News 22 -- January 2006

I must ask myself, as I did so often before when living in various parts of Latin America: “is it justified for me to be living here in Latin America when so much of the world’s problems have their roots in the capitalistic system and government of the United States?”

[campo = farm field or farm region. Campesino(a) = peasant farmer]


NEWS-22

January 2006
Guatemala

Dear Friends,

It’s been a long time, more than four years since I have sent out any sort of newsletter. Those four years had me in the U.S. and after my mom died in August of 200l, I got serious about trying to put some of my life on paper. To my surprise I accomplished this, but as of yet, have not found a publisher.

I have been back here in Guatemala now over 3 months and I am wondering if an audience exists to send news to, though I feel my soul is bubbling over with things to share, personally and things outside of myself in a certain sense.

While in the states those four years and after my mom’s death, it wasn’t hard to reflect on my life with her spirit in me and her great influence on me till the day she died at 98. Instead of trying to sum up the contents in these memoirs, I ask you (if there is in fact anyone out there waiting anxiously to read my ‘gatherings’), to hang on patiently. They will get out, by hook or by crook.

What to say? The decision to come back to Guatemala was made when I first visited here during the months of March and April of this year. Yes, I did come to get a sense of my feelings for returning and also to assist the 25th anniversary of the death of Oscar Romero celebrated in El Salvador.

That celebration alone with thousands of people from around the world coming to reflect the life and death of Oscar Romero, the death of the Jesuits and the woman and her daughter working at the Jesuit University (UCA) with them, was inspiration enough to beckon my heart to once again live among the people of Latin America. There is something about this land and its people south of the border that makes it hard or almost impossible to stay away.

Dear friends, here is where I am now, physically and spiritually. I moved into my 70th year of life recently and a friend reminded me: “Lorenzo, at best you have l0 more years of full living remaining, so be sure they are your years doing what your spirit yearns to do most, with all the gusto and enthusiasm you can muster.” I liked that. And somewhere, midway through my visit in March and April I knew I would come back here to Guatemala.

Given my past, I knew and know what gives me life. I know it’s about being personally connected with those desperately in need. To celebrate the sacraments does give me life, but especially when there is that personal contact where knowing and growing and loving those in need become a possibility and a result of such contact.

Parish life is great, but I feel we often accept a mission in the most abandoned and impoverished areas without taking into account how our people on all levels of their human needs can be met. And too, is there time for me, my needs, my growth, whereby my talents and my capabilities are best shared with my people?

Since returning I have been fortunate to visit a hospice for patients with AIDS or the AIDS virus. There are up to 45 children with the virus and generally up to l0 to l2 adults with AIDS itself. This number does not include the many persons young and old who come weekly for consultation and medication they need to combat this often deathly disease.

So thanks be to God, I have been given the okay since returning to create my own ministry. I had no idea just what this might turn out to be. It was suggested I remain living in the Capital and begin to see just what needs existed there. In a country torn by war and violence; where the trafficking of children and the selling of drugs is a multimillion dollar industry, I knew it would be more a question of where I felt I wanted to put my energy.

In these first few months I found the Sisters of Madre Theresa and their home for the abandoned elderly of the country a place where I could go and come as I pleased. At first I would take my sketchbook, sit down in the middle of a group of the women, write their names down, so as to hopefully remember at least some of their names, and then ask if there was anyone who wished to have me draw a profile of them. I am in fact an amateur at best, but they were delighted at the possibility. It’s a wonderful way to get acquainted, since when I began to sketch one lady, several others would gather around and conversation would start up, on most any subject.

Across from the area where the women are, live the other half of the community, in all, about fifty men. I do not have a game plan for the men. I just show up. And then I just help in whatever needs to be done at the time. I usually help Minor, a young man working with the men. He gives baths to the fifty men daily, so I just dry the men down, help them to dress and afterwards help to scrub down the shower and toilet area. Anyone having worked in elderly care know that such work as giving baths and dressing the folks with clean clothes can be quite a task. Some may shout and call you names, others throw their clean clothes back at you and all those nice things. But that’s what makes it all interesting, to say the least.

There is also a woman who visits once a week to give physical therapy to those who are open to receiving it. There is a certain percentage of the community who often for reasons of their mental state refuse the therapy. She works with whomever shows up. Aura welcomed my presence on those days and I found it a great way to be of service and a way to learn a bit more about the needs of the community. It was easy enough to lift up the leg, or help the men and women to stretch their arms, or to just toss the round plastic ball back and forth. It’s delightful to see the joy so many of our friends get in these weekly exercises and it’s a good way of adding some diversity to their rather seemingly long daily routine.

The huge city hospital of San Juan de Dios is the third place I have been visiting two times each week. How a hospital is able to accept the majority of its patients who are poor and unable to pay anything is beyond me. Some sort of note from a doctor or a director of a clinic verifying the sickness and need of the person is usually enough for admittance. So the young and old from all ends of Guatemala come. Those unable to pay anything may have to wait up to a month before being operated on. Yet, I have never heard anyone complain about the waiting. It’s what the poor have been born doing -- waiting in lines for most every need they have. Just where the money comes from to run the hospital is hard to say, as the country is so impoverished and in debt of every kind.

But operations of every kind are performed. Nurses and doctors somehow are maintained around the clock. I have been fortunate to have known the Sisters of Charity who work there, since it was their order who ran the clinic in our parish in Playa Grande, Quiche.

So I show up on Monday mornings and Sr. Estel and I make the rounds. Sister, who is in her early 70’s and who has been working in San Juan de Dios for over ten years glides from Intensive care unit to the emergency room and then to the five other floors of the hospital all in the course of one morning.

Sister has usually made the rounds during the days before my coming to know those who wish to receive communion, confess their sins or just have the need to see the ‘padre’. By making the rounds with Sister, I get my eyes and heart partially opened to the immensity and gravity of the suffering in Guatemala. I will then know those to whom I can return in a few days to follow up on the relationship established on my first visit with Sister.

At first, Sister and her community and especially the priest chaplain of the hospital said it would be best if I would come wearing a roman collar and priestly robe. I did get a picture I.D. of myself with the roman collar and with this I can pass through the entrance door without a problem. The first time or two dressed in my street clothes and without a priestly collar was sort of touchy, but as soon as Sister presented me to the patients as the ‘padre’ I think she was surprised to see that the habit or collar was not necessarily what was most important to the sick person. After these two or three months of visiting frequently, the Sisters and patients in general just feel good that someone comes who has time to spend and listen and bring the sacraments as the case might be.

What goes on here in a hospital basically for the poor? Well, I am not an expert after such a short time visiting here, but some things do seem to stand out. The hospital is basically quite clean, though paint has not reached many walls. However, doctors, nurses, and nurses aids take time to listen and do their work thoroughly and interact on a first name basis and in a most respectful manner almost always.

In the mornings the staff doctors make their rounds usually with student interns interacting well with each patient. The gratitude expressed by those being cared for is overwhelmingly one of gratitude. The majority coming without sufficient means to pay their medical bills, are deeply appreciative for all the help they are granted.

Unless a person is gravely sick, the patient stays in large dormitories holding up to 30 persons. A type of curtain or petition divides the men from the women. Guatemalans are by nature, as are most Latinos, very community minded. This is observed by the familiarity seen in life on the streets where the large part of each day is spent. Markets, small lunch counters and shops of every kind speak to this community way of life. Usually, only the need to sleep and eat brings folks inside their homes, or perhaps too, the new arrival of the TV and even more recently the computer.

So to walk into the city hospital for the poor one might find as I did groups of women gathered before or after their operations, around one or the other’s bed sharing about family life, their operations or present state of health or often grouped to pray together. No one was ever purposely excluded from these groups.

Ana was a young woman of 25 years old. She came, as do the others, waiting her turn to be examined and then operated on. She had had brain surgery before, and now needed an additional operation. A most friendly young woman from a religious fundamentalist background, mixing in well with her Protestant and Catholic neighbors. This is what made so many of the dormitories so precious and valuable. The patients truly cared for each other.

I always greeted Ana when I came to visit as she and her family were always so greetable. I always assured Ana and her folks of my prayers and for this they were most grateful. A week ago on visiting the 3rd floor where Ana and her friends formed community, Olga, one of the founding woman of this loosely formed sisterhood told me that Ana’s third brain operation did not go well. Ana was in and out of consciousness for several days and then before doctors could decide what course to take, Ana slipped away in the middle of the night. Twenty five years old and beautiful in every way, I wonder if Ana had been in a hospital in the U.S., with all the modern medical techniques available, if her life might have been saved?

Olga, Catalina, Maria Alvarez, Rosa, Dina are some of the names of the women patients from this 3rd floor contingent. Let me say a few words about Olga who awaits a fourth operation on her back. She seems to be the one person, so motherly and open to all, that drew people together. This group that I just mentioned are all Catholics. As we visited from week to week, Olga shared that she had never received her first communion, but that all of her five children had been baptized, received their first communion and were confirmed. And, all continue to practice their Catholic faith.

Olga confided that she did all she could to raise their children Catholic, went to church regularly with them and made sure they were instructed well and received the sacraments. But since she and her husband had never been married in the church she felt she couldn’t receive the sacraments. She acknowledged that her husband never wished to be married in the church and in fact had been unfaithful to her over the many years of their marriage.

I explained that under such conditions where it was her husband refusing to marry in the church she had every right to the sacraments. To confess and receive first communion right there in the hospital would be splendid.

And so it came to be. The five or six or more Catholic women who prayed and conversed continually with one another would come together in a week to celebrate Olga’s first communion. It was really neat because they were entering this feast day fully conscious that their friend Olga would have the added support of the sacraments now to see her through the difficult days ahead till her next operation and then hopefully on to a ‘normal’ life once again.


But now I think it best I continue on to share a bit about the third place where I also volunteer once or twice a week. It’s called Casa San Jose and is a hospice for AIDS patients. It is just a twenty minute walk from our Oblate House in San Bartolo and just thirty minutes from where I live on the outskirts of the Capital. Upon hearing that such a place existed from one of our scholastics, I asked him to accompany me there on a short visit. I wasn’t sure that I was up to this and what I might have to offer to victims of a most often deadly disease. But something inside me said yes, go and see. That is always the best and only way to act when something is pulling from within.

Casa San Jose is part of Hospice International and for some reason I hadn’t realized this during my first several visits there. All I had taken in was I had never seen any sort of social service community functioning with the love and care that I was witnessing here. Some forty children with the AIDS virus and another l0 to l5 adults with AIDS living all under the same roof.

On my first two or three visits, I tried to move around and just observe how things functioned, stopping to say hello and introducing myself to personnel working there and familiarizing myself with the general surroundings. The adults have a room large enough for about twelve beds. I would usually enter and as I passed a bed and saw that the person gave any response at all to my ‘buenos dias," ‘como esta usted?" I would stop and usually a conversation would start up automatically. In fact, if the person, man or woman, was not suffering too much at the time, they generally welcomed a visit and a chance to talk.

I have been visiting Casa San Jose now for over four months. Early on, a young boy of eight years died there. He had become a permanent resident there since the age of four. Volunteers and staff alike had come to love ‘Juanito’ as he was called. I only came to know of him on his last day of life when I was asked to administer the sacrament of the sick to him. But by then Juanito was unconscious, yet his appearance alone gave way for reflection of what this crippling and deadly disease is all about. I asked if a Eucharist would be in order for Juanito, and it was suggested that it be celebrated on the ninth day after his death.

What a moving experience this Mass was for me. All forty five children, plus cooks, nurses and doctors and almost the entire staff were present. Two seminarians who visit regularly led the singing and the kids especially picked up to the guitar music and made an excellent choir. Most touching though was when I asked, after the reading of the gospel, if anyone would like to express anything about the presence and life of Juanito during his four years in the community there. Juanito’s joyful and never complaining presence had touched deeply everyone who came to know him. Tears flowed and enough couldn’t be said about how this little lad, abandoned by his parents, had truly brought life and love to all the community of Casa San Jose.

I met Luis Fernando one morning when his father and his father’s brother had come to visit Luis, as he lay in bed in the section for adults. I came to learn that not only Luis had AIDS but also his wife and one of his two small daughters also. It was evident that his father was really suffering with his son and doing everything possible to comfort him. They had come a long ways from the state of Solala and Luis had worked hand in hand with his dad in the ‘campo’ before contacting AIDS. It was easy talking with Juan, Luis’ father since they were Catholics and at this time especially were receptive to any kind of consolation and help they might be able to receive. It turned out too that Juan was what is called a Eucharistic Minister in his parish church and prayed with all his heart for his son and family that somehow they be spared the deadly results that AIDS so often brings. So the contact was a welcomed one for Luis and his father as well as for myself. They said the next day would bring Aura, Luis’ wife and daughter Wendy who would both be receiving treatment for AIDS....

It is now several weeks since I wrote the last paragraph. I met and became familiar with Aura, Luis’ wife, their daughters Wendy and Alma. Luis improved and was released from the hospice and I continued to keep in contact with the family by telephone. But then one day a call came from Luis who explained they had been trying to reach me by phone, but couldn’t get thru. Their daughter Wendy who had the AIDS virus was interned in the hospital San Juan de Dios and while there fell into a coma and within two days had died.

The news sent me into a state of shock, since when I had last seen Wendy and her sister Alma at the hospice San Jose, she had appeared quite healthy. I tried to respond to Luis expressing my sincerest sympathies, but felt that this did nothing to ease the pain that he, Aura and the family were going through.

In the days and weeks following, I have been able to visit with the family when they come to receive their consultations and medicine at the Casa San Jose each month. They seem to be living with the loss, but it will take months or years or perhaps never will they get over the death of Wendy, their three year old daughter.

It is hard to put to words how the visits to the hospice San Jose, the hospital San Juan de Dios and the Sister’s elderly home is affecting my life. Seeing death facing persons who have become my closest friends, suddenly take them to the other side allows me to enter a new and deeper dimension of my personal life. For this, I am deeply grateful.

Before putting an end to this letter to you, I should try to state briefly, the larger picture of life that lies before us all today. The hurricanes have come to Guatemala and have left many without home or crops and taken the lives of thousands of dear ones. To a country already impoverished by years of war and violence and exploitation of the poor beyond repair it seems, this kind of disaster is all but unbearable.

As I read the news from our papers here, and receive over the internet the world news in general, I also must personally deal with the situation of what so many of my friends in the U.S. are confronting on a daily basis. I must ask myself, as I did so often before when living in various parts of Latin America: “is it justified for me to be living here in Latin America when so much of the world’s problems have their roots in the capitalistic system and government of the United States?”

My friends are serving time in prison for saying no over and over again to the School of the Americas in Columbus, Ga. Others have been to Iraq again and again, fasted and said no through Civil Disobedience for our countries devastating presence on the people of Iraq. Most recently members of several communities of Catholic Workers have gone into Cuba marching from its capital of Santiago to Guatanamo Bay, where the U.S. has held prisoners without trial for well over a year, in hopes of holding interviews with the prisoners undergoing a hunger strike, focusing on their deplorable conditions there.

I guess I will never be able to understand whether my decision to be in Guatemala presently is justifiable or not. But I do sense it is important that each of us make decisions out of where we have been and experienced and know that somehow we are connected in our efforts.

It is now just three days before Christmas. I must put an end to these rambling thoughts and to finally wish you all a blessed Christmas and a joy filled New Year. My prayers, love and peace to you all. Lorenzo