Paraguay - Hospitality

Strawberry Fields

A Sunday charitable work has grown into a halfway house to help ex-prisoners rebuild their lives. Prayer, school, work, ball games, and a swim to end the day. In the capital Asunción, a place that holds hope for everyone

“We truly cannot imagine how God works through what each one of us offers. A simple gesture of obedience, such as the charitable work that we have been doing for seven years in the ‘Panchito Lopez’ juvenile prison, has generated an unforeseeable friendship with the young inmates.” This is how Pedro tells the story of a friendship that today has taken concrete form: a house dedicated to the Virgin of Caacupé, which takes in young people coming out of prison, offering them a family, stability, and an opportunity to study and to work.
Pedro continues: “Many of the kids we met during our Sunday charitable work, once they were free, looked for the same relationships that had given them hope while they were in prison, but in a short time their frailty and poverty made them go back to the life of the streets and to jail.” To fill their need, in November 1999, on All Saint’s Day, the large house that can hold up to 24 boys between the ages of 14 and 18 was officially inaugurated.
Many friends give of themselves to this work with patience and dedication, and it is truly beautiful, as Pedro says, to see charity sinking its roots in the gratuitous love for another’s destiny.

Father, mother, brothers

Currently, nine boys live there: Alcide, David, Dionisio, Epifanio, Lucio, Manuel, Marco, Ramon, and Roberto, all living with Pedro, Cristina, and Tortu, who are father, mother, and brothers to them. A school has been set up inside the house, now officially recognized by the Ministry of Education, which allows the boys to finish elementary school, while those who have gone on to higher levels of education can attend a boarding school in an institute in the area. Daily life is begun by recitation of the Angelus. Mornings are devoted to studies, while various jobs are done in the afternoon. Under the guidance of Pedro and Tortu, the boys have cleaned out the woods around the house, cutting down the vines that were suffocating the trees. They have built stone paths surrounded by orchids hanging from the trees, and where before was a desert, flowers are now growing. A part of the land was turned into a vegetable garden, and an earth that was previously infertile is now yielding strawberries. The boys also do some small sculpture work, earning a little money, and the ones who take care of the animals have even managed to break a wild horse named “Zaino.” Finally, when their workday is over, they still have the strength to play soccer or volleyball, or to take a swim in the lagoon next to the house, where they have built a small wooden boat.
In the house, too, each one has his assigned task, and the order and beauty in their care for every detail is a sign of a Presence that brings forth hope for recovery, for a new beginning.

A Paraguayan oasis

Thus, immersed in a Paraguayan field, where poverty is a raw reality, where untamed nature hits one with colors and perfumes never known before, and where the heat of the sun is often brutal, there is an oasis of peace, order, and serenity.
“This house seems like a small monastery,” says Pedro, smiling at his young delinquents who grimace but smile back. What he says is true: Pedro and Cristina live the rule of the Memores Domini in this house, in these circumstances, and this is their paternal offering to their young friends who are free to go whenever they like, but who stay, looking at them with respect, and participating.
The mere name of the prison from which they have come strikes terror in the local population because of the presumed dangerousness of its inmates, but it is truly difficult to discern in the laughing eyes of the boys living in the house at Itauguá all the weight of their crimes and their problems with society. In fact, what matters in this house is not the mistakes made or crimes committed, because frailty is a characteristic of everyone but it cannot determine their lives. “The only thing that matters is our dignity, because we have been created in God’s image: this is our greatness.”

The Friends in Paraguay

Repeating a gesture

We offer here Pedro’s talk at an assembly on charitable work held in Asunción on September 10th

Charitable work has been, since the very beginning of my experience in the Movement, one of the gestures that attracted me most (and the fact of repeating a gesture and understanding the reasons for it was for me a task that the experience demanded). I have been repeating this gesture for 15 years now, and this time that I have lived with responsibility has made me aware that “all of life is an act of charity.” This awareness ripens in the moment when one realizes that he is loved by an Other who is greater than he: by the Author himself of our lives. I had never thought that God gives himself always, that His very nature is a gift. But I discovered this by making a gift of myself, and the place where I was given the chance to experience this was the prison. One begins and tries–in other words, he imitates, he repeats–because by imitating and repeating he ends up living. This is true for all places, for all experiences; it is true for the whole world. The realization that life is giving yourself to others, making a gift of yourself to others, is far-reaching, because you don’t expect anything in return. Loving others for their truth, for the destiny, the ideal that makes them up and makes me up, is liberating and comforting because you discover that your humanity grows, your capacity to love, to care about others grows. One doesn’t expect anything, and despite this God gives him everything. For this reason, one is happier. The surprising thing as you travel this path is being able to admire how God works among us and through us. We did not imagine that our charitable work would lead to something like the house of Itauguá. If it were not for a total gratuitousness, one could not survive in a house like this. I say this because it would be impossible to sustain a work like this if we were not conscious of a love for another’s destiny. So many friends give their time, their money, their labor; so many friends give food, clothes, books, seeds for the garden, soccer balls, and even animals. It is an explosion of gratuitousness. I cannot help being grateful to God for so much grace, for all these friends who continue to be involved and motivate me to give something more of myself every day. It doesn’t matter if I have to wear myself out for this, because the beauty comes in seeing a new hope bloom in the faces of these young people, the reawakening of a life that before was only a cause for rancor and failure, while now it becomes a chance for a future, a chance for happiness; they study, work, play, and sing. Cristina and I look wonderingly at the spectacle of the change in them, and we are grateful.

Pedro