Feast of All Souls

Here in Ecuador there is a blending of church, tradition and culture.  All of the religious holidays have a strong cultural component.

The Feast of All Souls Day that we celebrated this month is a good example.  There is a Mass, and reading out of the names of all the dead one wishes to be prayed for in the cemetary.  Then individual tombs are blessed. 

The thing that makes this feast unique for a lot of South and Central America is the great devotion to loved ones who have passed.  There are four-hour lines in the bus terminals to get a bus on All Souls Day as everyone travels to be with family.  Sometimes no transportation is posible as all the buses are full to capacity.  Everyone visits the cemetary where family members are buried.  The families clean the grave site the week before and then all the family spends the day around the graves of their loved ones.  There is food and drink (a dark purple fruit juice is typical only this day) available to all.  There is occasionally music as well.  The cemetery is so full that you have a long wait just to be able to get to the cemetery chaple to pray.

Typically the people in Ecuador pray at the house of the deceased for eight days after a death, have a monthly mass and family get together, and give out bread to all at the one year anniversary of the death.  Some families will not have the money for a stone so save up money and years after the death of a loved one they put up the tombstone. 

I believe this tradition is a reflection of the great devotion that the people have to family here.  Parents with large families sacrifice everything to give their children the best they are able to.

The devotion to family here is an example of hard work and sacrifice to help others that I am trying to learn to imitate.

Holy Week Inspiriting Me

This Holy Week I went to a town about 2 hours away to lead the services.  I ended up being inspired by the people I met.

We visited a 97 year old woman who was so gracefull and kind. Another older man struggled to his feet to give me a parting blessing.   An older woman who has been deaf for many years somehow was able to hear the guitar music of the other missioner and started singing along.  Her daughter was so moved; she was astounded and explained that that song was her mother’s favorite and she had not sung in years.

A woman spent the whole day taking me house to house visiting the sick and elderly and bringing them communion.  At the end of the trip this poor woman, who had no husband or land,  brought me two baby ducks as she had seen how much I like animals.

Almost the whole town turned out in the pouring rain to walk the way of the cross in the streets.  During the reinactment of removing the body of Christ from the cross a  teenager was so moved by the image that she cried when the woman portraying Mary held the dead Christ in her lap.

The people in the community decided to have an all night vigil for Holy Thursday.  Every family took an hour and the church was never vacant.  At 4 am only one woman from her family came but she and I prayed together until the next family group arrived.

The people invited me into their homes for meals.  It was such a nice experience to spend time with people.

The whole week the community supported all my activities and were so generous to me.

It is a week I will always remember.

Hope in the Midst of Tragedy

Life here in Ecuador is to be enjoyed each day.  That is what I have learned from my experience here this last month.

In church I sat next to a woman and her 18 month old son during one of the nine nights of prayers before the town fiesta.  The service finished at 9:00 and I heard the next morning that the child had died later that evening.  He choked on a piece of hard candy.  The mother has been widowed twice already and the child who died was born within weeks of the death of her second husband in a mining accident.

The same week a 14 year old girl was laughing with her friends at school, went home, took the food out to the pigs, and then hung herself from the roof of the pig pen. 

The following week was the funeral of an elderly neighbor and the one month memorial mass for my friend and neighbor’s mother. 

The town only has 500 families so this is a lot of tragedy for one month.  Nothing in life is for sure or guaranteed. Living here has taught me that every day should be lived to the fullest and one should do all one can each day to serve others.  Today could be your last opportunity.

We are in the middle of changing the clinic to a new status.  Thus soon more people working here, more services offered, surgery offered again so things will be different.  We may have a laboratory or maybe not.  We may turn into a specialty clinic or a day hospital. We may have a new nurse and lab worker.  We have started the reconstruction, which is hard to see the nice exam rooms divided into small cubicles asked for by the health department.  By April we should know which of these changes will be coming about. We should confirm plans following the health department inspections.  Thus lots of changes, but lots of hope too, to be able to help more people with added services.