AND THEN SOME ...

Oftentimes as we research stories for Denison Magazine, we stumble upon treasure troves of information. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s wonderful to have so much good material to create stories for our readers, but at the same time, we often have to make tough decisions about what material makes it into our print magazine and what material we have to file away for future reference. As we worked with writer Sally Ann Flecker to pull together an article called “Minister of Peace” for the issue in mailboxes now, we exchanged emails with Gus Parajón’s (’59) widow, Joan Morgan Parajón ’58, who lives in Nicaragua. Through our research, we learned many more things about Gus than we could manage to include in the print version of his story. Things like the fact that Gus had been born in Nicaragua in 1935 and grew up in contact with a Baptist Missionary in Managua by the name of Lloyd E. Wyse, who was from Granville. It turns out that Wyse was the director of the Baptist School in Managua and offered scholarships to graduating students to attend Denison University. Parajón was among the first four students to receive such a scholarship and this, writes his family, “forever changed the course of his life.”

Parajón met Joan during a Bible study, and only hours after his Denison graduation, they married at the First Baptist Church of Granville. The couple, of course, returned to Nicaragua, where Parajón took the lessons learned from Wyse and passed them on by personally mentoring members of the younger generation and helping them make contacts to secure scholarships for high school and colleges in Nicaragua and the United States. Parajón received many awards for his life work, which you can read about in the current issue, and he helped found many organizations to make the world a better place—organizations like Prestanic, a Nicaraguan microfinance non-profit organization aimed at helping families overcome poverty, CONAR (Nicaraguan Committee for Assistance to Refugees) in cooperation with the United Nations, and different projects associated with the First Baptist Church of Managua during his tenure as pastor (1984-2010).

Many thanks to the Parajón family for sharing such wonderful stories about Gus. It’s clear he made a difference in this world and will be greatly missed.