Page 1 | August 2003 | Vol. 30  No 8 | Index | Page 2

FROM THE DIRECTOR…

Dear Fellow Missionaries,

In our June newsletter, we read the very moving article by Fr. Paul Scanlon, OP titled Not a Sparrow Falls in which he told us of the tragic death of a Tzeltal Indian woman.  In his account, he spoke of her son who "straightened out her hair, wiped the moisture and bits of mud from her face, and kissed her on the forehead."  Many of you asked about the little boy and what happened to him.  With the help of Fr. Paul and Fr. Vincent Foerstler, I can give you a brief follow-up.

The boy's name is Petul, which in the Tzeltal language is Pedro.  After his mother's death, he was baptized with Fr. Vincent as his godfather.  He was adopted by Javier and Kathy Vargas, lay missionaries who were working with our Dominicans in Ocosingo.  Later the Vargas family moved to Mexico City and Pedro (Petul) eventually became a taxi driver.  If you should ever take a taxi in Mexico and the driver's name is Pedro Vargas, you will be meeting an old friend.

In this issue, Fr. Timothy Conlan, OP tells us of his ministry among the indigenous people of Guatemala.   Please keep Fr. Timothy and all of our missionaries in your prayers.

In Christ’s peace,
Fr. Martin de Porres Walsh, O.P.

Building Adobe Chapels
By Fr. Timothy Conlan, O.P.
Ravinal, Guatemala

Here in Rabinal, the 12 communities were I work are in the mountains at about 6,000 feet of altitude. Eighty percent of the people here are indigenous Mayan Indians, who live in adobe houses and plant corn on the very steep hillsides.  In the last five or six years some funding has come to help them get water piped to their houses and to get a few mini-irrigation projects.  Mostly these people only grow corn and a few were growing coffee or granadillas, (which are a fruit with lots of seeds that looks like a yellowish, brown goose egg).  But coffee prices are so low that they are pulling up the coffee.  Really, there is not much that can be grown on the steep hillsides.  It is not appropriate for farming, because it is so inclined. It would be better used for forest.

Although most of you think of Guatemala as a tropical paradise, in this area there is not a lot of rainfall.  What is happening here is that the people are so poor that they must cut down all the firewood they can to sell in the village and all the trees they can to sell for construction.  The area is being deforested at a very rapid rate.  Every day, all day long, people are walking down ten miles with a load of 40 to 60 lbs. of firewood.  Even worse, large contractors are taking out huge truckloads of wood each day.  The result is that much of the mountains no longer retain water and many of these little villages don’t have water part of the year.  It is a natural disaster and the government does very little or nothing about it.  You ask why?  Well, it is a corrupt government.  Every day we read about hundreds of millions of Quetzales (the basic money which is about 1/8 of a dollar) that are robbed by the heads of ministries or institutions of the government.

These mountains used to have very large trees of various kinds.  Also the Quetzal bird had its grounds here, but those will soon be extinct here since they are cutting down the trees it feeds on.  The people are not educated as to the disaster that is about to happen.  They are humble peasants who have little education.  We need to have a program that really tries to educate them.  In the past, various ecological groups have come and gone, but now there are none active here.  Partly the problem was that the military governments in the early 1980’s murdered so many people here that there is a great amount of fear about working here.   I have on various occasions shared that sad history.

Well, in these mountain villages the women try to make a little money taking off the shell of the seeds in the squashes that they grow.   They receive a few pennies for this laborious work.  From those seeds comes vegetable oil.  The men must leave for about five months of the year to go out to the coast to work on large plantations where they pick cotton, coffee, or cut sugar cane etc.  They receive very little wages and poor food and often get sick from malaria or dengue.  These people are extremely poor.   They rise at 4 a.m. and work until dark.   These people are very strong and hard working

For the past six months, we have been building two chapels at the same time in two different villages.  It is a very challenging project.....>>>