A busy week in the parish

This past week I’ve seen some of what our parishioners do, even during the coffee harvest when most people are picking coffee to earn cash, one of the few opportunities for people here.

I assisted at Masses on Sunday and Wednesday (the feast of the Black Christ of Esquipulas) and attended parish council on Saturday. But there were two days where parishioners came out to volunteer with the parish.

The parish is doing a major renovation of the parish center so that we can better serve those who come for our formations and training sessions. This effort is being done with the financial assistance of our sister parish, Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ames, Iowa.

An initial part of this effort was taking down the old kitchen and dining room, which were very small. More than sixty members of the parish came in from rural villages to help. I was especially impressed by the number of young people. (I guess they like the “destruction” we did.) The area cleared out is now very wide open and very welcoming. I took one group to their village and almost 200 bricks which they'll use - recycling.

On Thursday about forty came to work on the parish coffee field. I brought one group in – from a village more than 45 minutes away. They picked coffee for several hours. Since there was not much coffee this year, they picked both ripe and unripe coffee berries. We were finished before noon.

Friday, I went into Santa Rosa de Copán with Moisés, the president of the coffee association in El Zapote which export to Ames. We were investigating the possibility of a new company to do the processing and transport. Talking with the local director we were impressed and will probably go with the company since this will make the whole process easier and more efficient.

Saturday after the parish council meeting I went to a distant village to talk with a woman who has taken in the four children of her sister who was killed in Guatemala. She has three grown children of her own and is very poor. We talked about some options and we’ll see how to help her, her children, and her nephews and nieces. It is incredible how some poor are very open to help their relatives, stretching their resources.

On the way back, as is my custom, I picked up a number of folks walking on the hilly roads. As we entered the hill town of Delicias I realized that it was time for their youth group meeting and so I went and spent abut half an hour with them.

Today, I slept in but then went back to Delicias for a late morning Mass.

This week the pastor will be away and I have a few things planned – visiting the sick in a rural village, a diocesan meeting, and a meeting of the Delegates of the Word on Saturday. I’ll probably be spending a lot of time preparing for that meeting – as well as covering four or five Celebrations of the Word with Communion next weekend.

But there are always surprises.