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First stop on the lay missionary journey
They met as North Americans teaching in Guam. In
1992, they returned to the United States and, in 1994, wed. Angel
Mortel, now 29, who grew up in San Francisco, and Chad Ribordy, 33, of
Wichita, Kan., applied in 1997 to become Maryknoll Lay Missioners.
Theyd talked often about a life of service, they said, as they
reminisced over an Italian meal barely a month before they left for
Brazil in January this year. Finally, one day, recalled
Mortel, we just said, Fine, well apply once we
[have] paid off my college loans. Well give it a try.
Mortel, educated at Oberlin College and American University with
a bachelors in English and Third World studies and a masters
in international development, was working as Office Manager at Bread
for the World; Ribordy, with a bachelors in Philosophy from
Conception Seminary College and a masters in Pastoral Theology
from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, was teaching high school
religion.
The Maryknoll Mission Association of the Faithful, known as the
MMAF, founded in 1994 as a successor to an earlier lay mission program
run under the auspices of the Maryknoll fathers, prepares its
missioners with four months of theological and cross-cultural studies
in Maryknoll, New York. The initial obligation is a 3-and-a-half-year
renewable contract as a lay missioner in a location mutually agreed on
between the association and each missioner. After in-country language
training, the lay missioner is at the service of the local poor and
needy.
In Brazil, where Mortel and Ribordy were bound, the Maryknoll
presence includes lay people, sisters and priests in São Paulo
and the Northeastern city of Joao Pessoa, working in the areas of
womens and childrens rights, land issues, prison ministry,
marginalized people living and working in the city dump and Christian
Base Communities. Before they left, NCR asked the young couple to
periodically file an account of the new life that confronted their
first year in Brazil while the impressions were new and stark.
This first letter from Brazil covers their first month in the
country.
-- Arthur Jones
By CHAD RIBORDY AND ANGEL MORTEL
A 10-hour plane ride from the United States, and we finally landed
in the city of São Paulo, home of nearly 18 million people. It
seemed that the plane took as long to fly over the city as it did to
fly over the country.
For several weeks, we stayed with colleagues in Brasilåndia,
an area on the edge of the city. Though not a slum by Brazilian
standards, it is definitely a poor neighborhood, with garbage strewn
in the streets, deep pot holes, half-constructed though occupied homes
and a whole assembly of stray, mangy dogs.
In one of our first days in the neighborhood, we visited the home of
a local parishioner, Lucinha. Her house is situated in a small valley
among a cluster of similar-looking homes in an area prone to flooding
from the frequent torrential rains. We had to step over a stream of
open sewage to get to the front door of the small house. The
cinderblock walls and rafters were exposed, and the cement floor was
bare. The two windows in the house didnt provide sufficient
ventilation on that 92-degree day.
We were warmly welcomed (no pun intended). Lucinha lives with her
husband -- who was away working one of his marathon shifts as a
restaurant waiter -- and their four children. Their 5-year-old
daughter has a terrible bone defect in her knees; one of the triplet
boys also has a physical defect -- he has virtually no neck, and one
shoulder is higher than the other. He also had open sores on his back
and legs. In spite of the heat and cranky kids, Lucinha exuded
dignity, maintained her composure, was very attentive to her guests
and seemed not at all embarrassed by her poverty. During the course of
our conversation, Lucinha, who is dark-skinned, congratulated Angel,
who is of Filipino descent, for having married Chad, a white man, a
telling comment on Brazils racism.
From São Paulo, we took a 45-hour bus ride north to visit
Maryknoll colleagues in Joao Pessoa, a city of about 1 million people.
Fellow passengers were mostly people who had fled the poverty of
northeastern Brazil to look for jobs in São Paulo. Many were
going home to visit relatives, sometimes children and spouses they
hadnt seen for years. The bus was modern, riding on roads that
were surprisingly smooth.
One stretch of the journey is notorious for road bandits, and buses
usually travel this stretch in convoys.
The Northeastern region -- including Paraíba where
Maryknollers work -- is suffering from an intense drought. The rural
population in the semi-arid interior regions, especially the
subsistence farmers, is near starvation. Sufficient underground water
sources do exist, but only the wealthy landowners can afford to tap
into the reserves. Because hungry people have ransacked some food
convoys and supermarkets, the Brazilian government has military troops
accompanying food trucks. One government target for blame for the
saques (ransacks) is the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem
Terra, known as MST, a burgeoning movement of landless rural workers.
The government accuses MST of creating social tension and chaos.
The truth is that while the MST has helped organize some saques,
people are hungry and doing what they can to survive. Paraíba
Archhbishop Marcelo Pinto Carvalheira has said the Brazilian bishops
conference condones the saques in extreme circumstances --
citing Thomas Aquinas statement that stealing is morally
acceptable if it is a matter of survival.
Brazil has tremendous conflicts over land, as many countries do.
Here the majority of the land is owned by a very small percentage of
the population, and much of the land lies idle. Over the past several
years, groups of landless people have been taking over this idle land
to work for their own sustenance.
They move onto the land, live in tents and begin to plant and grow
crops. Sometimes there is a struggle with the landowners hired
guns. If the group perseveres, and if the land is declared to have
been unproductive, the group as a unit gains title to the land, and
thus an assentamento (settlement) is born.
As part of our orientation, Maryknoll colleague Tom Bamut took us to
an assentamento about 20 miles outside Joao Pessoa. We wound
for the last five miles along dirt trails through a maze of sugarcane
and manioc fields. At one point, we took a wrong trail and got lost
and stuck in sand. No AAA here.
Fortunately, we were able to push the car out. At this assentamento,
the houses, like Lucinhas, were clustered together forming a
small community that had no electricity as yet. The nearest water
source was a 15-minute hike down a hill to a spring.
Reginaldo, a settler, gave us a tour that included the house of the
former landowner, an absentee landlord for the most part, who, when he
was there, was quite cruel, abusing women and torturing those who
disobeyed his orders. Eventually he stopped coming altogether. In
1990, the people who had been working the land claimed the property
for themselves and, after a struggle, gained title in 1993.
Currently the community uses the former landowners house as a
school. The teachers, however, arent well prepared, and most
only have a primary school education. Teachers receive a miserable
wage of between $23 and $85 per month, though the cost of living in
Brazil is as high as it is in the United States.
Brazilians have been incredibly hospitable and patient with our
barely-intelligible Portuguese and our unending list of questions. It
has been difficult for us to move around so much -- weve slept
in six different beds and supped at twice as many tables since our
arrival four weeks ago. We are very much looking forward to having our
own space when we go to language school in Brasília, the nations
capital.
National Catholic Reporter, July 31,
1998
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