Getting to work

My apologies to the Sheldon and others who depend on this Blog to while away countless hours (o.k. minutes) of productive work time. I’ve been busy and let’s just be honest, when there’s a world of souls to save the Blog’s a low priority. Ha ha ha. Just kidding.

However, speaking of a world of souls, before I move onto San Pedro, let me just say that my sources in Benque tell me that the tide of communicants continues to swell. Apparently, the Padres decided to start hearing confessions at school before the Friday masses, not afterwards (an amazing mathematical equation when you figure that the opportunities for mortal sin falling between a Wednesday and Friday are exponentially fewer than Friday afternoon all the way to the next Friday morning mass). So, they heard the fourth form boy’s confessions last week and challenged them all to lead the school in going to communion on Friday and they were quite excited about the opportunity. Apparently, Fr. Mark invited them to lead the school in going to Communion on Friday and all the Catholics went! He said they had about 200 students receive that morning! I can’t even think about this without tears in my eyes. Let’s just be honest. No paycheck in the world can equal the feeling that comes from watching kids you taught about Jesus receive Him in the Eucharist (although a laborer is worth his wage, Mom and Dad, don’t worry there are people out there that will write a check for these mad skills). Anyways, it’s so hard to not be at Mt. Carmel while there’s so much going on with the kids that I love so much, but I ask you in joining me in praying for both the students and teachers at Mt. Carmel, because if there’s hundreds more kids receiving Jesus in the Eucharist on a weekly basis, some created beings in low places are going to start attacking…

So, La Isla Bonita… San Pedro… Saint Peterprayforus…. What can I say? I’m not in Kansas (or Benque) anymore, I’m a grown up missionary now. This is so much more than lesson planning (which was no cake walk either). So, first of all, let me tell you that we have received the most incredible, open-armed welcome from the parishioners at San Pedro Catholic Church. These people are active Catholics in what is known as the “axis of evil” in Belize, so you know there’s something special about them. They’re taking turns having us over for lunch so we’re really getting a chance to know the people which has been awesome (San Pedronos are much more proficient in English than most people we met in Benque too, so there’s much less awkward silences followed by… lo siento, como se dice…? So that in itself is really rewarding. So in the past week we’ve really gotten to get the grand picture. Who have we met? Oh, I could write a book.

Claudio is a lay minister who picked us up from the water taxi terminal, brought us a pizza that night and has been looking out for us ever since. He and his wife Maria are both from San Pedro and have been really helping us see what the need on the island is for evangelization and Youth Ministry. Claudio has been working pretty hard on the evangelization end himself, he’s been taking care of the daily 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. half-hour Catholic radio shows on his own so that the Church wouldn’t loose the spot. He’s a big fan of Scott Hahn and Jeff Cavins, (so strange to realize that Hahn’s fan-club has no borders) he explained to us that for the past thirty years, the Jesuits were coming to San Pedro to say mass on Sunday but there was very little religious education.
Thirty years of little religious education is a lot for one island to weather, but other pieces are beginning to fall into place to help us understand the challenge that is San Pedro. Soon after meeting Claudio and Maria we met Abel and Martha, two other awesome lay ministers. Sitting in their living room that overlooks the “midway”, the main road of San Pedro that’s lined with hotels, bars and tiny shops that sell the same tacky “you better Belize it” souvenirs and cluttered with golf-cart and bicycle traffic (the only “real” cars are the occasional minivan taxi), Martha explained to us that when they were children, San Pedro was a village. No electricity, no running water, nada. So a mere 50 years ago this was all your primitive National Geographic scene. What happened? Well, Martha explained, her sister married a man who had the idea to put an airstrip and hotel on the island. This idea is in the same league as the genius who said, “what about… sliced bread?” or “I got it. Let’s bottle water!” or “hey, I bet people would by a round-flat disk that they can put in a machine to play music”. You get the idea. Her family ran this hotel with a generator that turned off after dark and water that had to be pumped to each room. Fifty years and a billion tourists later, you have modern day San Pedro.

Look at a timeline and count the years between the invention of electricity and modern day America. Look and see how much “transition” we in the U.S. of A. had and how modern social problems still confound us and we could, sort of, see them coming. Plus (and many would probably argue this point) the average American had access to a lot more moral formation than Jesuits visiting their Church every Sunday (NOT that the Jesuits can’t be good at moral formation! Nobody go telling Aron Little that I’m giving the Jesuits bad press in the blog). I’m just saying that America is morally floundering and we sort of saw it coming in the past couple decades. Imagine if you lived in a world that went from Little House on the Prairie to MTV’s Spring Break in less than fifty years. No transition! I mean, you have parents who grew up in thatched cabanas raising kids who carry cell phones, jet around town in souped up golf carts and socialize with bars full of unscrupulous tourists influencing these kids with the worst possible example of drunken revelry. (Not all tourists are bad mind you! But the badly behaved ones are the ones that attract all the attention…) In the midst of the island flourishing on a material level, evil was able to take root without people even realizing. The gist of this soapbox-style rant is that we now see why the kids here are at risk, it’s a real multi-generational catechetical nightmare!

Anyways, we were discussing all this at lunch with Claudio and Maria and Maria interrupted Claudio’s descriptions with, “but do not get discouraged! We need you here!”. If we were to stand back and look at everything that needs to be done and could be done, we’d go crazy. However, we’re just taking things a day at a time, a project at a time. Fr. Jim, the pastor of San Pedro Catholic Church is a very spiritual man and he told us, as long as we’re praying everyday for our work and for the island, he doesn’t care if it all flops. It’s all you really can do, to just keep in mind that above all you need to be a living witness to what you’re trying to teach and as soon as you get so stressed out that you can’t be effective, you might as well go sell shoes… or maybe sea shells by the seashore.

The past two days I occupied myself with gathering the names of all the children all over the island who will need to be prepared for the Sacraments. Let me tell you, this was no small feat. I wanted to meet some sort of representative from the schools so I decided to actually visit the schools, biking from one side of the town to the other. I discovered that besides the public Roman Catholic School (it’s a confusing system for us Americans. Many of the public schools are called R.C. Schools, short for “Roman Catholic”. A priest from Cayo once explained it to me this way. Apparently, the Church is so darn good at education, often the government jus lets it run their schools. A lot for us “separation of Church and state” raised Americans to wrap our little brains around but it works for them. Anyways, I discovered that there are about seven other schools in San Pedro, which is pretty amazing considering that San Pedro has about half the population of Hilton Head. However, I also discovered that many of the schools are no more than an apartment with desks and a chalkboard. Anyone can hang out a shingle calling their house a school. My friend Ali exclaimed, “it’s like clusters of homeschoolers!”.

Ok, as I approach my third page of rambling I realize that I should probably postpone more stories for an upcoming post. Please keep us all in your prayers!