|
Corazon - A Family's Reflection
by Moet Takahashi, child I thought that going to Mexico was fun, but very miserable. I felt really bad for the people that had to live in a place with no water, no bathrooms, and no houses. I thought that I was going to die, and never be able to go back home. Then I thought about how the people had to live there for the rest of their lives, and not have a home to go home to, and be safe. When I was in Mexico, I really wanted to go home, and that I never should have come, but now that I think about it, I think that I want to do it again. by Seijiro Takahashi, child Corazon is a very fun event. These are some of the reasons: you can play soccer with the kids there, you can feed the stray dogs, you can go to the bathroom anywhere, you can get food for cheaper prices, and the best of all you can help people have happier lives just by having all that fun. So please come because it makes a BIG difference for the people there. by Mariko Takahashi, mother She was 44, but looked a decade older. She, a widow, had moved to Tijuana with her four children and a disabled sister, looking for a better life and schooling for her children. What they found instead was more poverty and hardship. The daily medication for her blind sister's seizures, the lack of decent jobs, the crumbling abode which they called home strained the family's meager resources. Her eldest son, barely older than my daughter, had to quit school to sell water for $20 a week. Together with her babysitting job which yields $15 for a six-day week, that is the family's entire source of income. The circumstances of her life are so very different from mine. Or are they? When, some four years ago, I decided to consciously begin my journey of faith in the sacrament of baptism, I did not think that I would ever feel compelled to go to an event such as Corazon. After all, I'd never put hammer to nail, nor even painted ... not once! I was afraid that I'd have an awful time, and that I would be more a part of the problem than the solution. But I wanted my children to have some awareness of life outside of the first world, and I was becoming increasingly aware and uneasy about the gap between my faith and how I put it to practice. After all, I have always been concerned about issues of social justice, but what had I done aside from the odd check to Amnesty, the odd signature of political protest from the safety of my own computer? I came out of my first Corazon weekend with a sense of connection, not just with my fellow parishioners and with the family for whom the house was built, but through them, with God. That family's life may be very different from mine, but I could not escape the feeling that, if not for some mysterious reason, I could very well have been in her shoes or she in mine. Why was I born into an affluent country and a relatively affluent family, and she not? I don't have an answer, but on that drizzly, foggy day in the village of Cumbres, Christ was with us as we trudged through the mud. He was in that lowly spot, that little space, to quote Archbishop Rowan's Christmas address, where "there is room enough for all of us"; forgiven, welcomed, made inheritors of the divine fullness of life and joy that God longs to share with us. "No straining our eyes to see a distant God; but a God whose fullness dwells in that space we are not small and simple enough to enter." Mindy Staley was right. Corazon is a life-changing ministry.
Copyright © 2003 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
|
