Archive: Around Town

At least 140 people came to All Saints Catholic Church Saturday to see Father Greg Schaffer talk about the San Lucas Mission he heads in Guatemala.  The Lansing Youth Mission, which includes young people from All Saints and Lansing United Methodist Church, has been going to the San Lucas mission for a dozen years.  The event raised more than $780, which was given to Schaffer to support the mission.  In addition the Youth Mission presented him with a check for $6,000.

"You have a number of families in the community that have been affected and drawn to this," says the program head Steve Palladino.  "There have been over 50 different families from Lansing and Cornell who have gone and who are constantly reaching out to make people aware of the mission and its needs and people.  Most of the people that have traveled there have at least heard Father talk there.  Once you have experienced that, and when people heard that he was coming they wanted to rekindle something that was dear to them."


Schaffer has lived in Guatemala since he began as the mission pastor in 1963.  Originally from Minnesota he was assigned to teach at a Catholic high school in the western part of the state.  He loved teaching, so when a letter came from Bishop Alphonse Schladweiler asking for volunteers to go to Guatemala, Schaffer ignored it.

"I didn't really want to go, so when the letter asking for volunteers came I didn't pay attention to it until the Bishop came up for confirmations," Schaffer  recalls.  "He asked me about the letter.  I told him I didn't want to volunteer so I threw the letter away.  He said my chances of going were nil because so many people volunteering.  'But as a young priest you should and you must respond to your bishop,' he said.  I was embarrassed as I should have been.  I quickly jotted off a note knowing that it was just a formality.


In May of 1963 he received a letter saying he had been chosen.  It turned out that Schaffer was the only one who had written back.  So he went.

Palladino says that was good for the mission, because Schaffer is so impressive and inspiring to volunteers.  Both men stress the relationships that are formed as American volunteers work alongside Guatemalans who have known nothing but poverty.  Palladino says that there is a vast cultural difference, but part of the experience is bridging it.

"You're going to be living in conditions that aren't what you are used to," he says.  "There are bugs, there's dirt, you're going to be smelling sewage, you're going to be living in smoke, and you can get digestive problems.  People are nervous about how they will handle that.  If any of that bothered them, that's not what they remember."


Schaffer says that he gets the most satisfaction from seeing people gain the confidence to give back to their community and take responsibility for making conditions there better.  "When you deal with the people that suffer, that process of poverty is so destructive," he says.  "Their self-image is destroyed immediately.  That is the great great crime of the process of poverty.  As you see people grow out of this and watch them take responsibility... like the young local fellow who grew up in a poor, but dedicated and strong family.  We were able to help him through school and he became a doctor.  He came back to serve his community in the clinic.  But he brought so much more, because he could bring encouragement and dedication and literally was able to encourage other young people."

The mission focuses on four goals:  food security, housing, health care, and education.  The parish has restored three acre plots of land to more than 4,000 Maya families in its 35 years of operation.  One of the crops produced is coffee, which the Youth Mission sells here in Lansing.  Mission volunteers have helped to build more than 1,600 homes and brought potable water and sewers for thousands of people.  More than 8,500 patients were treated at the parish clinic in 2007.  And Schaffer partners with sister schools to provide a free education to 650 Maya children in grades K - 6.

Palladino says the experience of volunteering at the mission has life-long influence.  His own daughter went to the mission with him in 2004 when she was a freshman at Lansing High School.  After graduating and being accepted at college last Spring she decided to defer her education to return to the mission to volunteer for six months.  She returned in June.  "I think it's really had a profound affect on her," he says. "It was an amazing experience that will help shape her life from here on out."




Schaffer still spends most of his time in San Lucas Toliman, only coming back to the United States for special reasons.    "This trip is one of the special reasons," he says.  "It is primarily for awareness raising, and, through that, funding.  It is primarily for people who have been to the mission, but somewhat wider than that.  It is to have contact and a relationship that we can share and talk about."

Schaffer was recognized by Guatemala's highest honor in 2003 when he was awarded the Order of the Quetzal.  But he says that his greatest satisfaction comes when the Maya people there take responsibility to make their community better.  "These are opportunities to give service and be of value to your own people," he says.  "These are the kinds of things that give me great joy."

---

----
v4i35