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Touching Lives
By Susan Kauffman |
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| Carrying
on: Erin Stone, a sophomore, made her spring break a holiday
for this Honduran girl |
| photo:John Willard |
It seemed a long way to come to dig a ditch. I’d
never lifted a pickaxe in my life, much less in a tropical country
under a blistering sun. Yet there I was on spring break in Honduras,
chipping away at compacted dirt with a group of Duke students half
my age. I could only work three minutes at a time before needing shade
and bottled water, though I took some comfort in the fact that the
students didn’t last any longer than I did. As one experienced
Habitat for Humanity volunteer grumbled, this was “hotter than
roofing in Memphis in August.” It took us three days to carve
out a thirty-six-foot trench that a back hoe could have handled in
an hour.
Seventeen of us from Duke—including
six undergraduate and eight graduate students—spent eight days
in March as guests of the Episcopal Church of Honduras. We had gone
to help victims of Hurricane Mitch build a community in a little valley
outside the city of San Pedro Sula. As a member of Duke’s public
affairs office, I thought I had mainly come along for the ride to
get a story about Duke Chapel mission trips. Though we’d done
some homework and some team-building exercises in Durham, most of
us did not know much more about Honduras than we did about each other.
In the course of a week, that all changed. Remembering
to pop anti-malaria pills, inhaling the odors of garbage and diesel
fuel, and adjusting to more primitive toilet facilities were the easy
parts. Confronting dire poverty and illness, on the other hand, put
our best motives to the test. Amazingly, no one’s spirits flagged,
and no one got sick. The sweat produced by hard physical labor washed
away the mental stress of work and school. Our spirits were lifted
by vistas of cool, inviting palm trees, smiles and hugs from hordes
of young Honduran children,
and spicy food lovingly prepared. The spiritual camaraderie helped
forge friendships among us.
“Most of our friends went to the beach to
lie in the sun,” said J.C. Richard, a sophomore from Minneapolis.
“That doesn’t even sound fun to me compared to getting to
experience another culture.”
Our adventure began at 5:30 a.m. on the freezing morning
of March 10, when we met at the campus Episcopal Center before driving
to the Raleigh-Durham airport. Preparations had begun several months
before. You don’t just join a Duke mission trip at the last minute.
After a lengthy application process, we had been carefully interviewed
and selected by group leaders Will Malambri, a lanky Divinity School
student who had traveled in Indonesia and Africa; John Willard, a
fifty-six-year-old retiree and volunteer adviser at the Episcopal
Center, who led a similar Duke trip to Honduras last year; and Aby
Algueseva, our interpreter, an artist married to a graduate student
in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
We’d met half a dozen times, usually in the basement
of Duke Chapel around nine p.m. to accommodate student schedules.
We touched on the history and culture of Honduras, the original “Banana
Republic”—a country the size of Tennessee, located south
of Mexico and north of Panama, one of the poorest nations in the Western
Hemisphere. Unemployment has hovered around 30 percent since Hurricane
Mitch, the savage storm of 1998 that killed 13,000 Hondurans, destroyed
about 80 percent of the agricultural land, and left more than 35 percent
of the population homeless.
Our group began to coalesce the moment we got on the plane.
The Divinity School students were already friends. Two—Katie
Boutwell and Kris Bryant—had announced their engagement before
the trip. Still, it seemed the undergraduates weren’t really
keen on being with so many older students. Some had never been on
a mission trip; Sarah Bagley, a junior from San Diego, had never even
been out of the country.
By the time we landed in San Pedro Sula, though, our strangeness
to each other had started to wear off. Now we faced a more daunting
strangeness. The heat hit us like a brick as we boarded an old yellow
school bus with no air conditioning, driven by Pedro, a Honduran who
became our friend. As the bus made its way to our destination—Nuestras
Pequenas Rosas (Our Little Roses), a church home for sixty abused
or impoverished girls referred there by Honduran courts—we passed
by horse-driven carts of bananas making their way alongside Toyota
trucks, and by several “maquilas,” the massive, gated clothing
factories known back home as sweatshops.
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“We
have a saying that you can’t change Honduras in a week,
but you might change a Duke student.”
—WILL WILLIMON
Dean of the Chapel |
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The gated complex of Our Little Roses,
located in a middle-class neighborhood of small, gated, stucco houses
with carports and an occasional tethered horse, was guarded by an
armed security officer. By relief work standards, our accommodations
were luxurious. We couldn’t flush toilet paper, but we enjoyed
air conditioning, a fridge stocked with soft drinks and exotic juices,
hot showers that worked most of the time. Women bunked in one room
and the men in another, sharing a common living space with a television
(with cable, which allowed us to cheer the Blue Devils on to victory
in the ACC tournament).
It was already hot by eight o’clock on our first
morning. We breakfasted in the orphanage dining room on cereal, fresh
pineapple, mangoes, freshly squeezed orange juice, and rich Honduran
coffee. After saying a prayer, twelve clean-scrubbed little girls,
ages two to eight, waved from the long table next to ours. Then we
hopped on the bus to ride about ten miles out of the city to the Episcopal
Relief and Development’s Proyecto de Fe, Alegria y Esperanza
(Faith, Hope, and Joy Project). A new community of 200 cinderblock
houses being built with donations from the United States, the project
is home to many families whose shanty dwellings washed away during
Hurricane Mitch.
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| A friendly face |
| photo:John Willard |
About 115 houses had been completed,
a church building was half-finished, and plans had been drawn up for
a medical clinic and school. The two-bedroom, one-bath houses, without
telephones, washers, or dryers, cost $3,500. The residents spoke of
them as castles, though, because they featured electricity, bathrooms,
and potable water—a huge improvement over the “aguas negras,”
the river sewage that thousands of Hondurans must use.
“We’re not just building houses—we’re
building lives,” said Padre Blanco, the robust Episcopal pastor
who oversees the Faith, Hope, and Joy project. “We’re not
here to push a faith on the people,” he continued in Spanish.
“We’re building a church because they asked for one.”
Blanco’s red-haired wife serves both as surrogate mother to dozens
of young children and as the community’s ex-officio social worker,
evaluating which of the 2,000 applicants will get to live here, and
helping families brook medical and emotional crises. Deeds to the
homes are placed in the names of the women and children as well as
the men, encouraging family stability in a male-dominated culture
plagued by domestic violence.
During our five days at the site, some of us helped residents
start six more housing foundations. Matthew Schlimm, a Divinity School
student from Michigan, helped a young Honduran electrician wire five
houses. My group carted dirt for the floor of the church and dug a
trench to support church columns. The work was slow. It quickly became
clear that our unskilled labor was not going to be much of a contribution.
There weren’t enough shovels, and the ones they had weren’t
the best kind for digging. Still, there was no hardware store to run
to for supplies, and we gained a newfound appreciation for people
who work with their hands.
“I never understood before why construction workers
would sit on the side of the road,” said Dan Gray, a lawyer who
is studying at Duke to become a youth minister, wiping sweat from
his brow. Jane Cho, a sophomore whose parents emigrated from South
Korea to the United States, said, “I’m grateful to my dad
and my relatives who have done manual labor to make a living.”
Of course, we didn’t work all the time. In the community
center that also served as a school, led by a seminarian who doubled
as the construction foreman during the week, we joined joyful church
services in Spanish.
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| It makes
a village: The Faith, Hope, and Joy project helps Hondurans
replace shanties with sturdy homes, and pride |
| above photo:Susan Kauffman |
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| Foundation
builders: juniors Katie Gres, left, and Kate Miller, right,
digging at a new home site |
| above photo:Aby Algueseva |
Parishioners sat in little wooden desks and young
children ran circles around the seminary student.
Divinity School student Katie Boutwell, from Alabama,
had brought her Polaroid camera along and walked through the unpaved,
dusty streets of the community with Erin Stone, a sophomore from Oklahoma,
taking pictures of every child in the community to leave as mementos.
The children, many barefoot or wearing the white shirts and blue skirts
or pants of their school uniforms, flocked around the Duke students
as though following the Pied Piper.
Our week included a bumpy bus trip to Tela, a beach town
on the Carribean frequented by Hondurans. There, we were serenaded
at a seafood restaurant that advertised Alka Seltzer on the menu.
Three live red, green, and yellow toucans perched on swings and “talked”
to us. Several of us paid a young Garifuna girl (an Afro-Carribean
Honduran) to transform our hair into “trenzitas,” or corn-row
braids.
One night, after a lesson from the teenagers at Our Little
Roses, we went to a discotheque and attempted an expressive Honduran
dance that places emphasis on the hips and pelvis. Perhaps in honor
of our group—welcomed by the disc jockey—Michael Jackson’s
“Billie Jean” was on the song list. Even Dean of the Chapel
Will Willimon, who joined the group for a few days with his daughter
Harriet, danced up a storm, prompting some laughs. “Now, every
time I see Dean Willimon in the pulpit, I’ll picture him running
in place out on the dance floor,” Sarah Bagley confessed with
a giggle.
We also learned of the long ties that bind members of
the Duke University family when we toured the spectacular Mayan ruins
of Copan, a three-hour bus ride on mountain roads northwest of San
Pedro Sula. John H. Park, A.M..’70, now the Episcopal Archdeacon
of Honduras, joined us and explained how his Duke experience dramatically
shaped his life. It was on Duke’s soccer fields that he forged
a friendship with Ricardo Agurcia ’74, the son of a former ambassador
to the United States. “I found the church while I was at Duke,”
Park said. And [Agurcia’s] the reason I’m in Honduras.”
Agurcia, now a leading Honduran archaeologist, greeted us in a Duke
baseball cap and thanked us for the work we were doing for his people
and his country. Touched, we followed him on a private tour of Rosalila,
the hidden temple he had discovered.
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| It makes
a village: The Faith, Hope, and Joy project helps Hondurans
replace shanties with sturdy homes, and pride |
| photo:Susan Kauffman |
Despite the stunning natural beauty
and the sense of adventure, evenings at the orphanage also ranked
among the highlights of the trip. It became a little ritual for the
girls to cluster around the Duke students on a covered basketball
court before dinner. Some of us gave piggy-back rides; others chatted
with the teenagers about their favorite singers—Ricky Martin
and Christina Aguilera. At nine each night we convened for a half-hour
of informal, student-led devotions, reflecting on our day and whatever
spiritual insights we might have gleaned. The quiet time allowed us
to get to know each other in a way that team-building exercises in
Durham had not.
Some students said they had expected the country to be
more primitive and the people more downtrodden. How people who could
afford only one meal each day, or a family of twelve living in a two-room
house, could smile and laugh so much proved a powerful lesson that
contradicted our all-too-common belief that you’re not supposed
to be happy if you’re poor. “Being at Duke, probably being
in America, we think we have everything to teach everybody else,”
said Katie Gres, a pre-med student from Florida who led a devotions
session with me that included shoulder massages. “I’ve seen
how much we can learn from others.”
Hondurans making $90 a month in a factory showed us such
incredible hospitality and appreciation that it was almost embarrassing.
“I thought, ‘We haven’t done much—what are they
thanking us for?’” said Sadie Walker ’99, LL.B. ’02,
whose parents live in Jamaica.
“One man who didn’t know English and clearly
had barely any means at all brought twelve sodas out to a group of
us students,” said Kate Miller, a junior from Virginia Beach
who had studied in Spain. “People who have nothing have every
reason in the world to hate us and be jealous of us wealthy Americans
with our modern luxuries of cameras, watches, work-out clothes, and
sunglasses. Yet for some inexplicable reason they were so generous
and loved us unconditionally.”
We saw many people of all ages looking out for each other—children
carrying younger children, women holding hands of kids not their own.
“You’d think they were from one family,” Katie Boutwell
said one evening at devotions. “There is no racism among them,
no differentiation. It’s as if they’re part of one body.”
Certainly, the experience put our lives and worries about
papers and assignments into a different perspective. “As I read
a book for a class here at Duke, where I am paying more than $30,000
a year to attend, I cannot help but picture one nine-year-old little
girl telling me that she could not learn how to read because she could
not afford to buy a book that cost 10 pesos,” Miller shared with
the group.
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“Most
of our friends went to the beach to lie in the sun. That doesn’t
even sound fun to me compared to getting to experience another
culture.”
—J.C. RICHARD ’03 |
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This kind of questioning and soul-searching
lies at the heart of mission trips, Will Willimon explained. Though
a little-known tradition at Duke, more than a hundred students travel
on such trips each year, he said. Another student group, for instance,
also spent spring break in a small, rural village in Honduras, building
a house for a midwife. They went under the auspices of a Honduras-based
organization called Christian Commission for Development, with which
Duke has been associated for more than a decade.
Eleven years ago, Ollie Jenkins, a former director of
the Wesley Fellowship, made a real commitment to mission trips in
the Third World. Willimon calls him “a great catalyst.”
Groups sponsored by Duke Chapel have an educational and Christian
focus, based on Christ’s charge to serve the poor. Our group
happened to consist primarily of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and
Methodists. We all asked family and friends for donations for the
group and for the projects, so that any Duke student, regardless of
family resources, could afford to go.
“We have a saying that you can’t change Honduras
in a week, but you might change a Duke student,” says Willimon.
“Duke is an elitist, privileged place, but there is an amazing
number of people who want to make sacrifices and help others. For
some, it becomes their life.”
Mission work may not become my life, but it proved to
be a whole lot more than ditch-digging. Ostensibly, we went to help
Hondurans rebuild their lives. In reality, the trip helped us build
Duke community – and to connect with people who live in very
different, very difficult circumstances but who possess an inner joy.
Kate Miller put it well: “I definitely got out a
lot more than I put in. We can hear about, read about, see pictures,
and even watch a video about poverty, but until we actually meet someone
face-to-face, see the conditions they live in, and listen to their
story, we are not truly affected.”
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