with praise, but he was unashamed of making it clear that he expected the impossible and, with surprising frequency, he got the impossible done.

It has taken me some years to gradually become aware of just what an amazing man it has been my honor to work with, to work for, and to admire as we have both grown old. I have sat through hours of board meetings and public gatherings in which people who didn’t have half of Keith’s intellect, and not a thimble-full of his character and vision, would actually talk down to him and place demands on the mission and nature of Rainbow’s work if they were going to continue to contribute or participate.

Keith was never defensive and never returned hostility in repayment for such absurd abuse. Like the philosophy of Habitat, Keith could see that the “theology of the hammer” was bigger than anyone’s beliefs, that no one’s personal faith or lack of faith should get in the way of efficiently and effectively ameliorating the suffering of the innocent victims of poverty.

Keith had a profound and deep spirituality that went so far beyond the pompous and childish faith of so many of the people who considered themselves to be in a position to guide him and tell him how to do what he was already doing better than many people could ever appreciate. I realized that as Keith retired and turned over operations of the charity he started out of his own heart and wallet, that he was not being shown the kind of deference he deserved and, at least in my opinion, he was being dismissed by people who didn’t even understand what he had done.

When I had a chance to take Keith to cancer treatments, I would try to remind him of the lifesaving and life-enhancing things he had accomplished for thousands upon thousands of people. And I included myself in that list because the very best things that I ever accomplished in my 40-plus years of ministry began in Keith’s heart and mind, and he managed by either inspiration or manipulation to get me to do more than I ever imagined that I could.

But in those car rides, knowing that I had taken some shameless abuse from that sociopathic institution we too easily refer to as “the church” he would speak over his grave illness and impending death, to try to make me feel good about my life’s work and unheralded accomplishments. He could almost make me believe his propaganda might have had a kernel of truth to it but mostly it was his generosity, his compassion, that made him show love, even as the glowing ember of his own life was about to disappear.

He was proud of his children, even if they were eclipsed by his pride in his grandchildren. He took pleasure in things I couldn’t relate to ... model trains, ham radio and pretty mediocre Mexican food. He bore the challenges of his cancer treatments with unshakable courage and he never complained about the obvious pain from a series of surgeries and treatments that gave him just a few more months of life.

I am devastated by his death. I have never known his equal and I doubt that I will ever meet another person who could stand in his shoes. I can’t even imagine the loss that Karen, his loving wife, or any of his family must be feeling now. I wonder how the news of his death will be received as it rolls around the hills of Matagalpa and the farmland around Managua. I am sorry that it took me so long to realize how uncommon Keith has always been and how much recognition he really deserved from a world that has largely taken his genius for granted.

I can’t take religious language about life after death seriously in any traditional sense but I know this: Keith’s love lives on in the lives of those who received medical treatment and surgery that kept them alive, those who learned how to read and write, to grow and manufacture, buy and sell, until they had moved from mud huts in the jungle into houses with kitchens and toilets, and who were able to send their children to college. His work lives in all of us who were changed by his vision, his sacrifice, his humility, and his inspiration. On the one hand, I know that he is dead. I saw it coming all too clearly. But on the other hand, he will never die because his good deeds form a cascading waterfall of improved lives all over Nicaragua and among those of us who had a chance to work with him in North America.

Roger Ray is pastor of The Emerging Church in Springfield.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Rainbow Network founder Keith Jaspers' death leaves world poorer place