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By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer
COMAYAGUA, HONDURAS—On an archdiocesan youth mission trip to
Honduras, missionary Father Emil Cook, OFM Conv., challenged participants to
literally live like Christ through service as foreign missionaries there for up
to two years.
Their help is needed in the traditionally Catholic Third World
country to revive a deteriorating church with a large priest shortage. “If
you come down and be a foreign missionary you’re 10 times better in your
own backyard. If Christ was a foreign missionary during his life why can’t
we give two years of our life?” he said. “I think we have to
challenge the Catholics in the U.S. and, if we do, it will be the springtime of
Catholicism that the Holy Father prays for. You have to start thinking Jesus is
number one, not on the peripheral.”
Father Cook said over 95 percent of Mormons, who are encouraged to
serve two years in missions, keep lifelong commitments to their faith while 80
percent of Catholics leave their faith and 40 percent never return. As Christ
established the church as a missionary, many Catholics today “have gotten
fat and lazy and we have to get back to the origin of what it’s all about.
A lot of parishes have the missionary aspect as like 17 or 18 on the priority
list when it should be number one,” he said, adding that missionary work
should not be left for the Religious only.
In June, Father Cook’s arms were open wide to youth from
Atlanta, one of his top volunteer sources. Thirty teens and youth leaders
participated in the mission trip to the Asociación de Pueblos
Franciscanos de Muchachos in Flores, Honduras, sponsored by the archdiocesan
Office of Youth Ministry.
With over 1,000 students, the teens saw the long branches and deep
roots of the educational foundation which has grown to include eight schools,
trade schools and university housing in a country where 80 percent of the
people have a sixth-grade education, according to APUFRAM.
Pulling out at 5 a.m. of the Guadalupe Center for Girls in El
Conejo, where they were based, the archdiocesan group headed towards the
Caribbean. The first stop was near 200 acres where Father Cook plans to build a
“City of Niños” school for fourth- through sixth-graders. The
group got a bus-eye view of literally dirt poor children the project will
target, living with four to nine others in roadside shacks lacking running
water and electricity. Other children still affected by Hurricane Mitch, which
buried many towns in 1998 and severely reduced production, lived in hillside
refugee camps with plastic-sheet shelters. Yet their greatest enemy, Father
Cook said, is parental indifference. “Here in Honduras our kids don’t
dream dreams. You’ll never hear in ordinary homes (children) talk about
what they’re going to be as adults,” he explained, as parents
pressure their children to quit school to earn lempiras. “You really want
to teach them how to dream and hope for things and open the way because
you’re gonna have to convince the children it’s worth it to study
because they’re the ones who are going to keep themselves in school.”
Forging on, teens saw traces of Mitch through washed out bridges
and roads and uncompleted bridge and other construction projects. They pulled
into a junior high school of about 50 students in the village of La Campana.
Walking through open-air hallways at the school, the team saw children writing
in notebooks, as textbooks in the country are unaffordable. Yet the computer
room was empty and the library had one bookcase with few books and a
second-rate set of English encyclopedias. APUFRAM will plant African palm,
producing lard for soap, and build a student house on 20 acres nearby. It is
also increasing the farming of sugar cane, coffee and other crops and raises
chickens and cattle elsewhere to eventually support ordinary needs.
While the country is predominantly Catholic, 80 percent of this
pueblo is Protestant and the Catholic Church only opens once weekly. The priest
shortage in Honduras beats that in the United States by a landslide, Father
Cook said, as there is one priest for every 1,250 American Catholics while in
Honduras there is one for every 45,000 Catholics, plus no permanent deacons.
Consequently, only 5 percent of Hondurans actually attend Sunday Mass, which
many don’t understand and view “almost like magic,” and
Protestant evangelization has increased in the last decade, with about 15
ministers for one priest.
The “tremendous help” of long-term APUFRAM volunteers,
who stay from about six months to two years, includes everything from teaching
English to coordinating a child sponsorship program. Volunteers, in turn, are
healed of materialism and better see the large disparity between needs and
wants.
“Jesus made you, he wants you and he calls you and when
you’re down here hopefully you’ll hear that in a very clear way ...
Life is a gift and we should all return that gift to Jesus with our hands and
our hearts,” he said. “When people come here it’s a moment of
grace. There’s an incredible amount of poverty. It’s not something on
TV or in a textbook. It has a face. It has a name. This is one of the graces
that God can share with you here and it can reach out and touch you.”
Felix Mirabal, a parishioner at St. Ann’s Church, Marietta,
is a long-term volunteer who answered the call to serve after a mission trip
last spring. Having worked in construction and as a hairdresser, Mirabal, a
bilingual Hispanic, is in charge of volunteer construction projects and lives
at the main APUFRAM headquarters in Flores. He also cuts villagers’ and
children’s hair, and gets a number of requests by girls and boys for
bleaching or glamorous styles, but students are only allowed conservative dos.
He said these kids don’t just make the grade. “These
kids seem willing to get out there and study and they work hard and you can
tell they want to succeed ... It makes me want to help them,” he said.
“I feel like a lot of people over here don’t have the opportunity to
improve and that’s what Mission Honduras is trying to do, to give them a
better opportunity in life and give them an extra chance.”
A building project in Chachaguela will give Hondurans a place to
grow spiritually. Heading towards Guatemala the Atlanta group turned onto a
gravel road to arrive at APUFRAM’s newly acquired $70,000 beachfront
property. A retreat house, chapel and house for a pastoral worker are being
built there. They then ate in the nation’s industrial center, San Pedro
Sula, at Wendy’s, only accessible to the rich.
Katie Press, a parishioner at St. Jude the Apostle Church,
Atlanta, on her third mission there, said the bus trip gave her a better view
across the Latino tracks. “You see San Pedro Sula, that’s not
something that does lead you to believe it’s the second poorest country in
the Western Hemisphere. Then to look at the cardboard shacks—that’s
the stuff that makes you realize and want to help out, that’s the
situation that makes you realize that their parents have no interest in sending
their kids to school,” said Press, 17. “It says a lot if they take
kids out of that ... These kids live in incredible luxury compared to what
their family does. It also says what a long way they’ve come because most
of them that teach at the school have graduated from APUFRAM.”
In addition, APUFRAM has two houses in La Ceiba and three in the
capital, Tegucigalpa, for college students. Father Cook noted that one educated
soul could infect 15 more with the love of learning. The final goal, he said,
is to open not just the mind but hearts and souls. “If you just educate
them secularly that translates to ‘now I’ve got an education. Now I
have power. Now I’ll do everything I can to get everything I can get a
hold of and I don’t care about anyone else’ ... How can you create a
just society with unjust people?” he said. “Just educating people
will not make people better. Hitler was educated. Stalin was educated. The
education has to be holistic education, not only the mind and spirit but also
the soul. If you don’t have God, it’s a shell. You have to have
God.”
And giving back requires sticking around, as many emigrate
illegally to the United States. “Honduras needs its people. We certainly
don’t want to educate people and then lose them to another country ... In
order to do that we have to provide them jobs.”
Engineer Manuel Cartagena is one alumnus who, after graduating
from college at the top of his class, returned to APUFRAM and is now its
executive director. Growing up in a house with no electricity and a dirt floor
and an alcoholic dad who discouraged education, Cartagena began attending an
APUFRAM high school. He has much hope for Honduras and his work allows him to
free others from the prison of poverty. “It’s the finest way to
contribute to the development of the country ... It is generating employment
for the country. We have quite a lot of workers for all the projects, more or
less 200,” he said.
A third of APUFRAM graduates have returned to work for the
organization. Another way to help is through child sponsorship, a vital
ministry vein where “padrinos” donate money and correspond with an
assigned child. While the organization struggles to identify more internal
sources of revenue, the backbone of the ministry is Mission Honduras, the U.S.
fund-raising arm from which at least 90 percent of its operating budget now
comes. The Franciscan travels to America five months yearly and speaks at
parishes soliciting donations.
But money cannot replace time spent as a missionary. Father
Michael Sloboda, MM, who served as the trip’s spiritual director and has
lived in Asia for 13 years, reiterated the need for more missionaries.
“U.S. Catholics need to realize how much U.S. evangelical Christians are
doing in Honduras and other places and we need to take more interest—in
lifting up Honduras and lifting up the Catholic faith in Honduras. If we
don’t do it somebody else is going to do it. Emil Cook had the line,
‘U.S. Catholics play at missions really. They don’t support it with
presence or money the way evangelicals do.’”
Father Sloboda found with the schools’ indoor plumbing and
electricity and after passing acres of banana, sugar cane and other major crops
on the bus trip, that Honduras has a more prosperous industry and
infrastructure than expected. Yet he also saw barefoot children in fields with
machetes and markets with very few Honduran goods, noting that a country with
so few educated can’t compete in a global economy. The democracy is now
working to implement a $4 billion national recovery and improvement plan of
social, economic and environmental conditions.
Before their departure, Father Cook asked Father Sloboda and all
participants how they would continue helping APUFRAM students, to consider why
they made this trip and what decisions, like career, marriage or money, would
prevent them from longer service. “This is one of the reasons you had this
experience, to go back there and share with people and tell them about (it) ...
Jesus is in your heart. Talk to him about it.”
Supported by their northern neighbors, APUFRAM will continue to
feed students spiritually and academically and make Honduran disciples, from
which dreams may not only come but also come true. And they won’t come
through any magic but through the surefire combination of education, hard work
and faith.
For information on Mission Honduras contact Frank Farrell at (770)
913-0195 or the Office of Youth Ministry at (404) 885-7491. |
