Retiro Anual, etc.

Greetings from Chimbote! I write this new blog over several days from Wednesday, March 25, to Monday, March 30 – with still one written blog yet to post from earlier this month. I´ve had some technical difficulties transferring from our home computer to an internet connected site using floppy disks, but am hoping to post them both soon. I have, however, succeeded in posting some music from our choir on our music site, link at right, from a wedding that we sang at in January (songs with ´W´ preceding the title). Also, the photo site has some images from March, including our yearly retreat in Tortugas. Before going on to summarize recent life, I wish you a happy feast of the Incarnation (9 months before Christmas). March 25th is the patron feast of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, so we four gathered with the local sisters, IW lay associates, and others from the parish for a 7:00 mass and then a compartir – a simple sharing of food – at the sisters´ house afterward.

VISITS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
Elmer, an acquaintance from the parish who is finishing his studies to be an English teacher, asked me to accompany him on two visits to classes at a local public high school. As part of his student teaching, he has to do some communal work and asked me to present on the importance of learning English, the school system in the US, and bring a song in English to look at the lyrics. We visited a fifth grade class – students were about 16 years old, since high school here is five years – and a fourth grade class on two separate days (see photo of the fifth graders below). Impressions: a scarcity of resources and amenities within the rooms themselves, which were basically concrete with desks, a few tables and a whiteboard; students all wore uniforms; the first day we tried to have them do group work without much success; not a lot of respect for the authority of their teacher, though I know this depends a lot on the teacher´s work beforehand; all students in public schools wear uniforms; curiosity about school system in the US; they really liked hearing the U2 song, though didn´t understand much of it since their English is really basic, maybe similar to the Spanish of many US high school students. We arrived in the second week of classes for the year, and were told that some students had still not started attending for the year. While waiting for the watchman to let us out the second day, I had a group of 7-8 second grade youth gather around me with tons of questions about the US, why I was here, etc, realizing at that moment that in their enthusiasm youth in various parts of the world are not really that different.



ANNUAL IWM RETREAT
A couple days following the visits to República Peruana high school, we four joined Sister Leonila – a recently-arrived IW sister from Mexico – for the 45-minute ride to Casa Galilea, the retreat house owned by the Diocese of Chimbote on Tortugas Bay, where we held our yearly Incarnate Word Missionary Retreat. Though the rest of the IWM´s in Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas gathered together for a joint retreat in Mexico, travel distances oblige us to make our own retreat, united in spirit. Like last year´s retreat in Lima, this five-night experience was restful and fruitful spiritually and personally – but the site was definitely an improvement in my book. For one, we avoided the eight-hour trip to Lima and instead of being in a compound within the city, we were right on the water of the bay, the most consistently heard sound being that the small waves coming ashore down the stairs from the nice covered patio. We had a small, simple house with six bedrooms and a living room, pretty good food served three times a day (lots of rice and potatoes, not surprisingly), lukewarm showers if you waited until the afternoon, a swim most afternoons, and a refreshing ocean breeze. Tortugas itself is mostly vacation homes with a handful of hotels/hostals and a few restaurants. Though on the coast, there are few signs of greenery about – rocky shores and beach, mountains of sand and rock, dirt roads. It felt fairly abandoned with the summer over, schools back in session, and most of the families from Chimbote, Lima, or Trujillo gone for the year until next summer. There is no electricity anywhere except for 6:45-11:45 in the evening – weird to see all the lights in the homes across the bay come on at the same moment. Water is delivered by truck to private tanks which feed each individual home or complex, and a guy with a big basket strapped to the back of his small motorcycle makes bread deliveries each morning. Our schedule included prayer and scripture sharing at 9:00 at 4:00, one interview each day with Sister Leonila, guides for personal reflection, lots of personal time for journaling, reading, thinking, etc, and a time of sharing about the day with the group after dinner each night. I did some running around the bay or climbed the mountain behind the house each morning, and one afternoon we all four climbed up to watch the sunset. I went to bed early, took a short nap each afternoon, and generally caught up on a lot of needed rest (although three days back in Chimbote I felt very tired once again), and had plenty of time to play the guitar. Themes for my own reflection included my personal relationships, how I´ve grown in the past year (helped to read my journal from last year´s retreat), and priorities/hopes for the my final six months here in Chimbote. My list of last project ideas and goals from our 2008 retreat was, I now realize, quite naively over-ambitious – though I might very-well look back on my revised goals for this period as a bit far-reaching as well. I guess better this tendency than the opposite – see next headings for discussion of ministry goals.



CHOIR
I still much enjoy being a part of my choir, Trovadores del Evangelio (Troubadors of the Gospel), though we admittedly are suffering through a bit of a transition period as a group. Several veteran members have dropped out – at least temporarily – largely due to time restraints from studies and/or work commitments. As it happens, those 7-10 of us left are all guys, several being quite good musicians on guitar, percussion, and/or wind instruments. Ginno, our repeat coordinator, is deeply committed but at times lacks a little tact in managing the group and stimulates unnecessary tensions. I have taken on the role of typing up the lyrics every two weeks of the songs we will be singing at mass, and still have the goal of playing the guitar with the group, but would also like to help more. What we really need, maybe, is to invite new members for a new group make-up, though we need to work a little on creating a welcoming environment for new people. This may be an area of focus for my ministry – to help strengthen the choir an provide a place for new people to be involved in the parish life. I was discouraged this past week by a couple things with the group – first, that Ginno told his fellow coordinator – and a main guitarist – on the night before we were to sing at mass that he wouldn´t be singing because he wasn´t leading well by example with the group. Partly true, I think, but could have been handled better. Anyway, he didn´t sing – and three other guys also boycotted in protest, leaving three of us who had rehearsed. We requested some emergency help, and it turned out a little off key, but acceptable. Then, this past weekend, a couple group members got on Ginno´s case for inviting others to sing with us who hadn´t rehearsed (a rule of the choir is that you have to rehearse to sing). Ginno got upset and there was an argument. I just left feeling – besides tired, at 11:00 pm – but discouraged that if even within parish groups we have trouble working with each other, how will we tackle the larger problems that face us all and face society?

BIBLE WORKSHOP
A very positive recent experience was a Bible workshop in the parish every evening during the week March 23-27. All parish groups and meetings were suspended (including our English classes) for a Lectio Divina workshop led by a team from the diocese of Chimbote. Primarily, following the first hour on Monday for introduction and orientation to they why of Bible study, we spent each evening in groups of 10-12 reading, discussing, and praying in response to a different short scripture passage each night. Each evening about 80 leaders and participants from the parish – primarily adults, but also some from our JUMIFRA youth leadership group – met to read, pray and share. Besides the benefits that it had in connecting members of the parish, I found it spiritually rewarding, something I´ve missed. I kept wanting to share all sorts of ideas and thoughts, and a couple themes kept jumping out at me. One, the missionary call of the church – to go out, no just wait for folks to come to us. As you know if you´ve read my blog for a while, I´ve had for some time a desire to initiate a more concerted effort to visit youth in their homes. The reality is that we communicate with a very small fraction of the young people that live within our parish region, the majority of whom are Catholic culturally or in name. Previously also, I´ve realized that the consistent time commitment required to plan and prepare for eight English classes per week indeed takes away energy and time that I could put at the disposal of other parish youth projects. In these weeks as we come to the end of a third English class cycle, I am discerning again my priorities in my final months – how do I best invest my limited time and energy in these five months that I have left here?

ENGLISH CLASSES
Even given the time commitment mentioned above, I do enjoy teaching English and the community that has developed within the group. We are just today getting back to our normal schedule after a two-week break – one for our retreat and the second for the parish Bible workshop. We tried to hold make-up classes on the Saturday afternoons before and after, but just a few students came. This actually is our final full week of classes – the second half of next week we will be suspending classes for our Holy Week celebrations. I took advantage of the class being cancelled last week to finish the project of an English Class IWM CD. Each of us four chose 9 of our favorite songs that we have access to here on CD and we compiled a two-disk set of music in English, accompanied by all the lyrics for students to practice – and for the fun of sharing our own musical culture with our students. Initial response has been positive, music being so popular here. We´ll finish this three-month cycle the Monday after Easter and are scheduled to start a new cycle the first week of May. Also at that time, I will again be assisting with the Confirmation program one or two nights per week and therefore am considering consolidating two of our four groups and not, this cycle, starting a new group from the very beginning.

UPCOMING VISIT OF MY FAMILY
My family is again coming to visit! A little more than a year after my mom and aunt Janie braved the summer heat of Chimbote last March, my brother Ryan and his wife Michelle, along with my sister Suzanne and her boyfriend Cory, will be arriving for a 2 ½ week sojourn in Peru. They arrive in Chimbote Saturday, April 11, and after four days here we will again travel south to explore Cuzco and the Inca trail. I feel blessed to be able (thanks to the generosity of my parents and aunt) to be able to visit for the third time sites that for many are once in a lifetime experiences. I also can´t avoid a little guilt knowing that my friends from Chimbote will likely never be able to visit Cuzco, although it lies within their own country. Still, I can´t help but be very excited for the upcoming visit – to see my brother and sister after 20 months, to share with my life and my temporary home country, to have them meet my friends. An ironic note is that thinking of the upcoming reunion I am missing home more – a feeling no doubt increased by the ill health of my dad and wanting to be able to help more.

ON THE HOME FRONT
One welcome development that came out of our retreat was the development of a more structured sharing of house responsibilities, important to me because at times I have felt recently that I was having to assume a larger than just share of taking care things around the house (cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc). With Julie and Courtney now each having two mornings free during each week, they have more time to cook, and actually wanted to take on more of this job. So, I now am responsible for preparing lunch on just two days – Friday and Saturday, and we have a rotating schedule of home cleaning responsibilities.

We still don´t have a new fridge, though our friend Alex did help us to sell the old one for parts. As a splurge, we used some of the 50 soles to go out for ceviche. We returned from our retreat to a burned out pump, once again leaving us without running water in the house. This time the bucket showers and filling buckets morning and afternoon lasted less than a week, our landlord Hector getting to repairing the pump fairly quickly. Lifting the faucet in the bathroom and having water come out is, hopefully, something I will not take for granted for a long time to come.



Last week we welcomed a two-day visit from Zach and Tad, two representatives of a US Christian organization called Harvest. The mission of Harvest is to train local missionaries in practical methods for transforming their local community socially, politically, and spiritually through concrete acts of love, of meeting peoples´ real needs. Zach´s job (he is a friend of Jane´s), as a journalist, as been to travel around three continents (Asia, Africa, South America) to record stories of the activities of local churches that have Harvest-trained missionaries. Peru is the midway point of his four month, eight country South American loop – the last of the three continents. I was intrigued to hear his stories of adventures while traveling and he was definitely interested in the activity of the local church here. It was interesting to hear that although Harvest trains missionaries from all sorts of denominations, he didn´t know of them working with any Catholic churches.

EVERYDAY IMAGES
With the months that I have left here sure to fly by, I am trying to remember more of the images of daily life here that I strike me as I walk through each day. 1) Every morning as I go running on Avenida Peru out into the fields of corn, rice, and cotton, I pass numerous two-wheeled donkey carts on the way from field to market and several groups of children I regularly see being driven to school using this means of transport. On one particular morning, I was struck by three very young school children, maybe 5 or 6 years old, perched high upon a mountain of cornstalks being carted into town. Another father can often be seen driving his two young daughters to school over the sandy dirt road – by bike – one perched on a back rack and the other between her father´s legs on the cross bar. Then there are the two sisters, maybe 12 and 8, who daily make the mile+ walk into school, almost invariably the older sister about 10 paces ahead of the younger. It strikes me that, pulled out of their radically different setting, these kids – in their well-kept uniforms of skirts and blouses – could just as well be piling out of an SUV at a Catholic school in the US. 2) I regularly see as well, walking about, people transporting large loads by their own power. The primary means for accomplishing the transport of whatever large item – a pile of furniture, scrap metal, bricks, sides of beef, crates of chickens in their last hours of life – is the ´triciclo´, or tricycle. Triciclos have one rear wheel, two wheels in front to support a large cargo box, and just one gear. For this reason, and because of the sheer weight of some of the loads, often the owner is seen pushing or pulling the card instead of actually riding, unless he is heading downhill. Apart from the triciclos, I saw a man this week carrying a metal tray – with an incredibly tall pile of cookies – on top of his head. How he managed to maintain the cookie mountain intact must me a feat of practice (and a strong neck) – anyway, the cookies must have been fresh baked, because they definitely smelled good as he walked past.

JUMIFRA
Our youth leadership council, JUMIFRA, has continued to be busy with a variety of projects, though it seems we are often a little behind in getting started. Projects accomplished recently include a first draft of a proposal for group statutes, or norms, in an effort to formalize membership a bit and emphasize the identity of JUMIFRA – a gathering of young leaders within the parish in order to serve their fellow youth and the parish at large. In fundraising efforts for a cross to use in our street Way of the Cross on Good Friday and for T-shirts that identify us as a group, we have held breakfast fundraisers on two consecutive Sundays after the 7:30 am mass. Instead of the pancakes and eggs that would be served in the US, we actually have it a bit easier – shredded chicken sandwiches (with lettuce, mayo, and thin-sliced fried potatoes on a French roll) and a hot drink, either ´quaker´ (oatmeal drink with cinnamon, cloves, and milk) or quinua, prepared with cloves, cinnamon, pineapple, and chuño (freeze dried potato flour).



Selling 120 sandwiches and 120 cups at 1.5 soles each (about 50 cents) yields us about 100 soles profit each time. Apart from visiting area schools to invite registrations for confirmation and first communion preparation, our major project of the moment is rehearsing for the acting of the Vía Crucis – Way of the Cross – that our young people (and me – I will be Simon of Cyrene this year) will perform on a route through a couple of our parish neighborhoods on Good Friday afternoon/evening, complete with crosses and a mock crucifixion.

Have a blessed Holy Week.