Bolivia is a landlocked country of great geographical variety. It has some of the largest peaks in the Andes mountains—as high as 21,000 feet—yet it also contains a substantial part of the Amazon rainforest in its eastern part. At 13,500 feet above sea level, the capital La Paz is the highest major city in the world, seventy-eight more feet than Lhasa in Tibet. For those of us born and raised in the flat lands of the American Midwest, it's hard to appreciate the enormous scale of the Andes, which are, after the Himalayas, the second highest range in the world.
Bolivia's population is fifty-five percent indigenous—split roughly equally between Quechua and Aymara—with around thirty percent mestizo and fifteen percent white. Many of the Aymara, who also live in northern Chile and Peru, and the Quechuas, who are spread across Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are very poor. Bolivia today has a growing population of Evangelical Christians, but at the time it was ninety-five percent Roman Catholic. When I arrived, the country was just emerging from a period in the early 1980s where a series of military governments marked by corruption, drug-smuggling, and human rights abuses, in addition to a collapse in the price of tin—one of the major industries in Bolivia—had debilitated the country's economy.
Cochabamba, where I landed, was, at the time, a city of half a million people, about 150 miles southeast of La Paz. It rests in a valley in the Andes range at about 9,000 feet above sea level, and after La Paz and Santa Cruz is the third largest city in Bolivia. January is the height of summer in the southern hemisphere and Cochabamba was full of flowers and grasses when I arrived. It was also the rainy season, and it rained every day I was there.
The team of missioners to which Gilchrist belonged consisted of four nuns and two priests. Rita Keegan had joined the Maryknoll sisters after one year of teaching in 1957. She could speak Spanish and the native language of Quechua quite well. Rita was particularly concerned with community development and issues of economic sustainability. She initiated pastoral programs with the Quechuan Bolivians that immersed her directly in the lives of the ordinary people for over two decades. She worked closely with Father Matt Mueller, a Dominican priest from Chicago in his early sixties who'd lived in Bolivia for many years. Matt had been ordained in Rome and had a doctorate in theology from a university in Spain. He was deeply committed to aiding the poor and suffering.
Both Rita and Matt were very involved in working on homesteading projects near Santa Cruz. The Bolivian government would designate land in the rainforest for the indigenous Bolivians and Rita and Matt would write and obtain grants to fund individuals and groups to migrate and become self-organizing and self-sustaining communities. As a cause and result of their work, both Rita and Matt had developed into extremely capable planners and logisticians.
Another member of the team, Mary Mahoney, was a Chicagoan and a Dominican nun from Sinsinawa, Wisconsin. Mary had a master's degree in the fine arts. She was a simple and shy woman with beautiful, soft brown eyes, and a quick wit and ready laugh. In her forties, she had an introverted personality, was extremely sensitive, and I believe had a hunger for the contemplative life. Because her own community sponsored her, Mary lived with the other members of the team in Cochabamba on the weekends only, and was, as it were, "hired" by the team for their work.
The fourth nun in the team was Geraldine McGinn. Gerry was born in New York City on July 4th, 1937. Her early education took place in New York Catholic schools where she was greatly influenced by the Dominican Sisters of Sparkhill. She graduated from St. Helena's High School and entered the Dominican Sisters Community, making her first vows on May 16th, 1956. From then until 1981, she was deeply and creatively involved in elementary and secondary education in the Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of New York, where she served as chairperson of the Community Council of her congregation for two terms and was very active in the various projects of the Inter-Community Center for Justice and Peace, organized by religious communities of the Archdiocese. In 1981, Gerry joined the Maryknoll Sisters Associate Program and in February 1982 became part of the mission in the Cochabamba valley.
Gerry's personality was the opposite of Mary's: she was gregarious and loved to sing, especially Broadway musical hits, and she even had a life-sized picture of Bette Midler on the door of her room. In another life, I'm sure she would have been a model and a dancer. Gerry and Gilchrist had met in the language school sponsored by the Maryknoll Fathers and, given their compatible temperaments, were, along with Rita, the best of friends.
The final member of the team was Jack Risley, a Dominican priest from Chicago. He was forty years of age and suffered from diabetes. Nevertheless, he was very eager to help in extending the mission.
* * *
Rita, Gerry, and Gilchrist met me at the Cochabamba airport in a borrowed jeep, as the team's 1952 sky-blue Willy was in the shop getting new tires. Gilchrist presented me with huge bunch of red roses. Although my backpack and I had made it from Indianapolis, the bowling bag with the turkey was not to come until the following day. When the airport finally called to tell us it had arrived, Gilchrist was hopping mad: "How come they didn't call us earlier?" she said. When we picked up the bird, the customs man informed us that it was illegal to have brought it in and that he should have confiscated it. He relented, however, and we brought the turkey back to Casa Rosario and refroze it. I remember that Gilchrist shifted from rage to false, demure gratitude when she realized that all that she had to do to get the turkey was provide the usual monetary bribe for the guard.
Casa Rosario was a mission house on the outskirts of Cochabamba that provided the home base for the students of the language school. Maryknollers used it for their regional headquarters, giving missioners a place to stay in the city. When the house was fully occupied, it slept twenty-four people—three or four beds to a room—with a bathroom down the hall. It was very simple space: a dining room, a small chapel, a kitchen, a gathering place with windows on one side and bookcases on the other, and a fireplace.
Soon after I arrived, Gilchrist, Rita, and I visited the house of Doña Blanca, where we picked up a little boy called Juanito Vargas, who was perhaps twelve or even fifteen years old, although he looked more like a six- to seven-year-old child. Juanito suffered from cerebral palsy. He was able to walk with a limp, but was knock-kneed and cross-eyed. He was also thought to be deaf, but nobody knew for sure as he was mute, and mentally and physically challenged.
Gilchrist had fallen in love with Juanito when she'd visited an orphanage in Cochabamba in 1980. She'd learned that Juanito had had a brother, but there was no record of what had happened to him. Obviously, the mother had been unable to take care of Juanito, so he'd ended up at the orphanage where Gilchrist had found him sitting on a bed wearing only a T-shirt. Gilchrist discovered that when Juanito soiled himself, the staff of the orphanage wouldn't change the bedding, but simply turned his mattress over and waited for him to soil it again. She knew she had to get him out.
At first, Gilchrist took Juanito from the orphanage on weekends, but one time she didn't return him and had to pay a fine. Finally, she decided to become his legal guardian, and began the officially authorized process that would allow her to do this. The Benedictines have a provision in their statutes that nuns cannot own anything, which, of course, extends to the indebting of the community with adoption commitments. Even though Gilchrist's order was more flexible in that it allowed individuals to acquire money for their ministry, I don't think anyone could have gotten permission to adopt a child!
So Gilchrist had a plan to ferry him to the U.S., where her brother Dennis and sister-in-law Debbie, who already had six children of their own, would look after him, while Gilchrist completed her assignment in Bolivia. Although the Bolivian government didn't place any obstacles to Juanito being adopted outside their country, the United States rejected the possibility because Juanito was mentally and physically handicapped, and an orphan. Therefore, Juanito stayed with Doña Blanca during the week and accompanied Gilchrist on her tasks on the weekends. At the time I arrived, however, Doña Blanca was due to have surgery and Juanito was out of school, so he was with us for the whole week.
Juanito was a delightful child, with huge liquid, brown eyes and a ready smile and laugh. He loved cleaning dishes, sweeping the floor, pulling weeds, and hugging. During my stay in Bolivia I never heard the slightest negative word about him from anyone who was involved in his life, and everyone took turns looking after him. Every morning, when he was with us and not with his family in town, Gilchrist would try to tickle Juanito awake; and every night he would bless you and kiss you before you went to bed. In turn, Juanito thrived under Gilchrist's care. He'd put on about twenty pounds in the four years before I arrived in 1984, and although he remained very short (he only came up to my waist) he'd grown five inches in the same period and had undergone extensive dental work and surgery on his eyes to straighten them.
Gilchrist and the other nuns had also gotten Juanito into a school for the physically challenged, although this was also proving complicated. For diagnostic purposes, Juanito's school required reports from no fewer than nine doctors—some of whom gave contradictory advice on whether one or the other impediments would be attended to in this school. The Monday and Tuesday following my arrival, I accompanied Gilchrist and Juanito as we traveled around town to meet the doctors, only managing to see four of them. Further disappointment came when Gilchrist was given the official papers that indicated that Juanito had "failed" kindergarten at the school. The rejection had a familiar sting.
Taking on Juanito's care represented a serious commitment on Gilchrist's part. But she never shied away from selfless outreach, and Juanito gave her great joy. She had unlimited zeal, and although she was brilliant and could have competed with the highest-profile religious, clergy, or laity, she dedicated herself magnanimously to working for the least. Moreover, Juanito was always surprising them. Gilchrist and the nuns had taught Juanito how to signal his wants and feelings—thumbs up for "yes" or "good" and thumbs down for "no" or "bad"—and he was beginning to learn the rudiments of speech. It had become clear that part of Juanito's disability stemmed from the fact that no one had ever listened or spoken to him.
* * *
Rita, Gilchrist, Gerry, Juanito, and I spent three days in Cochabamba, gathering materials for our trip to the campo. Rita drove the team's two-ton truck to the food warehouses, where we paid in cash for forty-pound sacks of flour, sugar, powdered milk, soap, and rice, as well as chickens for the food pantry and some bottled water and beer for ourselves.
We then traveled on to Charamoco, a little river village that lay southward about half-way between Cochabamba and Capinota, the capital of the province. About an hour (and one flat tire) outside of Cochabamba, we turned off the two-lane highway onto a gravel-and-mud road that snaked into the mountains. Now and again we came across creeks that we had to ford because there were no bridges. In spite of the mild temperatures, the altitude made it necessary to wear a sweater, except perhaps at noon when you might be able to wear a T-shirt. Gilchrist and I sat in the back of the truck, coated in white flour that puffed from the sacks as our vehicle bounced along the rutted paths. Gilchrist's eyes shone: "This is the finest wheat we're giving them," she yelled above the noise of the truck's engine. I recognized the reference to Psalm 81, verse 16. "Even the richest in Cochabamba don't get this wheat," she beamed.
Finally, we arrived in Charamoco, which consisted of just a few houses. Rita and Carol (another Maryknoll nun) had a few years before engineered and overseen the building of a gray adobe house that overlooked the village and cornfields that were dominated by the Andes on all sides. Although the house had no running water nor a pump, barrels trapped the rain that funneled from the roof and this provided water for cleaning. Inside, the decoration was tasteful though Spartan. The theme was red: red wooden and cane furniture; red dishes, cups, and saucers; and curtains made of bamboo slats. The building sported perhaps the most comfortable outhouse I've ever known, with no odors and good ventilation. The house had been built on an old threshing floor, and the back rested on a spacious plateau.
That Wednesday I was designated to work at the co-op, where Juanito and I took the rice, flour, and wheat we'd brought from Cochabamba and poured each into two-kilo plastic bags to distribute to the people of the area. By noon we'd finished, and then as far as the eye could see, campesinos descended from the mountains to fill up their aguayos (colorful cloths that they used to carry everything, including their children) with supplies.
On our arrival at Charamoco, we met the remainder of the team: Fathers Matt and Jack and Sister Mary. The two priests lived in a little house down in the village, while Gilchrist and I shared a small residence located about a hundred yards or so from the adobe on the plateau where four could sleep, two to a room. Each morning, Gilchrist would wake up and read her Jerusalem Bible. She'd memorized huge sections of her favorite book, Isaiah, and she loved to recite sections from Deutero-Isaiah. (The book of Isaiah is generally considered to have been the work of different hands. Chapters forty to fifty-five are associated with Deutero-Isaiah—deutero being Greek for "second.")
That Saturday night, Gilchrist and I had our own Communion service. I took some Eucharistic bread that Sister Frieda from Beech Grove had baked. Before I left Indiana, my Benedictine sisters had conducted a prayer service where they'd blessed the bread, and I'd brought it with me to use it for Holy Communion. Gilchrist, in turn, also blessed it. We listened to each other reading the scriptures for the day from the Lectionary and then we ate the bread. (In recounting the event this way, I show myself to be more traditional than Gilchrist. She would've said that we celebrated a real Eucharistic Mass, even though neither of us, of course, were—or could have been—ordained. I honestly believe she felt called to the priesthood.)
The next day, Sunday, Gilchrist had some time off, and we rose late and talked the whole day and into the evening. We took the opportunity to catch up over what seemed like a lifetime of news and conversation—although in fact we'd not seen each other for four years. We prayed and laughed together, and shared our hopes and aspirations. Gilchrist expressed to me in person the joy she'd communicated in her letters and tapes, and that, although the work was difficult at times, it was work she genuinely loved.
* * *
January in Charamoco meant that the team was undertaking its planning for the next twelve months. The six members had a wide and complex set of responsibilities: they were required to perform baptisms, confirmations, and funerals, and visit every one of the four towns and thirty-three pueblos to say Mass and bless the sacraments, all in a cycle of two years. This was a considerable challenge. Some pueblos were only accessible by mule or horse, and a few only reachable on foot. When members of the team entered the peasants' houses, they'd occasionally find the occupants sitting on the floor, often with very little in the way of possessions around them. It was a scene, the team told me, straight out of the Palestine of Jesus' time.
Because of the great poverty of the region, the team had become responsible for pastoral care in its broadest sense. They'd set up youth organizations and a woman's group and were providing nursing services, while simultaneously trying to further their knowledge of the languages. In the short time I was in Bolivia, ten people a day or more would visit the house on the hill with problems they needed help fixing. One had a worm in his ear; another was a baby with a hernia. A man had stepped on a stick and it had sliced right through his foot. To each request, one of the team would open up their nurse's manual and try to deal with the situation, or if it was beyond their expertise they'd attempt to arrange professional medical help.
Sometimes what was required was beyond the reach of medicine. Gilchrist told me that once a woman had arrived at the house sporting a huge black eye. She'd told the team in Quechua that her sister had gotten mad at her and had hit her. One of the team patched up the eye and the woman returned home. About an hour later, another woman had turned up and was asked what was wrong. "I am sick at heart," she groaned, "I am sick at heart." It turned out that she was the one who had hit her sister in the eye and she was feeling remorseful. This confession entailed one of the team sitting outside the house with her for an hour, counseling and consoling her.
Gilchrist had given me some idea of the difficulties of the work—how so much of it was about tending to the maintenance needs of the team rather than the efficiency she knew in Indiana or Oklahoma where most of her time was given over to sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ. The pace of life was slower than that in the U.S. she'd told me in a letter before I came—not least because everything depended on the condition of the roads and the team's jeep, and the weather. Among the native peoples of that part of the Andean plateau, she wrote, alcohol and suicide rates were high as the people coped with problems endemic to poor, indigenous communities: disease, high infant mortality, the uncertain crop yields of subsistence farming, and the challenges to their culture and lifestyle posed by modernity and urbanization. While Gilchrist recognized the difficulty of breaking through the people's natural resistance to change, she also acknowledged their extraordinary courage and resilience, the simplicity of their lifestyle, and their proven ability to make extraordinary sacrifices for their children and extended families.
Like many missioners, Gilchrist had discovered that although it was perhaps impossible to change the structures and systems that kept the native population marginalized, landless, and unable to move their societies forward, she and her fellow religious nonetheless had a vital role in bearing witness to the people's struggle and doing what they could to make their daily lives more dignified. In her typically honest fashion, she felt she succeeded on some occasions and failed on others. But she hoped she was growing in compassion, and expressed gratitude for being able to do such important work and to receive so much support from her friends in the U.S.
The planning that Gilchrist and the team were undertaking that Thursday was to last three days. As I heard through the door to the room where they were meeting, it soon became obvious that the meeting wasn't proceeding very well. Juanito and I busied ourselves by sweeping the floor, tidying up the beds, going for a walk, and chopping and cleaning the vegetables. We made quite a team. I couldn't speak a word of Spanish, nor could he. He loved to take my watch off my wrist and put it on, over and over again.
Finally, later in the afternoon on Thursday, Gilchrist stormed out of the room. "Funk. We're stuck. You have a degree in planning," she said, referring to my master's degree from Indiana University. "Can you help us?"
"But I'm in grief," I spluttered. "You told me to come and hang out with you. I came to rest. I'm still trying to get over what happened at Catholic U."
Gilchrist gave me a look as if to say that she'd never heard such baloney in her life. "You get in there," she repeated, "and help us out, because we're in a real mess."
By this stage in my life, I'd been a facilitator for ten years. How could I say no?
So Juanito and I entered the room, and I got down to work. What happened over the next three days was in some ways a privilege, as I heard presented to me in a very frank and honest way the concerns, assumptions, aspirations, and ideas for making a difference that these two priests and four nuns had for the year, both as a team and as individuals.
I offered the group the option of three types of mediation with myself as the facilitator. In the first, I'd be soft, as it were. I'd sit back and allow them to figure out what they needed to get done, and be present should they ask for advice. In the second path, I'd be moderately involved. I'd allow the conversation to flow and gently guide it by intervening when I had to. In the third, I'd give direction to a process and, once they agreed to it, I'd hold the six of them to it. Immediately, the entire team agreed that they needed to be directed as fully as possible because they were completely incapable of pursuing the meeting in any organized fashion.
I then took a ruled 8 1/2 x 11 inch–sized pad of paper and filled up thirty pages by writing down all the team's assumptions: about who they were, who could or couldn't work together, what the problems were, what they were doing, and what needed to be done. In all, we arrived at perhaps two hundred assumptions (about how many parishes the priests could reach, who could or couldn't ride a horse, why women couldn't say Mass), and we wrote them down in outline.
In the assumptions, I got to hear all the problems, and they were all relational. It was the usual situation with teamwork, in that the functions and tasks were easy compared to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Gilchrist preferred to work with Gerry and Rita. Only Rita and Matt spoke Quechua, which was the main language of most of the local people between Cochabamba and La Paz. Gilchrist didn't know Spanish very well, so she had to be accompanied by someone who did when she was involved with the native people. Mary was more of a contemplative: she needed a lot of time alone and wanted more of a transition period between tasks. Sometimes, the meeting arrived at an impasse: some members of the group were willing to undertake some tasks, others willing to do others, and the discussion was honest and raw. But we laid it all out so that the six could see not only what they were feeling and thinking but also know that each was being heard and heeded.
We then moved on with a question about mission: What was it that the team was attempting to achieve? Ultimately, they concluded that their mission revolved around a wish to bring Christ to the thirty-six destinations in their charge and treat every Bolivian as someone through whom Christ made himself present. From the elements that the team brought forward, we were able to string together a loose but workable mission statement. We then set two or three long-range goals that the team hoped to accomplish by the end of the year. Under those goals we established ten or so objectives, and then under the objectives we worked out who was going to do what task (whether in a team of two or three individuals, or solo), and how much time and how many resources it would take to accomplish that task.
Most people have about two thousand work hours in a year, beyond which they really don't have the energy or will to continue. Because of the logistical challenges posed by their situation, the team determined that the work-year consisted of 210 days for each member to dedicate to their mission. From this set amount of time, the team then decided which member or members would be able to visit the parishes, give missions, train catechists, build a church, or try to provide some social service in another place. They decided who would be the lead agent, and who would or wouldn't be part of the group for that particular task.
I recall that on that Thursday, I started with a prayer; on Friday, Gerry did the same, and on Saturday, Jack led while Gilchrist gave a homily on Isaiah 35—"The desert will rejoice."
"Isn't God wonderful?" Gerry enthused on the last day of the meeting. "God's not only going to make the lame walk, but to make them dance. God's not only going to make little Juanito talk, but to make him sing." Rita remembers Gilchrist's play on the words of God's allurement in the desert and how this attraction had gathered each and every person in the room to God's infinite manifestations. Because it was January, the theme of Epiphany after the Christmas season in the liturgical cycle was still present.
As this process unfolded, I realized the great strengths and dynamism, the passion and idealism, of this team—its honesty, its humanity, and its wish to try to work through the interpersonal differences toward accomplishing the goals they all desperately wished to see. I was in awe at their commitment. All the members had been struck by illness. Gerry had had hepatitis and Gilchrist had come down with the parasitical infection giardia so severely that they'd had to leave the houses where they lived with the villagers and move into the staff house. Yet their conviction and dedication to the people around them had only deepened over time.
The dynamics at Charamoco were so complex that it was a challenge to even design a plan, let alone execute one. The team all took risks in getting to some hard places to accomplish what they did. Mary, for instance, took on some major responsibilities, even though she was more contemplative and needed a lot of time to prepare and follow up. In spite of these six individuals' very different personalities, the desire for cooperation trumped lack of trust and fear of incompetence, and the team engaged in some of the hardest and deepest dialogue I've ever heard.
It had been two-and-a-half days of grueling work, but by four o'clock on the afternoon on Saturday, January 21st, we'd finished. We celebrated the accomplishment by singing a rousing Amen as Rita cooked the evening meal. The team had seven goals, forty-four objectives, and 1,200 days to give to the Lord. They were going to speak more Quechua and learn more Spanish. They'd attend the fiestas and live with the people. They'd make their team a priority, and they'd pray.
Recalling that session from twenty-five years later, I recognize that many might now see the limitations of planning and business models that don't necessarily apply to the conditions human beings experience in real life. But in those days, all of us were into planning and learning to collaborate as a team; and at the time, there was a genuine feeling that a new start was being made, with life-giving boundaries, clear roles, and felt expectations.
It wasn't all hard labor. On the evenings following the Thursday and Friday sessions, we gathered as we'd done earlier in the week for dinner. One of us cooked, while everyone else drank Manhattans. We played a short set of bridge and then ate dinner. In such congenial surroundings, I began to think the life of a missioner wasn't too bad!
* * *
After the meeting ended that Saturday, the team was to divide. The next day, the archbishop was arriving in Cochabamba to commission the catechists for their work in the Capinota region. The catechists were all lay Bolivian missioners and native people who spoke Quechua, for whom becoming a catechist was a significant and serious obligation. They were pledging to live in a village and to act in lieu of an ordained priest—providing the religious instruction and disseminating the teachings of the Church in the absence of any other religious authority. This commitment would require them to spend months, even years, away from their homes.
Mary, Gilchrist, and Gerry had spent months training the catechists, and the service would be at once the confirmation and highlight of a very important aspect of the team's mission. They were understandably very eager to see the catechists receive the honor and to wish them well in their mission, and so wanted to attend. At first, the plan was for Rita and Mary to go to the commissioning ceremony. However, everyone agreed that Mary had more of her Dominican-trained candidates in the ritual, so Mary, Gilchrist, Gerry, and Father Jack were designated to make the two-hour journey back to Cochabamba. Rita and Father Matt would stay at Charamoco for the Mass on Saturday evening and then drive to Capinota the next day to conduct Mass there.
That evening we ate dinner quickly, and there were no cocktails or games of cards.
Gilchrist turned to me. "You're coming, aren't you?" she asked.
I demurred, just as I had when Gilchrist asked me to moderate the team's meeting. I really didn't feel like climbing into a jeep for a two-hour bumpy journey at night, especially since I'd only arrived in Bolivia eleven days before and had already traveled the route less than a week previously. I also had an ulterior motive: the beauty of Charamoco. The house was simple, situated in a gorgeous location.
"You know," I muttered. "I just got here. Why don't I stay? I'll be fine. Rita and Matt are here, so I can stay with them."
"Oh no," said Gilchrist, in her insistent fashion. "No guts, no glory, Funk. Now you come along with us."
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