Youth adopt grandmother
02.06.2010
Grandmothers can touch young hearts; it is one of their gifts.
Fr Derry Healy’s area of Valparaiso, Chile, survived the recent earthquake quite well. There was no serious damage to the housing nor to the palm trees in the gully. Many of the old adobe building in the CBD and even new buildings such as the Chilean National Congress were damaged in the earthquake.
I was with a group of 15 young women and men (aged between 18 and 24 years) who belong to the Columban Missionary Youth (JUCOMI - Juventud Misionera Columbana) for one week’s mission in the parish in mid-January not long before the earthquake.
They operate out of St Columban’s House, our Mission Centre, of which I am Director. We did door to door visitation, organized Soccer matches and ping pong for the youth every morning, Biblical workshops for the adults every evening, craft groups for children every afternoon. From about 11:00pm to 1:00am we walked in small groups through the streets trying to get to know the youth who hang out all night and invite them to the activities in the parish.
Our principle objective for the mission was to expand the small youth group of five or six members that existed before the mission. When we finished our mission with a large Mass on the final Saturday night, we had a youth group of 14 new members who were youth who had been at loose ends at night on street corners and in danger of beginning drug habits or for the adolescent girls becoming pregnant.
Many of these new members are unemployed and vulnerable. We hope that their new involvement in a church youth group supported by JUCOMI will help them get their lives back on track, discover faith in God, life in a church community and incentives to find work or to study.
On the morning, when the hired bus came from Santiago to bring our JUCOMI missionaries back to Santiago, the 14 new youth group members, (tough street kids) along with our own JUCOMI missionaries, cried their eyes out, hugging each other for a long time.
Somehow, and this is important, the JUCOMI mission to Fr Derry’s parish had given HOPE to young men and women who, though they seem tough and hardened on the outside, are full of desperation, hopelessness and psychological wounds from dysfunctional family life on the inside. Our great challenge is to keep up the contact made from the the mission. 
As Director of St Columban’s House, I am the chaplain to JUCOMI but we have a paid Coordinator of JUCOMI.We have a commitment to continue to visit and support this new youth group for three years. Our young missionaries were particularly moved to find one little old lady of 88 years old living alone in one of the apartments. She has no close family, no children and could not make it to Mass or sometimes even to buy food from a local shop.
Due to her advanced aged and health, she was almost confined to her apartment in a socially deprived and crime-ridden area. Our youth missionaries adopted this lady, La Señora Ines, as a kind of emblem for the mission. They brought her to Mass and bible study every day; the group eventually developed into a Basic Christian Community of which she is now a member. This community will now collect her to bring her to Sunday Mass every week.
The one great wish of this elderly apartment-bound lady was to visit her dear husband’s grave, which she had not been able to visit so our youth took her to the cemetery.
For many of the youth particularly the young men, Señora Ines became like a long lost grandmother. Every time some of our young men brought this lady home in the car from the nightly Bible Study, they came back crying.
Fr Derry said to me that Ines seemed to be the grandmother that today’s youth never had. In the final farewell Mass two of our young men were sitting with their arms around Ines through the Mass.
This mission was a 100% success and I was extremely proud and happy with the way it turned out.
Fr Dan Harding has been a missionary in Chile since 1991.
Read more from The Far East, June 2010
