Fr Peter Hughes - Photo: St Columbans Mission Society
Columban missionary, Fr Peter Hughes, is REPAM’s coordinator of indigenous and human rights. REPAM, which stands for Red Ecclesial Panamazonica, is a Church network that promotes the rights and dignity of people living in the Amazon. Fr Peter spoke to Mike Finnerty of the Mayo News, Ireland, about his life as a missionary and turning 80.
Imagine becoming a Columban Missionary at the age of 17 in the Ireland of the early 1960s. Then, imagine a short time later leaving for Latin America and remaining there for almost 60 years, helping the people of Peru in any way you can. This is Fr Peter’s story.
It is a story of a young boy who was born and bred in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, and how he has spent his entire adult life trying to educate and listen to some of the indigenous people in one of the poorest places on the planet. In recent years, he has been highlighting the climate change emergency through a project that works to defend and protect the Amazon rainforests and eco-system. The Amazon produces 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen and 20 per cent of the world’s drinking water.
When you meet him, Fr Peter insists he is “nothing special by any means. I don’t think of myself as doing good things for everybody else. It’s not like that. I have a job to do, and I’m trying to do it as best I can.” He is an environmental activist and a man who tries to help those who cannot help themselves. Or as Fr Peter puts it himself, “I’m a kind of educator, in the widest sense, just not in the classroom.”
Fr Peter Hughes with the Columban Mission team in the UK. - Photo: St Columbans Mission Society
He teaches people about ideas and values. “Values are terribly important,” he explains. “The people we work with, like lawyers, are not allowed to just give a class. What they do is listen and help people organise their struggle [for their rights] more effectively.”
When I met Fr Peter, he was back in Ireland for the first time in five years. He doesn’t need to think for long when you ask him what he has missed most about home.
“Obviously, things like family and friends, but to tell you the truth, the thing I came home for this time, and I have absolutely enjoyed it, and felt it, is to be able to walk on green grass. To be able to look at the beautiful countryside. To be able to look at mountains, to be able to see Lough Mask and Lough Corrib. To go for a day’s fishing. To be able to put your face up to the rain. Because where I live, there’s no rain. I live in a coastal desert. These are the things that you miss."
He continues, “I’ve had a great life. I’ve had a wonderful life and great friends. You get to meet so many people, and you get to see so many places.”
We have been talking for almost an hour about the trials and tribulations faced by the people of Peru and the indigenous tribes in the Amazon Basin, and the challenges he helps them face on a daily basis. It makes me wonder what his definition of a “good life” is, especially when many people reading this would feel that living and working in a third-world country for six decades - in a city located on a desert coast, where it hasn’t rained heavily since 1969 - would represent anything but a “good life”.
“It’s about bringing about change and witnessing change,” he replies. “Looking at people changing their attitudes, growing into a different way of thinking, and having the power to be able to do something about it.”
As for the future, Fr Peter (or “Padre Pedro” as he’s known in Peru) intends to keep doing what he’s doing “for as long as I have the health, with the help of God. And that’s going to be the deciding factor about what’s going to happen,” he said. “If I get some more years to live, that decides everything. For me, I wouldn’t understand or appreciate retiring. Maybe keeping on doing something in a smaller way would be something more like it. I hardly noticed turning 80,” he said.
“Age is totally unimportant; it’s irrelevant. It’s about how you feel, about how you are. And there’s no such thing as perfection. That’s a bad word. Everybody has his or her own struggles. Good days, bad days, not-so-good days. Life is like that. And when we’re down, we have to try and get up again and begin again. “Use the talents that we have. Every person has gifts. Every person has amazing things to contribute. And I think leadership is allowing people to have gifts. Leadership is trying to create situations where people can use and grow into their own gifts, whatever they are.”
“I’m the coordinator of indigenous and human rights for REPAM, this network that is in existence for the last number of years,” he adds. “It’s a going concern, but it has to expand and grow and help people, so it’s important.”
How would he like to be remembered? “I’d like to be remembered as another person from Ballinrobe. From Mayo.
Another person who grew up here, has friends here. Nothing more than that. That’s more than enough.”
COURTESY: MAYO NEWS
Adapted by Columban Fr Cyril Lovett who lives and works in Ireland.
Listen to "Living his best life"
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