Kids Having Fun

It was nice to see kids enjoying themselves at a recent birthday party in Carmen Pampa.

Reflections on Language School

Six weeks ago Lynn and I completed the 5-month Basic Spanish immersion course at the Maryknoll Language Institute in Cochabamba. I thought the living/learning situation there was close to ideal.

Cochabamba is an easy city to get around in, even if you don't know much Spanish. Taxis and buses run frequently, and for someone from the United States, the fares are cheap . Our section of the city--Cala Cala, on the north end--was served by plenty of shops and a Catholic church (we're Catholic) within a 15-minute walk. Also we could satisfy most basic needs without traveling far from our host's home on Calle Rafael Canedo. Even so, I remember the curious exhilaration and independence I felt when for the first time in Spanish I communicated my need to purchase toothpaste and bread, or attended Mass and discovered that I was beginning to understand parts of it, homily included.

Life with our host family was both simple and good because of their 25 years of experience hosting students from the Maryknoll Language Institute, their care for the welfare of the people they hosted, and their amazing willingness to be an active part of our effort to learn their language. That willingness extended not only to Dr. Henry Rojas and his wife, Lily Arze, but also to their three adult children (Lupita, Diego, and Cathy), their friends, and even aunts, uncles, and parents. We broke bread together, stoked the koa together, attended soccer games, shared music and photos, and talked and talked and talked. We were welcome on a daily basis to include or absent ourselves depending on our own schedules and/or those stages of fluctuating confidence in our ability to join in. We didn't realize it at the time, but because they slowed the pace of their own lives enough to include us they cushioned us from culture shock.

The Maryknoll Language Institute also helped us overcome culture shock. During classes I found it hard to do more than work at the vocabulary and grammar. The hypothetical daily situations we practiced gradually became real as we began exploring Cochabamba and needed to communicate. We also practiced vocabulary during class for events that we were encouraged to participate in like Carnaval, and the trip to the Jesuit missions.

The professors at Maryknoll Language Institute were patient, optimistic, and often inspiring. They were obviously accustomed to adjusting the pace of the program to the needs of individual students and even to adjusting that further as students had their periods of two steps forward and one step back. This was effective teaching-- sometimes tolerating error for the sake of continuing conversation. This brought more questions, answers and corrections. It also felt good to be a student in this group of like-minded people from different language traditions. People from Brazil, North America, New Guinea, England, Korea, Ireland, and Togo were speaking together in Spanish and communicating.

At the Institute conversations with faculty and staff were in Spanish, from the librarian to the grounds crew and gatekeepers. The grounds of the institute were carefully tended and formed an orderly garden. the prevailing there is no accident. The work of Padre Ramond Finch, Hermana Cathy DeVito, Alejandro Acázar and others helped to preserve the harmonious atmosphere. Our experiences with Padres Pancho and Juancho at Masses in the Institute and during visits in the South Zone taught us the high level of personal commitment to improving life for the people. Our brief meetings with the three older hermanas (they referred to themselves as the dinosaurs) and Padre John Gorsky, reminded us of the long history of those traditions. They knew the talented missionary linguist Padre Jack Higgins ( they called him "the Colonel") from Nashville, TN who served in Bolivia during the '50s until his early death in the '60s. His sister Bitsy would be pleased to know that the good work he was doing there has carried on. That includes Padre Ignatius Harding (also has a sister in Nashville) for his 39 years of service in Bolivia, and good work by people from our own organization, the Franciscan Lay Missioners, for I recall a boat ride back from the Isla del Sol to Copa Cabana and a casual conversation with two young volunteers from Cochabamba (started when one of them remarked on my Middlebury cap) revealed that they had worked with Richard Nalen in after-school programs and had great respect for his willingness to go out and visit with the families of children having problems, addressing them both in Spanish and Quechua.

I remember pausing one day at the bulletin board in the Institute, and there was an aerial photo of the Maryknoll headquarters and grounds at Ossining, New York. The building was designed in the style of a Japanese pagoda. I remembered our week of study there with prospective missioners from four other lay missionary groups, including the Maryknollers like Minh (Lynn's language partner at the Institute), and how even that had seemed difficult at first, interacting with all of them despite our basically shared goals. I remembered that not all us ended up going on mission. And I remembered an early morning jog I had taken on the Maryknoll grounds there, past the tennis courts overgrown with patches of grass, and past the graves of Jean Donovan and the missionaries martyred in El Salvador--God bless them for their intent. It reminded me that these were complex steps we all were taking.

While in Cochabamba we explored possible service sites. On retreat at Angostura we shared reflections with our three fellow Franciscan lay missioners there, Clare, Nora, and Catherine. All of these activities challenged my decision to undertake an out-of-country, out-of-culture experience, to examine my perceptions of myself and other people, to think about my relationship to the Franciscan vows of conversion, poverty, contemplation, and minority, and our motives for wanting to help other people.

Enduring Overwhelming Questions

Lynn and I have completed the five-month Basic Spanish course at the Maryknoll Language Institute here in Cochabamba.  Soon we will leave for our active mission site at Carmen Pampa in the Yungas region northeast of La Paz.  In the lull before packing I've been thinking about some of our experiences here. One in particular, K'ara K'ara, the dumpsite for domestic garbage for the city of Cochabamba, is particularly disturbing. In writing about K'ara K'ara, I remind myself that the dump will close and that a new dump will open with--I hear--appropriate environmental safeguards.  That will be good if those safeguards are in place when the new dump opens, but that still leaves the K'ara K'ara dump to mature as a social and environmental problem.

On Sunday, March 14¹, Lynn and I, along with fellow lay missioners Nora Pfeiffer and Minh Nguyen, visited K'ara K'ara at the invitation of Padre Ken to visit his parish there. Padre Ken was a missionary in Venezuela for 18 years, has been here in Bolivia for 4 years, and has lived at K'ara K'ara for about a year. In Quechua K'ara K'ara means something like peeled or barren. It refers to the natural condition of the land there, which is perhaps a perfect dumpsite for garbage. Problems arise when the garbage dumping process proceeds without environmental safety regulation and when the site around the dump populates with low income housing and inhabitants at risk of compromising their health because of toxic wastes accruing there.  Despite noted health risks the dump continues to operate because it provides an income to some in the region and because claims over who has the right to decide its closure are disputed. And despite this people continue to move into the region because they need a place to live and they can afford to live there.

As such, K'ara K'ara has become a complex part of the social fabric of Cochabamba and a social problem. Social problems are dynamic.  When they first strike our attention, they look like fixed realities, but they spread, intensify, and worsen for the people who inherit them. Institutionalized social problems become more difficult to stop as they perpetuate. K'ara K'ara is an institutionalized social problem:

• Opened in 1987 approximately 7 kilometers from the center of Cochabamba as a garbage dump site for the people of that city;
• Covers an area of approximately 98 acres;
• Established and operated without the benefit of a protective liner to contain the spread of toxic liquids leaching from the garbage deposited there;
• Surrounded by small homes of the many people living nearby, and some directly beside the dump;
• The site of unrestricted dumping, including unguarded hospital wastes and open pools for the deposit of chemical sludge;
• An income for 7 of 33 neighborhood groups by collection of permission-to-dump fines amounting to approximately $87,640.00 per year;
• An income for trash resellers who sort competitively through newly dumped garbage for items to salvage;
• An income for small contractors who buy lots near or adjacent to the dump, build homes on them, and sell them to buyers unaware of the long-term dangers of living next to a dump site.

Court orders have been issued about the dump since 2000. In September 2009 the Superior Court of Cochabamba ordered the dump to close and listed many problems with the dump in its present state:

• Nonexistent drains and insufficient works to capture the liquids leaching from solid domestic residues;
• Lack of monitoring of the volumes of production and recovery of leachate from solid domestic residues;
• Insufficient compacting of solid domestic residues, resulting in the formation of air pockets between residue deposits;
• Nonexistent monitoring of biogas formed during decomposition of solid domestic residues;
• Insufficient coverage of solid residues from hospitals (originally, this area of the dump site was surrounded by a security fence, but no longer);
• Lack of reforestation effort for those areas where material has been gathered to cover over areas of deposited waste;
•  Flow of leachate into air pockets among solid domestic residue deposits as that decomposes;
• Transport of deposited solid wastes is facilitated by inadequate cover of the domestic residue as it is deposited;
• Inadequate plan for pick up and disposal of collected leachate;
• Nonexistent plan for adequate disposition of residues;
• Nonexistent plan for recovery and recycling of usable materials in the interior of the dump;
• Insufficient traffic signs warning about the dangers of the dump site, resulting in ready access of unauthorized persons and animas in the area of the dump site;
• Insufficient barriers between the dump and neighborhoods surrounding the dump site;
• Nonexistence of an adequate plan for industrial hygiene.

During our visit to K'ara K'ara, Padre Ken reflected on some of his experiences while living there:

• Some of the older garbage piles are now covered with dirt. Gas pipes have been installed in some areas to channel off the gases created by the decomposing garbage. These gases catch fire and can be seen at night.
• The official collectors of the garbage (EMSA) dumped in K'ara K'ara had a meeting.  After their meeting Padre Ken was informed that he should be careful about going up on the dump site because of the escaping gases. (During our visit to K'ara K'ara trucks arrived, dumped garbage, and departed.)
• Numerous people were sorting through this garbage, apparently for possible reusable items. It is doubtful that they were informed of any danger regarding escaping gases.)
• The priest of the parish at K'ara K'ara before Padre Ken was asked to leave because he asked questions about the income derived from the dump and who controlled that. Padre Ken has been encouraged to not ask questions. As a priest, he visits all of the various neighborhoods around the dump, but many of the people are unwilling to associate with him, possibly because it is rumored that he is a representative of Vicente Cañas, an organization working to close the dump.
• The dump continues to operate by the payment of fines from the mayor's office.  For any of the money from these fines to be spent, a project proposal must be submitted to and approved by the mayor's office.
•  For the dump to close there must be a common agreement of the 33 communities surrounding the area. However, 7 of the 33 claim to have the greatest right to determine the fate of the dump because their inhabitants live in the closest proximity to it.  They oppose the closure.  In this limbo K'ara K'ara continues to operate.
• People are ignorant about the poisons in the dump and their potential effect on people. Urbanization continues on the slope west of the dump site.  People are building houses directly beside the base of the dump, close to all of the toxins. Speculators buy lots there, build homes, then sell them to people who are unaware of the danger. This is not large tract development. Typically, a developer will buy one or two lots then build houses and sell them.

I am very impressed by Padre Ken's persistence in enduring this tough assignment. I recall something he said as we rode in a taxi trufi to visit the dump. "Sometimes you just have to sit with problems, be with them."  True, we sometimes make problems worse by attempting to impose the wrong solutions on them.  And some problems by their complexity seem to mock our desire to solve them. During our brief visit it was very easy to see the potential for ill effects as I watched cows grazing on grass growing atop some of the older garbage and then saw elsewhere closeby children playing who might drink the milk from those cows. To think about K'ara K'ara is to want to fix it or just walk away and try to stop thinking about it.  I cannot stop the garbage flow from the growing city of Cochabamba or the ill effects of the past 25 years of garbage flow, but I propose the following:

• Differentiated future collections to divert most discarded matter into recyclable, compostable, toxic, or safe garbage;
• Incentives for local universities to develop and implement effective strategies for neutralizing the negative effects of the current deposit of undifferentiated waste;
• Broad-based public involvement to provide greater transparency regarding the profit incentives for operating the dump and to challenge the continued operation of the dump site as a cash benefit to a few and a health risk to many;
• Monitoring of residents in the area for possible contamination-related health problems;
• Your constructive suggestions.

______________

¹A little over a month before the Deep Water Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the street

I have lived in Bolivia for only 4 months. I have spent most of that time learning to speak and write Spanish at the Maryknoll Language Institute so I can communicate with people here when Lynn and I move to our mission site. In Cochabamba, when I walk on the streets I see a lot of people selling food or small consumer goods on the street. Most of them seem to be people from the countryside around Cochabamba, dressed in traditional Quechua attire. The upscale ones have a kiosk or a cart.  Others may simply have a bag of stuff beside them--fruit or vegetables--as they sit on the sidewalk and offer their wares to the passers by. That there are street vendors does not disturb me; it's that so many people seem to be trying to make a living this way.¹ Maybe a lot of them don't mind being street vendors, or even want the flexibility of being able to move to a new location at will², but I think more often than not they choose from within the opportunities available to them and that they haven't had much to choose from.

Maybe they even perpetuate this themselves by making short-sighted choices. It wasn't so long ago that I first saw a woman from the country (camposina) making a cell phone call while she sat on the sidewalk beside the sack of narangas she was selling. My first reaction was to assume that sitting on the sidewalk in her slightly dirty traditional attire was just a way of trying to look impoverished in order to influence people to buy the fruit out of pity³, and that the cell phone meant that she really had chunk of discretionary income that she opted to squander on a material possession that she would always have to keep paying for to actually make it work. Then I remembered the cell phone in my own pocket. Cell phones here are not expensive. They can be used without a contract by buying minutes only when you need them. Maybe the cell phone was part of a more efficient system of supply and demand for this woman: "Hey, I don't think I'll be able to push a second sack of narangas by sundown, so maybe hold off on that and bring me some potatoes instead." Maybe it helps her to relieve boredom there on the sidewalk or to keep someone from worrying about when she might be coming home for the day. Or maybe it was for something about her baby; she had a baby wrapped up on her lap.

Thinking about the camposina vendor with the cell phone reminded me to think about my own reactions to the things I see. I knew that I couldn't suddenly transform her life,⁴ but I also didn't want to have a reflex reaction that allowed me to just keep walking and eventually not even see her when I passed.⁵ One day the following week Lynn and I were leaving the Language Institute after classes, and just outside the gates a woman with a small child in her arms approached us.  She explained that she needed help because she had no job and she had four children, one of whom had Downs syndrome.  She was waiting to see one of the Maryknoll brothers inside the institute but he hadn't been able to come yet.  We went back in the Institute to make sure he would come out to see her and told her that he would come when he could.  We wished her good luck and walked on. About 50 yards away a woman stopped us and asked us if we would be interested in buying some bread in support of the cause she was working for. She handed us a brochure.  She showed us the bread.  We didn't need bread, but I checked my pockets for money. The bread cost 8 bolivianos. I had 10.  We gave her the 10 bolivianos and asked her to give the loaf of bread to the woman with the child back at the gate.  We pointed her out, and the woman with the bread was walking toward her as we left.  We think she probably gave the loaf of bread to the woman with the child, and now I felt I knew what to do the next time I saw the woman selling narangas on the sidewalk.

_________

¹I hear that for the purpose of employment statistics, selling something on the streets counts as being gainfully employed. So, is the unemployment rate then a falsified statistic or one based on a realistic use of the criteria for employment in this market economy? And does the fact that I can internalize both sides of an argument make me a better final arbiter, or is that just a gratuitous first step toward believing what I wanted to believe in the first place, employing the appearance of a Hegelian dialectical process?

² This feels a little like the argument that even if there is such a think as global warming one of the benefits will be to bring more land into cultivation for food. ("Till, baby, till!")

³ Would there be anything wrong with having a sales tactic?

⁴I wasn't sure what needed to be transformed and how to go about that anyway, and there were too many on the street to help them all even though that shouldn't stop me from helping one.

⁵Because my own preoccupations and the settling dust made her seem to blend into the road.

Imagine, if you will, Glaucon . . .

March 29, 2010

Last night Lynn and I returned from visiting two of the Jesuit missions in the Chiquita region near Santa Cruz: San Javier and Concepcion.¹ They represent different stages of mission work by members of the Catholic Church and also the dedication of the Bolivian people in preserving them.  Popularized outside of South America by the 1986 film The Mission², the mission towns (called reductions, in that they gathered in people for protection) were organized by18th century Jesuits who tried to reestablish social stability for indigenous peoples living in the areas now known as Bolivia and Paraguay. Fragmentation of traditional tribal society for people in this region began with invading Spanish conquistadors and some accompanying clergy in the 16th century.  The reductions were a safe haven for indigenous people against the continual need for slaves to work in the growing farming and mining efforts to accumulate wealth through forced extraction. In the reductions they could produce wares for sale and practice their own way of life.  They were also exposed to Christianity and to the baroque tradition of music and art from Europe. The Jesuit missions represented a later effort to bring Christianity to the indigenous people but by blending Catholic ritual with the tribal traditions and beliefs of the peoples surrounding each mission site. Their success at this may be gauged by the growth of their own influence and by the animosity this generated among landowners in the region.  In 1767, nine years before the thirteen American colonies declared independence from Britain, the Jesuits were ejected from Bolivia, and the mission towns became the property of the remaining residents.

The mission churches in the Chiquita region survived.  They were cared for by the local inhabitants, and members of the Franciscan order became responsible for the services conducted there.  After almost two centuries, as paint faded and wood rotted, the mission churches that survived were in need of repair and renovation.  This came under the direction of Swiss architect and theologian Hans Roth who completed most of the major renovations before his death in 1999.

The churches themselves would be striking to anyone who loves color, contrast, detail and symbolism, but this was made all the more remarkable by their location--in a region filled with natural beauty but no great manmade structures other than hotels for travelers like us, or the dam at the lake by Concepcion.  The improbability of their location heightened their impact on our senses as we entered.  These are not museums but living churches, and our best experience of this, I think, was in Concepcion when we accompanied the townspeople on their Palm Sunday procession from the edge of the cemetery to the plaza and into the church.  It was a hot day in a hot, humid climate, and the procession was packed with people carrying garlands woven with palm fronds. I thought I must be offending some by walking along the edges of the column, stopping to take photos as I went--a gringo gawker--but I wanted to share pictures with everyone who couldn't be there with me.

By the time we reached the arch of palm fronds before the great doors of the church entrance, I was sweating. In an arc over the great doors were painted the Spanish words for "The house of God and gate of heaven" (Gen. 28:17). I felt like I was one of the congregation and that I too could take a seat in the packed sanctuary, if I could find an empty one. There were none, and so we stood by an open window in the back.  This proved lucky for us as the temperature rose and we had a breeze on our backs. Throughout the service we heard hymns sung by a youth chorus accompanied by violin and guitar. For the benediction I decided that I had to get a closer shot of the celebrant, Bishop Antonio Bonifacio.  Of course, I expected this to be one more offense as I seemed to flip-flop from worshipper to photographer. However, as I stood beside one of the massive columns, one hand resting in the deeply carved folds, and the other poking my camera lens through the fronds of a palm leaf, I felt a tap on my shoulder.  The woman standing beside me at the end of the pew smiled and stepped out, offering me her place so I could take the shot.

We were reminded again that Jesus was going to see it through to the end, inviting us to do the same. Following the recessional, we spilled out into the plaza and the thick red dust of the streets.  The sun was bright and hot. One child after another offered to sell me woven crafts. I didn't mind.  It felt good to be there, occasionally understanding a few remarks, sharing the joy of the people.

Cooled by the breeze passing over my own sweat, I remembered how I had felt a few years back when our family, Lynn, Emer, Norbert, and I, were at the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland, a Norbertine monastery closed and confiscated by Henry VIII. It was beautiful and serene, but I was sad that the community had been destroyed. And now so far away in time and space I was seeing how a similar disenfranchisement had escaped destruction. I thought of Paul's remarks on faith in Hebrews 11-13.

______________________________
¹Our guide, Mercedes, explaned to us that chiquitano is one of those "lumping together"words that occurs when one group of people tags another group as all being a certain way, in this case as being shorter than the invading group, apparently based on the diminutive doorways they constructed in their traditional dwellings, and that feature in reality being more to protect themselves.
²Written by Thomas Bolt, this is a beautiful film for cinematography, acting, narrative, and considerations of moral dilemma. Bolt is also the author of the award-winnng play and 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, one that Lynn and I used to teach during discussions of film and writing. It felt good to draw physically closer to one of Bolt's subjects again (just as when we visited the grave of Saint Thomas More in Canterbury) if only for a day or so.
³Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., identifies utopianism as a factor in the early drive toward mission in Latin America, and cites Vasco de Quiroga as having been directly influenced by Thomas More's fictional work Utopia, written in 1516, when he tried to organize two ideal communities in the area now known as Mexico. Fr. Klaiber is author of The Jesuits in Latin America and other works on the role of the Church in the economic and political history of the Latin America.

VIA CRUCIS

On Wednesday, March 3, Lynn and I accepted an invitation to attend Mass and a stations of the cross ceremony in our neighborhood.  The invitation appeared on a photocopied sheet of paper posted on the outer door of our host family's home. To be sure we would arrive on time, we decided to find the house a day ahead of schedule so we followed the directions to the  address on the invitation and came to the door of a house only about a block away.  The houses here are surrounded by high walls and have locked gates or doors.  This one was no different, but a similar photocopied invitation indicated that we were in the right place.

On the following evening we returned at 6:30 and pressed the doorbell.  A middle-aged man with a kind face soon greeted us and led us in.  He was dressed in plain clothes, but we soon learned that he was Padre Tito and that this structure behind the high walls was a house of study for seminarians. The chapel was a large room just to the right of the foyer.  About fifteen people were already there--some seated, some standing close and chatting.  In the back were three young men, two holding guitars.  All seemed to be in good spirits, and soon a second priest, Juan, was welcoming us in English about equal to the Spanish we used to thank him for the invitation. No importante because our limited words were only a part of our communication: he could tell we wanted to be there and we could tell that we were welcome.  Juan introduced us to a neatly dressed woman and withdrew to prepare for celebrating the Mass. This woman turned out to be the mother of our host family's father.  In a moment we were laughing together and sharing the news we had heard of her recent birthday and how her three of her children--our host Henry, his brother and sister--had celebrated her birthday by hiring a mariachi band to stop by her house (just two houses down from ours) at midnight and serenade her. It was good to  get to know the person who lives on the other side of the wall we pass each day on our way to Spanish classes at the Maryknoll Language Institute, the wall covered with cascades of flowers I probably mistakenly call drops of gold. It was good to learn that before retirement she had been a professor.  She was energetic and observant, and when she welcomed us to the neighborhood, she did seem to speak for the entire neighborhood.  Others I recognized in the congregation were the Franciscan Sisters who lived together in a house two blocks from us, among them the one from Italy who greets me with a smile when I jog past her sometimes in the early morning.

Through words and song we drew closer during the course of the Mass and shared the body of Christ.  Our common beliefs united us.  Following Mass we were all invited in to the social hall to drink cups of api, eat empanadas, and share information about ourselves.  Most people were from the neighborhood, but several were from other Latin American countries, and Lynn and I, the only two from the United States, were welcomed again. The three young men of the choir were seminarians. Gradually people began to drift out of the social hall.  Lynn and I presumed they were returning to the chapel for the stations of the cross, but when we returned there we saw that no one was there. Confused, we thanked Padres Tito and Juan and left. As we started walking along the dark street back home, we wondered how we could've misunderstood about the stations of the cross and wondered if maybe we had missed something because of our limited Spanish.

On our way back we saw a light ahead at one of the doorways and saw several people gathered around. We stopped and had our answer about the stations of the cross.  Here at the gateway to this house the family was preparing one of the stations: a table covered with a white table cloth, images of Christ, Mary, angels, a wooden cross, candles, flowers, water, salt.  As we looked up and down the street we saw other stations being erected and learned that the fourteen stations were arranged at the gateways of fourteen homes at intervals around the block on which we lived.  We followed others to the first station and walked and sang in procession with them and the seminarians with guitars, stopping at each station for the announcement of Christ's sufferings and for the benediction.  To our surprise the gateway of our hosts' home was the final station.  (A neighbor took a photo of Lynn and me with our hosts, Henry and Lily.) This blessing seemed to complete the blessing of houses with the koa fires honoring Pachamama during Carnaval.

I suppose a block party can bring about good spirits among neighbors, and it would be wrong to idealize the faith of all of the participants, ours included.  We were not trooping around the block in lock-step bliss.  But it was beautiful to see this ceremony reverencing Christ's acceptance of sufferings extended from the church and into the homes and lives of the people nearby.  And it was beautiful to see so many people voluntarily join together in a peaceful ceremony of shared belief to express their faith.

Sorrow and Joy

Rantastic #1: "Anybody that thinks we're not born losers in a game of attrition is just kidding himself."  I'm quoting one of my own bleak attitudes when circumstances seem to take life in the wrong direction for no apparent good reason.  In my best-of-all-possible worlds people who intend to help others do so and their efforts are on the mark and the ones who are helped get better somehow and they're really glad about that and so they thank the people who helped them and then they begin trying to help other needy people with their own efforts that are on the mark or even if they've already been helping others, one by-product of the help they received is that somehow now their own perceptions and efforts are sharpened so that the quality of their help gets even better and so in this vision (I usually glaze over with joy while I'm locked onto this one) the whole universe starts dancing with 'no-problemo' harmony. And despite whatever age of aquarius reverberations flake about in this snow-globe vision, I think it's still healthy despite that nagging attitude on the sidelines, that raw aftertaste in a fabulous too-good-to-be-true dish:  maybe this just precedes something terrible happening to rebalance life into an inscrutably gray mediocrity of random chaos. In fact, it's always there at the feast, that devilishly complex postre of when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people dish, and we struggle to recover from our own hard knocks or watch and try to help others struggle to recover from theirs. That too is mission, and that was the pie on my face when I heard recently that one of our compañeras at the Maryknoll Language Institute here in Cochabamba had taken a hit.

Damnificados: So what could be more absurd than a nun on mission getting mugged while walking to Mass on a celeste Sunday morning? Okay, how about the probable take--one black bag containing an umbrella and a Bible. (True, there's priceless stuff there, but you gotta know how to work with it or it just gets all over you, and it probably will get all over you anyway.) Or better, how about the method for this intended property transfer--a snag from behind bag-jacking in which one guy drives the car and his buddy leans out to grab the shoulder strap. Or even better, how about the outcome--enmeshed Sister (bag is strapped courier-style from shoulder to opposite side) is whacked on the head but struggles to keep pace with accelerating car, falls against the car and then elbow down into the gutter, bag still at her side as the white taxi (it's always a blanco taxi they say here) speeds safely off toward...what? But, of course, there's always the impact on the victim--eleven days in the hospital to deal with cuts on the head and elbow requiring stitches, bruises and road rash, five broken ribs, one of which punctures a lung, necessitating a drain tube to evacuate the blood, and, of course, that's just the physical stuff.

It's no surprise that after further healing she will complete her Spanish language training elsewhere. I'm amazed that she still plans to serve on mission in El Salvador.  I hope that when she feels better she will lead others with her clear voice as she did when she concluded our prayer service with the City of God:

Let us build the city of God. May our tears be turned into dancing!  For the Lord, our light and our love, has turned the night into day!

In the quiet times between my amoeba infestations, between earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, I think about these things.