Being Sent

When I read articles in F@W, everyone finds an answer. Maybe some day I will too, but not today. I am in the learning stage of being a missionary in the Dominican Republic. The only answer I have is God.

I am white and North American and therefore rich. God sent me to work with black Dominicans who are poor, who are work-weary beyond belief and with little opportunity to change. There is no welfare. Life is largely "pull yourself up by your bootstraps or die." I have a whole new appreciation for the poor who scrounge hand-to-mouth each day, buying one egg, one pat of butter and one cup of rice-at double the prices in the U.S.

Sunday afternoons I meet with a group of women whom I admire. They are survivors. All of them lost their homes and most of their belongings in Hurricane George. All of them have little visible means of support--like jobs. We sit under a hurricane-ravaged tree and sing and pray our hearts out.

I've learned that most of the women have alcoholic husbands-a situation that is endemic here since rum is so available. Now what? How can I hep women in this situation besides pray and weep? I keep wanting God to fix things. We pray and pray and don't see many changes. They desperately want wholesome families but everyone is so tired, so work-weary and fragmented that drink provides a welcome numbness for many.

One Sunday afternoon, we began evening prayer, tired and listless:

O Lord, make speed to save us!

O Lord, make haste to help us!

I stopped and said, "Let's do that again, only this time let's say it like we really mean it. And we started shouting to God, naming our needs. I realize this is a very unEpiscopal thing to do, this clamoring. But it is good and now a ritual for us.

On Good Friday, Bolivar had made a cross and painted it a beautiful lavender. Cross in hand, we went door to door around the neighborhood saying, "We have a message for you from Jesus." Most of the homes in this area are one or two room shacks (as we snobs call them in English) but they are real homes to the people who live in them. This was the most real "stations of the cross" I have ever participated in.

We are trying to start a new mission in one of the suburbs. We are using homes because we don't have anything else at present. But our homes are small and the going is rough. I realize now the frustration of being the leader, for whom this Bible study is my job, asking work-weary souls to set apart time to commune with God. I know they need it. They are slowly learning that they need it also. Two of my ladies are working in the free zone, 44 hours a week, and making $37.50 They think the pay is great and I weep! And if they work weekends, the pay is doubled--and they are so tired.

We've been taking communion to three elderly folks. One fellow, age 94, was surprised by a burgler who whacked him on the head last year and he hasn't been the same since. One day we were singing, "On Jordan's bank..." and he sat up. He thought he was in church. "Here is your communion," we say and he opens his mouth. The second, Estella, has been blind for 35 years. She has never learned braille and has a mind as sharp as a tack. She remembers clearly the day she made her first communion 73 years ago. Her memory of hymns both in English and Spanish is marvelous and she sings so sweetly. And yet she is full of fear and anxiety and drives off everyone who tries to help her. A third, Lorenzo, is dying of cancer. He lives alone. His wife died six years ago. On his wall is a painted photo of the couple on their wedding day. Youth and old age, strength and weakness, firmness and brokenness confront me each time I visit. This week he said, "I am going to fight until I have no fight left and then I am out of here." This was the first time he acknowledged what is happening. We keep singing those hymns in the 1940 hymnbook, those little red ones with the melody only, whose last verses sing of the glory of life eternal with Jesus.

Being a Missionary

Being a missionary means being sent. It means having your world turned upside down (or maybe it is being righted.) It means having God squeeze you to the point where you think you can't tolerate it any more (but you do). It means being put in circumstances in which you can do nothing but "be" and "pray." It means hanging onto God with all of your being. My bishop asked me what was the best part of being a missionary. "My closeness to God," I replied.

Being a missionary means having God show you how self-centered you really are. And when it is my turn to be prayed over by those ladies up in the hills, and they put their hands on me and start praying, I know what heaven is like. I sure hope they do too when it is their turn.

Matthew 10:9 says Jesus sent his disciples out empty-handed. Elsewhere he exhorts us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and give shelter to the homeless. How can I do both? I helped one desperate couple when he was sick and now their grown children expect me to do so always. "La Americana will do it!"

Lucilla looks on me as her savior. I can't stand it. "I'm not," I tell her, "Jesus is."

"But you are here," she says.

How do we, the wealthy, support the poor in Christian love? We of the USA are sending all kinds of work teams to this country and others, to do the work that Dominican Christians should be doing. I have no problem with helping to rebuild after a hurricane, but painting a church? Landscaping a church? From my point of view, we are destroying the Dominican church because we are not allowing them to struggle and invest their own energies to create the kind of church that will survive when benefactors go away.

Caroline is working in La Romana, in the Diocese of the Dominican Republic, as a missionary of the South American Missionary Society (SAMS). Her USA parish is Immanuel Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Delaware.