January, 2006
Catholic Spirit - January, 2006
Guatemalan missionaries see pain, beauty in new work
Editor’s note: Newlyweds Katherine and Josiah Mooney arrived in Guatemala Sept. 1 to begin missionary work with Catholic Relief Services, the official international relief effort of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They have made a two-year commitment to working with CRS, assisting two Maryknoll sisters in opening an AIDS hospice in Coatepeque, in the Diocese of Los Altos. The following are excerpts from a letter they sent to Bishop Gregory Aymond via email.
As you know, we now call Coatepeque, Guatemala our temporary home. Located in hot and humid western Guatemala, it is surrounded by coffee plantations and is several miles from the Mexican border. At first glance it is a noisy and chaotic during the day, a commercial center for the local coffee and banana plantations. Our first several weeks have proven to be exciting and challenging, to say the least: funerals, floods, earthquakes, mudslides –– throw a bit of HIV/AIDS orientation in there and we’ve had a lot of “firsts” since we left ol’ Tyler, Texas. Coupled together with these orientations is an unpredictable nature of Coatepeque as a border-town –– a Central American gateway to Mexico, and further on, the United States.
Our HIV/AIDS training has been arduous, at times an overwhelming experience of extreme sickness mixed with extreme poverty, a complicated reality in which so many casualties are housewives and children. Throughout the past several weeks we have had opportunities to visit many people living with HIV, several in the final stages of AIDS; many of the encounters have been difficult for both of us. The purpose of the visits has been to encourage those who have tested positive to HIV to begin treatment.
Many, when having tested positive, enter a period of severe depression during which their bodies suffer heavily from malnutrition and non-treatment. While many are receptive to encouragement, others remain extremely afraid to face family and friends, and are often too sick to go to the hospital alone. Another difficult part of our orientation has been to sit with patients while receiving the results of their HIV test, so many of them younger than ourselves.
Katherine will be working with the education team in Proyecto Vida. As one of the only HIV/AIDS educational team of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, the team works with education, prevention, and awareness. Specifically, Katherine will be helping to design materials for educational workshops, as well as editing and redesigning the structures of lessons in their sexual education manuals. The education team holds workshops for various communities in the area, including public and private high schools, training teachers in methodology and familiarizing them with the manuals, which are distributed to the cooperating teachers. As her Spanish improves, she will facilitate some of the workshops in the coming months.
Regarding the hospice, my work will currently consist of mostly administrative and fundraising work. As the hospice project is still not capable of receiving patients (we have only three beds), there is much work to be done in order to prepare the hospice for an opening date, we think in early January. I have begun to write a funding proposal for the operational costs of the hospice, expected to be around $40,000 annually.
However, there are still several “finishing touches” needed on the hospice (i.e. gutters, office furniture, sheets and pillows) not included in the budget; these are the main immediate concerns, after which we can begin to accept patients. Throughout the week I spend three days at the hospice working with at staff of five. Work at the hospice entails everything from building fences and painting walls –– for which they use a curious mixture of washing detergent, salt, calcium, and water –– to finding furniture and figuring out how to work donated medical equipment.
Getting to know the staff at the hospice has provided some of the most meaningful interaction thus far. Four of the five are HIV positive –– and their collective diligence dispels any notions I have about how the disease affects a person with access to treatment. Surrounding the hospice is a large variety of plants and trees, which the sisters use for medicinal remedies; the hospice plans to use the medicines for low-cost alternative medicines for the patients.
As we become more familiar with the unsteady atmosphere surrounding our lives in Guatemala, our minds are acclimating to a world that is never constant, a reality that encompasses a plethora of different people with similarly difficult living circumstances; and we are learning to live in an environment which at any time can thrust forward entirely different situations of instability. We never imagined that much of what has happened would, indeed, happen. But, after all, this is why we came! Through it all we have been blessed with the people we have met in Guatemala, and all have given a loving reception to us and our wishes to live and work with them during the next several years. Thank you for your support.
In Christ,
Josiah and Katherine Mooney
Donations to the hospice work in Guatemala may be sent to Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17090, Baltimore, Maryland 21203-7090, or by visiting www.catholicrelief.org.