Soup Kitchen, School, and Pilgrimage

Hello friends and family. I hope you are all having a wonderful start to the Christmas season. I am happy and in good health and continuing to serve in Paraguay. In the month since I last posted, I’ve continued my work in the after school program and with the community dinners, but I’ll let you all know about some of the other activities I’ve been up to.

In the community of Franciscans where I live, every Saturday, we run a soup kitchen that serves lunch next to our house. Typically, 150 very hungry kids from the neighborhood on the other side of the fence show up to share lunch with us. Since we prepare all the food over a live fire, it’s one of the only times in my life that cooking duty has entailed splitting wood. Not surprisingly, all the kids seem to be better behaved during the twenty minutes of lunchtime than any other part of the week. It is a very beautiful and unique experience being able to share in a meal with such a large group of our neighbors.

Over the past couple months, I have also been volunteering in a public school, San Blas, about a twenty minute walk into the neighborhood next to our house. The school has about 300 students from kindergarten to sixth grade. 150 students come for morning session (7-11), and the other half come in the afternoon (1-5). I’ve been helping out with third grade teaching math during the morning turn. I generally work with only about five students at a time because I don’t think I am cut out to handle twenty Paraguayan eight-year-olds. The kids at the school are not always completely willing and excited to learn math, they are always extremely full of energy and wanting to become friends with me, the American volunteer.

Last week, I took part in the largest pilgrimage in the country. Each year over one million Paraguayans make the journey to the city of Caacupé as a devotion to the Virgin Mary. The pilgrimage originates from a Paraguayan legend. Around year 1600 in Paraguay, there was an indigenous Guaraní man running from members of another tribe who were trying to kill him because he had recently converted to Christianity. Looking for a place to hide, he saw a vision of Mary, and she told him to hide behind a tree. This Guaraní man hid behind the tree, and the tribe seeking to kill him passed by without noticing him. The man then carved that image of Mary  with the wood from that tree. Today, the statue is in the basilica in Caacupé, built on the ground where the man sought shelter. As part of the pilgrimage, I walked ten miles beginning at midnight and finishing at five in the morning in time for the mass at six. During the entirety of the walk, the whole road was filled with pilgrims as far as the eye could see. Because of how dark it was, none of the pictures of the walk turned out well, but here are a couple of pictures of the mass to give you an idea of the quantity of people that were there.

After school program where I’ve been volunteering made a video summing up what we do every day with the kids. The whole video is in Spanish, so if you’re feeling ambitious you should check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TdXGJnU_HU&feature=youtu.be

With the Summer Solstice approaching in a couple days, it is well into the nineties each day. Despite the warm weather, it is still beginning to feel like Christmas as the Paraguayans are really making me feel like family. Have a great Christmas and New Year and really enjoy the opportunity of spending time with friends and family.

Lastly, here’s a photo from our latest community dinner:

Peace, goodness, and Merry Christmas from Paraguay,

Jack

Community Dinners

Hello family and friends! Before addressing anything I’ve been doing over the past month, I’d like to apologize for not posting for so long. Because I’ve been busy with college applications while continuing work in the after school program, it was difficult for me to put a few hours aside to gather my thoughts. Now, for the update.

Two weeks ago my mom came to down to visit. She was able to take a couple weeks off work to check up on me, and I was able to share my mission with her. I am so blessed that she was able to visit. Although my mom can't speak much Spanish, she was able to communicate well using just her friendliness and warmth, reminding me of why I missed home so much. While she was here, my mom was able to accompany me in my work, going into the neighborhood in the dump to get the full experience of the poverty here. We were also able to do a little bit of sightseeing while she was here, visiting various historic churches and museums of the indigenous Guaraní people. While she was here, I realized how much I missed speaking English. For the first time in months, I was able to convey everything I was thinking. Thank you so much for such a wonderful visit Mom! Below is a picture of us at the National Cathedral in Asunción.

 

On the past few Wednesday nights I have gone with a couple seminarians to share a dinner with the neighbors living on the outskirts of the dump. We bring everything necessary for the meal including food, drinks, plates, silverware, cups, and, depending on the house, chairs and a table.

Each Wednesday, we have eaten with a different family. The first week we ate with a twenty-two year-old mother and her three children: a boy (three months) and two daughters (four and six). The father was unable to come to eat with us because he was still working late into the night, sorting recyclables that he found in the landfill. That week, we ended up eating in the building of the after school program instead of the neighbors’ house because there wasn’t enough space near the house to put a table. In the photo, the mother and her family are on the right side of the table. The three people on the left are other neighbors we spontaneously invited because we had food to spare.

The next week, we ate in the house of a mother who has been paralyzed from the waist down for the past five years. Also eating with us were her seven year-old son, nine year-old daughter, seventeen year-old daughter and her eighteen month old daughter, and a six year-old girl who wandered into the house during the dinner and said she was hungry. Because the mother is paralyzed and the eldest daughter has to work, the nine year-old girl must care for the baby almost all the time when she is not in school. A nine year-old acting as a full-time mother was shocking for me to see, coming from a first world country. In the United States, a girl of the same age would probably not be allowed to walk unaccompanied outside for more than a minute. Going from right to left in the photo are the mother, me, the son, the youngest daughter, the granddaughter, the eldest daughter, the girl who stopped by to eat with us, and Alcides, one of our seminarians.

At the latest dinner, I made the mistake of checking only with the teenage brothers to see if we could eat at their house without also asking their father. When we arrived with the food, tables, and chairs for nine people, there was nobody in the house. I saw one of the brothers down the street and asked him where the other eight members of his family were. He told me that he forgot to tell me that they’d be at his mom’s house. It was such typical behavior of teenage boys. I remember of the countless number of times when someone asked me to tell my parents something; it just slipped my mind. Being a teenage boy myself, I should’ve known better. Even though Paraguay is five thousand miles away, some things aren’t too different. We ended up just inviting a bunch of kids who were out in the street that night come and eat with us. Later we were joined by the father of the family and a woman and her baby. Two seminarians, the priest, and my mom were also able to come, so we had a good crowd.

The weekly dinners are still clearly a work in progress, but they give our seminarian community the opportunity to get to know one new family each week. After only three weeks, I have profoundly felt the beauty and power of just sharing a meal at a table as a family. Although we are seemingly from completely different lives and societies, the dinner affirms that we are in reality neighbors.

Thank you all so much for sharing my blog and staying interested in my experience here. According to the stats on Blogspot, my blog has now been read in ten different countries! Also, thank you all for the prayers that support and motivate me each day. Anyone, feel free to message me on Facebook or email me at john.mj.murphy@gmail.com to ask me any questions or just to say hello. I hope you are all having a lovely fall.

Peace and goodness,

Jack

P.S. Here’s a picture of some little girls on the other side of the fence that I thought was too cute to leave out of my blog.

Housing

Hello family and friends. I am now more than a month into my mission to Paraguay. I can confidently say that being here for one month has been the most challenging undertaking of my life. Living away from home, having a language barrier, and experiencing extreme poverty all hit me for the first time at the same time. After this experience, probably not many things will seem all that difficult in comparison.

This past weekend, I went on a two-day mission trip with one of my friends from the parish here. We worked with a huge mission organization here in Paraguay named Techo (Spanish for roof or ceiling). Roughly six-hundred college-aged kids met in Asunción on Friday night, and these kids were separated out into fifteen groups, with each group going to a different poor neighborhood in the greater Asunción area. Then, each of these fifteen sites built eight houses for families who had previously been living in very run-down and precarious houses. So in total, Techo built 120 houses last weekend. Below are some pictures of the house that my group built for a twenty-two-year-old single mother and her three-year-old daughter. Although it is still a very small house (10x20 feet) with no plumbing or electricity, it is an enormous improvement from the house where the family lived before. In the first photo you can see the old house behind me.

I continue to work at the after school program five days a week for the kids that live on the dump. I have become the secondary math teacher at the program because this is the subject that requires the least Spanish. Despite the lack of Spanish required in math, you’d be surprised how hard it is to teach the simplification of improper fractions to kids who don’t speak your language. In the past two weeks, I have gone on two field trips with the kids. These field trips are probably the most important activity that the after school program has to offer. Apart from these field trips, the kids from the neighborhood on the landfill never leave the proximity of their houses. With grades four, five, and six, we visited the national zoo, and with the middle-schoolers, we went to a different Franciscan house in the interior of the country for an extremely crazy night. These field trips allow the kids to experience something beyond the walk back and forth to and from school, and the trips show the students the world of those who have money. Ideally, the field trips reveal to the kids of how much better the quality of their lives could be if they could just break free from the bondage of the poverty. Having a vision for a better life is the first step.

Seeing poverty on such a large scale has certainly engaged my faith in God. I am far too optimistic to believe that living in this type of misery could ever be the plan for the entire life of a person, let alone the lives of the 1.2 billion people worldwide who subsist off of $1.25 or less daily. These people are meant for more. “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:20-21).

Thank you all so much for reading. Also, thank you to the many people who sent me emails and messages checking up on me. I’m really happy to know that people back home are keeping me and the people I serve their prayers. I miss you all very much.

Peace and goodness,

Jack

Beginnings

Hello family and friends. Before saying anything else, I would like all of you to know that I am happy and healthy, and I am a little over two weeks into my nine month mission to Paraguay.

I’ll be living the majority of time at a Franciscan house just outside of Asunción, Paraguay’s capital city. The Franciscans are a religious order within the Catholic Church who seek to follow the teachings and lifestyle of St. Francis of helping the poor while living simply. Living in the house with me are a priest, a friar (soon to be a priest), a keeper of the house, and four seminarians, people studying to be priests. On one side of the house, there is the national seminary for Paraguay, so the seminarians take classes in philosophy and theology there every day.

On the other side of the house lies the expansive and seemingly endless landfill of Asunción where all the city’s garbage is dumped. Inside the landfill live approximately ten thousand people. Each day the majority people of the “Basural” leave their homes before dawn and walk a couple miles to the other side of the landfill to work. Their work consists of digging through the fresh trash and finding things that they could resell to make some kind of money; they are usually lucky to make a dollar for a day’s work. Because of this, many people do not have enough money to buy food so they are forced to eat scraps of discarded food that they find in the trash. Thankfully there is a functioning public school system here, so some of the kids attend classes and get a free lunch there. Not all the children go to school who are of age because they have to work in the landfill to provide money for their families. Many small children never leave the proximity of their houses because they are too young for school and too young or malnourished to work. Below are a couple photos of the houses in the landfill.

At this point, it seems like my primary work in Paraguay will be working in the after school program at the house. Each weekday after classes, kids from the landfill come to the house and are helped with their homework and retaught some of the concepts learned in school. I have worked in the classes for four days. The task of educating a class full of fifteen-year-olds seems daunting enough when in an American school. For me in Paraguay, the burden of that task is multiplied many times because I have to work hard to communicate with them because of the language barrier. To add to this, the majority of the students seem to have no kind of motivation to learn because they can see no way out of their poverty. The majority of the time kids text on their phones, which are almost certainly stolen. What use is learning geometry going to do them if they spend their lives sifting through trash like their parents and grandparents?

It is extremely easy to look at the situation here and lose every ounce of hope for the thousands who live in the endless and inescapable cycle of extreme poverty. With faith, however, there is hope. Each one of the people living in destitution has a God that loves them, and each was created with a unique purpose. The central goal of the education at the after school program must be to get it into the kids’ minds that it may be possible for them to make it out of the cycle of poverty and off the landfill if they focus while they're young and learn how to read fluently and memorize their multiplication tables. They can make a difference and change the society that has denied them of their most basic needs. Below is a picture of the building where we have the after school program.

Thanks for reading. My mom has told me that many people have been asking about me, and I’m very grateful for you all keeping me in mind. I’m hoping that this blog can serve as a testament to how powerful and transformative a mission year can be. I miss you all so much, and keep me in your prayers. If any of you need anything at all or just want to say hi, just send me a message on facebook or email me at john.mj.murphy@gmail.com, and I should get back to you within a few days. I’ll post again in about two weeks!

Peace and goodness,

Jack