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“When You Pray, Move Your Feet” |
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Wednesday, 08 October 2008 |
Andrew is a parishioner at St. Peter Parish in Kirkwood and a 2008 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is currently volunteering in Quito, Ecuador with a Catholic community center called El Centro para el Muchacho Trabajador, or “The Center for Working Boys.”
I feel bad that these entries may be getting shorter and shorter as our schedules become increasingly more and more full. We started classes with our adults this week and I feel like it is going to be one of my favorites here. I am working with some of the more advanced adults. We did a diagnostic writing sample, asking them about their hopes and dreams, and the responses were all centered around their kids. They all hope to study so that they can help improve the lives of their children. Many of them hope to one day start their own business. I think the classes are as much a chance for them to take an hour each day to reflect upon themselves away from their families and jobs.
It is interesting as the weeks progress how the volunteers deal with stress. Every night at dinner there is usually a story of a breakdown of some sort or a class spinning completely out of control. On more than one occasion I have sent over half of a class to the office. Things have been getting easier to manage though. After the initial authority has been established, and the kids have the chance to test and see if the teacher will really follow through with their proposed punishments, control of a classroom becomes much simpler. One of my more interesting classroom experiences here has been working with the girls program. I was told I would be an assistant to another teacher who knew how to cook all the food the girls then sell. This turned out to be a woman who comes about once a week and tells me what to make (without a recipe) and how much the food should be sold for. They found it hilarious that I did not know how to make empanadas from scratch. Now I do.
We had a three-day weekend this past week and we all went to the beach town Atacames to recharge. We had a five-dollar hostel on the beach and went whale watching for ten dollars. We had seven people on a boat, which was powered by a motor fit for a go-cart. We saw nothing for two hours (minus some oil tankers and some sea birds that seemed to be trailing us), and then the whales began jumping. We first saw a large male jump entirely out of the water, and then we watched a baby jumping over its mom. These were huge humpback whales. It was almost eerie when two whales swam within fifteen feet of the boat and we could hear them talking. It was one of the more impressive things I have witnessed.
Every Tuesday night we have a spiritual reflection, which is great for recharging our motivation. Before coming here, I had a skeptical if not critical view of what I perceived missions to be. After witnessing the sense of purpose and community that is here in the center, I can only hope that someday there will be more centers like this in the world. A common observation here is how different the church masses are compared to those in the States. From my experience, I have always found churches at home to be a bit daunting, centered on the actual entity of the church rather then the people. It often bothered me how much people talked or somehow compared their level of faith to their peers, rather than striving for change through action. Here at the center, the masses feel warmer, with a pervasive sentiment of family. It is hard to explain why the masses feel the way they are. Possibly the only explanation I can think of is that after working hard within a large community of people for a purpose larger then yourself, communication seems to transcend far beyond the verbal into a realm more of mutual love and respect. A close friend of mine once told me a favorite quote of hers, "When you pray, move your feet". I have really grown to like this quote being down here.
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