Robbed Again!

Padre Julio, about whom I have blogged previously, Skyped me from Colombia this morning. He had been robbed again -- the second time in three months that someone broke into his car and took everything. This time the thief took both Fr. Julio's personal computer and the computer that belongs to the organization he founded, Por Amor a Los Ninos de Colombia (For Love of the Children of Colombia). It had recently happened, and I guess when he Skpyed me, he was at an Internet cafe, trying to figure out his next step and wondering where and when the good from this would come about!

I suppose I am a fairly appropriate person with whom to share this kind of news. After all, in addition to my regular muggings, I have been robbed on a few occasions. The first time washed away any sentimental affiliation with things. We had moved from Montana to South Carolina, where I was undergoing my initial military training, and had then gone on to California, where I was to be permanently stationed. (Of course, in the military one must realize that a "permanent change of station" is anywhere in length from six months to three years -- so much for permanence.) While I was in South Carolina, we had left many of our possessions, including my wedding ring (long story), in storage in Montana. After the move to California, I asked for annual leave, and we made a difficult and long trip back to Montana through the snowed-in Sawtooth Mountains, over which we had to creep with our tires in chains, only to find out that everything had been stolen. There was absolutely nothing left. Bit by bit, we replaced everything, except the wedding ring. I do not wear one to this day, but most people know immediately that I am married. There have been other times, each with its own special characteristics, but the most recent was finding upon return from two years in Jordan that our RV, in which we had been living in an isolated area on a mountain river in rural California and which we had left in the possession of a neighbor, had been broken into and everything stolen, including the door from the refrigerator, the air conditioning (leaving a hole in the roof), and all the wiring. The neighbor, it turned out, was wanted for kidnapping (her own child, in a divorced situation) in Louisiana and had been forced to return there. And then there was the house that we lost. We had rented out our primary residence when we moved from Pennsylvania to Washington, DC years ago. For years, the tenants paid the rent, taking out any money they needed for repairs, and renting out a second apartment that was part of the house and keeping the rent in exchange for taking care of the property. It was a great arrangement until they suddenly went incommunicado and stopped paying rent. Our attorney learned that the father, the sole breadwinner, had lost his job and was on welfare but had not conveyed that to us (perhaps we could have worked something out). When the attorney told the tenants to pay the back taxes or leave, they left, taking everything they could, including things that belonged to us. Then, to make sure that there was nothing left, they took an axe and broke every window and chopped down all the stairs. Oh, well, it was only a house.

Any time I might consider that I have problems, I recall the life of my best friend from college. Coping with a bubble baby (no immune system) and a child recently diagnosed with diabetes, together with a husband dying from cancer for whom doctors held little hope, she locked her house and left for her home city where the doctors were better able to treat her husband and her mother could help with her two children. Six months later, she returned with her husband in remission, planning to continue on with her not-so-easy life and found her house ransacked. Nothing of any value, including sentimental value, had been left. (The whole story is rather long and has an amusing, well, at least, a lighter, outcome; I have posted it on Mahlou Musings.)

I think the moral to these stories is that life is too short and too complicated to worry about possessions. Possessions, in the long run, do not really matter. (I don't think that is just the Franciscan me speaking. I think it is really true.) In the long run, we may never recover our possessions, but, in my experience, God will somehow turn these experiences into something that is good or something that gives good: good from bad, the story of my life and of the lives of many people I know.

Our earthly goods may be taken from us, in my case over and over. But that is not important. Our soul cannot be taken from us; we have to give it away of our own free will. Our hope cannot be taken from us; we have to give up on our own for God will always hold out to us a branch of hope. Our happiness cannot be taken from us for while we may not be able to control what is done to us, we can control how we react to it (as the aphorism goes).

Sure, I have been robbed, but I choose to let those things go, forgotten in past days that I am not going to relive, anyway. I choose happiness. Always. My happiness does not lie in having good things. It does not even lie in having good news. Rather, my happiness lies in the fact that the universe is bigger than I, that God is greater than I, and that, as we are told, all things will work together for our good. That does not mean that my life has no sorrow. Certainly, it does. Considerably much of it, truth be told. However, sorrow does not preclude happiness, just as happiness does not preclude sorrow.

The robberies I experienced gave me a very different outlook on life -- a more positive one and one less burdened with the need for things (now I can use more of my money to help others because I no longer feel a need to "buy" fine surroundings). The robbery my friend experienced led her, too, through the intervention that she sought, to the ability to cope with three difficult medical situations, and today both children have outgrown their medical problems and are married adults with families and her husband is still in remission from cancer. Good in the long term is something to be anticipated for Padre Julio as well. In the short term, however, please pray for him and the children of Palomar.

7 Quick Takes Friday #2

I did not really think that I would (1) have time to do the 7 quick takes today or that (2) I would have seven things to mention. I was wrong on both accounts. I love it when I am wrong about such things!

1. I might as well jump in up front with the confession: I spent a day of physical and spiritual debauchery last Saturday prior to leaving for Kiev just a couple of days later. In the morning, we picked up Doah at his group home, then he, Donnie, and I honored the invitation of one of my employees to attend an Assyrian (Chaldean) festival, associated with his church, in a city to the north of us. We had some great Middle Eastern food and managed to observe the Sheikhani (a fun but tiring circle dance associating with the town of Sheikhan) but escape before becoming a part of it. (Usually I get pulled into it, and then everyone gets to laugh at my two left feet.) We got back to our home town just in time for our Saturday Roman Catholic mass and immediately after mass left for a town to the south, about an hour away, arriving just as the sun was setting, i.e. perfect timing for iftar (the Muslim breaking of the fast – it was still Ramadan), to which we had been invited by one of the supervisors who works for me.

2. One of my colleagues traveling with me had made the arrangements at a four-star hotel here in Kiev and was excited about seeing it, getting to soak up luxury. I did not have the heart to tell her that five-star hotels here are like good (but not necessarily luxurious) hotels in the USA and four-star hotels are less than one would expect in the USA. Four stars means that you do get those little soaps and shampoos that I like to bring back to the homeless shelter (they are the perfect individual size). You also usually get a hair dryer and a real bed, not a couch-like bed. Other than that, one would not call it anything special. My colleague was disappointed, but it was about what I had expected, and I am happy because I do have access to Internet here although I have to pay by the minute.

3. I had forgotten how much walking one does in a former Soviet country. Public transportation is excellent, and you can get anywhere very inexpensively, but you do walk – between transfer stations, to/from the nearest metro, etc. Yesterday we had great difficulty finding a place we were supposed to visit because we had poor directions, and neither of our phones worked so we could not call. (With cell phones universally available, the pay phones have all but disappeared from the streets.) By my calculation, we walked more than three hours all told, and I ended up very sore. I guess I need to do more than just think about getting in shape. After all, this body belongs to God as much as it belongs to me, and I don’t want to be someone who forgot to tend God’s property!

4. For those of you who have been following the story of 19-year-old orphan Katya of Tula, she needs some help. We still do not have her in the USA where she can be helped. Everything seems to be on track, but Russia is a country where business takes place slowly. Now, she has lost much of her hearing (in addition to her sight). She must raise $1000 for the kinds of hearing aids that she needs. If you have spare change or know someone who is looking for a good cause, this young lady is a good cause. The person to contact about Katya (whose real name is Tatyana Tusova) is Ken Wilcox at Orphan Cry.

5. If I had any doubt that sitting beside Maxim (the Ukrainian who thought I was Russian and then, realizing that I was a foreigner in a somewhat unknown land, offered to have his driver take me and my colleagues to the hotel after dropping him off) on the plane was pure coincidence, then that doubt was removed this morning, when the driver, Volodya, popped up out of nowhere as we were leaving the hotel. He happened to be driving by and stopped to confirm that we wanted to be picked up at 4:00 in the morning tomorrow as we had indicated when he dropped us off two days ago. Volodya’s surprise appearance comforted us because we had found that our cell phones for some reason do not work here even though they were supposedly turned out and had not been able to reach Volodya to confirm while running around town. We would have called from the hotel in the evening, but we did not have to; here was Volodya in person! While we could also have called a cab from the hotel, knowing that we will not have to deal with an unknown company in the middle of the night but will have someone reliable waiting for us is one of those extra-nice spoiling I seem to get from God from time to time without knowing why. I did not do anything to deserve anything special, but what a nice feeling to have it happen!

6. The next thing I have to do before tumbling into bed this evening early in order to leave at oh-dark-hundred is to translate a letter Fr. Julio sent to me from Colombia. It won’t take long; it is an update to the sponsors of children in Colombia. (And, by the way, Padre Julio is always looking for more sponsors as there are many children in need of help in Colombia.)

7. And now I am going to stop so I can translate the letter and get some sleep for my wee-hours-of-the-morning trip. Germany, here I come!

In the event that I am incommunicado over the weekend, I wish all of you a great weekend – restful and spirit-filled!

Fishes and Loaves for Colombia

Almost two years ago, I met a young priest from Colombia, Padre (Fr.) Julio. Padre Julio substituted for our noon Spanish mass one Sunday and mesmerized the congregation. Shortly thereafter I came to know Padre better (1) as he traveled more than an hour to Stanford University Hospital to pray for my daughter Noelle who was having brain surgery, (2) after he accepted my offer as a volunteer tutor of English when his duties were changed from the Spanish mass to the English mass (a mutually beneficial activity -- as I helped him convert his homilies from Spanish to English, I learned a lot of theology from him and a little more Spanish, too), and (3) during web design working sessions with my family (which consists of graphic artists, computer programmers, web designers, and me, a writer and translator) as we constructed a website for the organization that he founded: Por Amor a los Ninos de Colombia (for love of the children of Colombia). Padre's dream was to help the children of his native Colombia, a beautiful, rural region, full of potential that was being replaced by violence. Padre describes the situation as follows:

In recent years, violence and illiteracy have affected the communities of the village of Palomar and surrounding hamlets. The distance between the school and the houses where the children live can be between one and six hours, making school attendance impossible.

Because their families live in poverty, these children cannot afford transport to nearby towns or cities either. This has resulted in young people between the ages of 12 and 18 having no other choice than to join guerrilla or paramilitary groups, commit petty crimes, work in the fields without the possibility of an education, or worse yet, becoming addicted to drugs.

The need to provide alternatives to solve the many problems this school-age population is facing is an urgent one. They have neither the economic nor the material means to do it themselves.

But let me step back just a bit in time. When I first became acquainted with Padre as a result of his describing Por Amor during mass, I wanted to donate a little something -- and "little" was the right label for any monetary amount I could hope to scrape together. Having come from an impoverished farm family and then spending most of a lifetime raising children with serious medical needs, even spare change was hard to find. I reasoned, however, that I could offer family skill in lieu of money, and Padre and I began a conversation about how the website would look. In the midst of this conversation, I ended up being sent to work in Bahrain for three weeks, just as Padre was beginning a push to raise the initial funds for Por Amor. Padre and I maintained a running e-mail conversation, he in Spanish and I in English, about the website plans, but somewhere in the back of my mind was the understanding that most of our work would be in vain if he could not get together a reasonable fund in a reasonable amount of time. I would have liked to help with that, too, but I am no fundraiser. So, on both counts -- giving money and raising money -- I was not much help to Padre until a marvelous thing happened.

As soon as I had arrived in Bahrain, a friend, who knew I was coming, showed up in my hotel room and dragged me to dinner, in good Arab fashion refusing to allow me to pay. But I had per diem for my meals, one thousand dollars, in fact, to cover the time I would be abroad. As I walked up to my room, an idea flew into my mind (from where?). There would certainly be another friend or two who would react in the same way over the next three weeks and the Ministry of Education would also likely host me for at least one meal, so I might have a hundred or even a little more than a hundred dollars left over from unspent per diem. I made a promise to God that whatever amount I did not spend on food in Bahrain, I would give to Padre for His children in Colombia. After that, friends and colleagues appeared out of the woodwork, and none would allow me to pay my own way (it does not fit with the culture there). In addition, the Ministry of Education had several socials and formal dinners which were also free to me. When I left Bahrain at the end of the three weeks, I had not had to purchase even one meal. When I reached the USA, I handed all $1000 of my per diem over to Padre for his children.

Bahrain might be little more than a desert to some, but it does have the famous tree of life that flourishes in sand. How symbolic for what had just happened! I was living in a philanthropic desert and yet out of that wasteland tumbled one thousand dollars for children in need half a world away. Would God re-create the fishes and loaves miracle today? You bet!