Visiting some of the
sick in Guayaquil
with a local sister. Pilgrimage can teach about your own Faith, writes Fr Shane Sullivan
From July 16-July 31, I had to opportunity to go to Ecuador with a group of seven young adults from different parts of Ireland (Mayo, Galway, Tipperary and Antrim) along with two of the Roscommon-based Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother on a mission trip none of us will ever forget.
Preparation
Before we even set foot in Ecuador each of us were touched by the extraordinary generosity of the people in our parishes. The Servant Sisters spoke at Masses in Castlebar and Athenry parishes this spring and the young missionaries made appeals themselves in their parishes, local schools and amongst family and friends.
The response was beyond anything we could have expected. Not only were we able to fundraise the cost of flights for the young people but were able to leave money under the direction of the local sisters and brothers in the communities we visited.
The generosity of local people will be felt for some time in some of those poorest communities in Ecuador.
The Faith of the Ecuadorian people
Once we arrived we were confronted with a systemic poverty unlike many of us had ever seen before. We first went to work in some of the poorest barrios of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city. Without the local knowledge of the Servant Sisters and Brothers it would have been impossible for us to have travelled safely there. We were able to connect with people in truly dire circumstances.
One of the most remarkable people we met was a woman named Sara whose husband had abandoned her and their two infant children after she was diagnosed with MS. She is now bed-ridden and can’t see anymore.
Her sons, now 14 and 12 are like her eyes and hands. She directs them from her bed in all the household chores that need to be done. The Irish women got to spend time with her over their days in Guayaquil. They were most struck by her graciousness, her dignity and her Faith.
Far from blaming God, she loved Him. She knew she depended on Him and in their conversations facilitated by the sisters she and the missionaries connected and encouraged each other in their love for Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin. Time and again we saw this unshakable Faith and abiding dignity in the people of Ecuador.
Missionaries on fire with love
In Guayaquil the sisters and brothers together run a parish called Our Lady of Loreto, in the district of El Condor.
The work they have there is overwhelming. They visit some of the poorest families in the district, bringing food baskets to some families who survive on as little as US$50/month. And they spend their time on bringing the blessings of the Catholic Faith to people who have had very little experience of it.
They work in some of the poorest schools where they are beloved by teachers and children alike. Additionally, they have over a thousand children in catechesis and over a hundred trained catechists.
Spending even the briefest of time with these remarkable men and women would leave you in no doubt about their motivation: they love Our Lord, Our Blessed Mother and our Catholic Faith with an intensity and sincerity that highlighted our lukewarmness.
They live in poverty themselves, a freely chosen poverty. Their diet is simple. Consciously and intentionally they have rid their lives of what is comfortable and luxurious in order to be more like Jesus and Mary.
And paradoxically their lives are richer than most people’s here – and I include our lives as priests and religious. They summed it up for us one evening at the dinner table.
They said that when we’re too physically comfortable, when the body has all it wants and more, it suffocates the spiritual. And they’re right!
Confidence in Christ
For them the spiritual was paramount. They worked with apostolic ardour, had zeal for souls and were confident. They spoke confidently about the blessings God gives us in the Catholic Faith, they confidently taught the Faith and they audaciously looked for every opportunity God gave them to pass that Faith on or build it up where they found it.
During our trip we stayed in a district city called Chone in the province of Manabi. During a visit to a very poor family’s home we were told that an elderly uncle was downstairs and quite sick. We went down to say hello and perhaps give him a blessing and found the man, named Segundo, on his deathbed. This man had lived such poverty his whole life that he wasn’t baptised or even on a civil register.
I watched as a religious sister spoke to this man and deftly felt out what he was able for and what God might have in store for him. She was an instrument in God’s hands, powerfully attuned to the movement of the Holy Spirit by all her hours spent in adoration, the freely-chosen poverty, the self-denial and the acts of love.
After a few minutes she made the offer of Baptism to Segundo and there, on his deathbed, Segundo accepted and was made a Son of God. We later returned to give him the sacraments of Confirmation and the Anointing.
There was absolutely no sense that the Faith was an imposition or something to be apologised for. There was equally no sense that we needed to change it to make it more palatable or more agreeable. The brothers and the sisters knew their Faith, they knew its goodness and- shaped by Our Lord in prayer- they knew in any situation how to successfully communicate it.
In the footsteps of Sr Clare
Our mission trip reached its climax with four days in Playa Prieta, a rural village in the district of Manabí, where the Derry-born Sister Clare Crockett served the last years of her life and where she died in an earthquake in 2016.
Her life and death were the inspiration for this trip and it felt as though she was somehow present in each place we worked. This was especially true of the school of the Sacred Family in Playa Prieta.
On the site where the convent and school collapsed, killing Sister Clare and five young women discerning religious life, there now stands a sanctuary. It is the heart of the newly-rebuilt school. Visiting there was a great privilege for each of us. We knew we were walking on holy ground, where one of our own and one of our best lived and served and died.
We went to Ecuador to work and serve and we came home changed and aware of how much more in us has to change.
We prayed for ourselves there, for those at home who had made this mission trip possible and we prayed for Ireland. Our trip in Ecuador was a remarkable blessing from God and Our Lady.
If you want to find out more about Sister Clare and her companions you can visit the website sisterclare.com and if you want to help sponsor a family or assist in the work done by the sisters and brothers in Ecuador you can visit their website at homeofthemother.org/mghm