The Poor Among Us: Why We Go To Guatemala

“Guatemala is not enough,“ bemoaned a fellow theology teacher, a man who leads student mission trips to Central America.  As we sat a retreat house after visiting a Guatemalan garbage dump community he explained,  “I have too many conservative students and parents saying, 'Gosh, the poor in our country don’t know how good they have it.'”   He is a man who prioritizes social justice in his religious and political views, and although I am not an adamant proponent of liberation theology or progressive moral theologians, I also found my heart speeding up with frustration at the idea that students did not understand why they went to Guatemala, that so many did not take to heart the plight of the impoverished in their own cities, their own schools, their own families.  And so I asked myself: why do we go to Guatemala? 

 

While talking to a group of rising seniors at an all boys high school who were serving in Guatemala, there was clearly one story that had affected them most deeply.  It had occurred during their first hours in Guatemala just a week before my arrival.  I know that the young men had gone to Guatemala City’s largest cemetery to lookout over the city garbage dump.  They had seen for the first of many times that week: thousands of humans looking for recyclables, sorting quickly through dump truck loads of trash, looking from afar much more like ants swarming over a rotten piece of food than individuals with the great dignity of being children of God.  But to this sight, the overpowering smell of methane gas, the hundreds of circling vultures, the young men quickly became accustomed.  In fact, they never described this scene to me.  But what clearly did leave a lasting impression was their encounter with death.   

On top of that lookout, the young men learned that the average lifespan of people in the dump community is less than 55 years of age; disease, amputations, and deaths from truck/worker accidents are not uncommon. Looking around the cemetery, the young men saw bones lying at the foot of broken tombs - the leftover contents of tombs whose bodies were dumped into the garbage to be searched for valuables when the tomb upkeep fee was not paid.   

The high school boys went from this site to the home of a student who attends the free school that they were helping to build on the outskirts of the dump.  While the dump outlook was eye-opening and the scattered bones unnerving, nothing prepared the team for what they would encounter most personally in the invasion community home that they visited next.  When they arrived at the house, they found out that the nine month old daughter of the family had died just hours before and was lying out in state in the family’s squalid one room shack.  They were invited to enter.  Knowing that many of the boys had not seen a dead person, let alone an unembalmed nine month old girl in the presence of her weeping mother and stoic father, their teacher decided to pray for the family outside of the home.  The father and mother joined them.  Each boy shook the hand of the father.  Each expressed his condolences in a mix of broken Spanish and simple English.  The baby had Down Syndrome and was unable to receive the medical attention needed for her heart.  Not a day had not gone by when these boys did not talk about this experience - the pain of shaking the father’s hand.  Beginning their mission work with this encounter with death, the boys spent the rest of their week working with children, half dead themselves: living in the midst of incredible poverty, disease, physical and sexual abuse, alcoholism, hunger, violence, and torn families.

And so one can imagine someone saying “the poor people in our city don’t realize how lucky they are.”  When a person who believes that “poor people are lazy and entitled” encounter this, he has one of two options: to change his presumption or make an exception, “poor people are lazy and entitled except those hardworking, tragic souls who live in Guatemala City.”  If the latter is the reaction of a student, the thousands of dollars spent to send students to the trash dumps of Central America was an utter waste.  So why do we bother sending students as missionaries to provide small help to people with such need?

Because as Catholics, as human beings, we have the deepest obligation to care for the poor, to be good Samaritans.  But not just the poor some 3,000 miles away.  For most, a missionary trip to Guatemala happens once in a lifetime, yet we are reminded in the opening lines of Gaudiam et Spes, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”  Like the Good Samaritan who stopped on the side of the road to care for the man who fell victim to robbers on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, we are called by Christ to care for those in need. We go to see the hunger and the poverty of the garbage dump communities to alleviate the suffering of people around the world, but we also go to raise our own awareness of the effects of poverty.  Of material poverty in our own cities, yes, but more importantly to become aware of the invisible poverty all around us.  We forget that like the Good Samaritan, we too meet people half dead every day in our ordinary lives.  We travel to Guatemala to open our eyes to poverty - in all its forms.

 Mother Teresa so famously wrote, “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”  

So we travel to Guatemala to ready ourselves to serve the poorest among us - the sad, the lonely, the heartbroken, those without faith.  We ready ourselves to see misfortune, to slow down enough to notice the poverty in our school, our workplace, our church, our home.  We learn to avoid hurrying by from parking lot to office, from cubicle to cubicle, from classroom desk to desk, from room to room in our very home.  And then like the Good Samaritan, we learn to be unafraid to get close and to care for the immediate need of those closest to us: unafraid to smile, to ask questions, to offer prayers, to let go of petty preferences, to laugh and cry, to speak the unpopular truth, to bring the fallen away to formation and the Sacraments, to bring Love, to bring God.

As I reflect on the wretched poverty of Guatemala, I think of the words of Blessed Mother Teresa, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread,” and I remember that Guatemala is not enough, but it is a first step.  In the Body of Christ, we are all connected.   In the voice of Jesus, St. John Chrysostom wrote, “I am not saying to you: solve all my problems for me, give me everything you have, even though I am poor for love of you.  I only ask for some bread and clothes, some relief for my hunger [...] My love is so great that I want you to feed me.”  What a great mystery that Jesus would choose to use us to care for the needs of His body and that in caring for the members of his body, the object of our charity is ultimately Jesus himself.