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
