Lost in Translation

¨Holiness is not the luxury of the few but a simple duty for you and for me. So let us be holy as our Father in Heaven is holy.¨ - Blessed Mother Teresa

Hello to one and all. We are now at the end of our second week in Olòn, the third in Ecuador - how time flies. These last weeks have been much consumed by learning the work of the base, the surrounding pueblos (villages more or less) and oh yes - Spanish.

So funny moment and the reason for the above title - one day last week I was feeling a bit sick and Fatima (our mamita)was asking what was wrong. So, in my broken Spanish I was attempting to say that I wasn´t hungry so I said, ¨sin hombre¨. HOWEVER, I had confused my a for an o so instead of saying ¨Yes, I am sick, I don´t have hunger¨ which should have been (and is at best a little rough anyway) ¨Si, estoy enferma, sin hAmbre¨ I said, ¨yes I am sick, I don´t have a man (hOmbre).¨ Well, Mariya and Fatima thought that was hilarious and it has since been a running joke. But, by the grace of God, and lots of other funny mistakes like mispronoucing ¨jabòn¨ which is soap and instead saying ¨jamòn¨which is pork. Yep, I´m one of those hilarious foreigners, Borak (?) has nothing on me.

In regards to the above quote, it is something that I have been praying with for the last week as I have had a lot of time for prayer (prayer has no language barriers - woohoo!) It seems so simple but for me right now, living out holiness is taking on a whole new meaning. I had always thought in the back of my mind that it was easy for the saints to be good because they were holy. But now I am realizing, becoming holier doesn´t make it easy - it ups the anty. But maybe it does get a bit easier. In the continuation of quote, Mother goes on to explain that holiness is being more intimately in love with Christ and isn´t it easier to do things for someone you really love? I hope that this is so as I am attempting to live out the call that JPII sets in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio for all missionaries to be comtemplatives so that we might proclaim (and live) that which we have already looked upon ourselves.

Please pray for me as I will continue to pray for you. There is a lot of work to be done here and I am working hard to be able to fulfill some of their needs with the work of these two very small hands. Tomorrow is my first day going out with the other social workers to their office in the city, I am excited albeit a bit nervous.
Also, please reference the side bar list of material needs of the base. I will continue to update it and hope to be able to soon post information for the stateside organization that is being constructed to benefit the base (tax deductible and all that). In the meantime, if there is a prayer group/youth group/ambitious family that wants to start raising funds for the base, let us know as there are a few programs that are in danger of closing (like the junior high/high school they run). God has all the money in the world - He just needs your hands to give it :)

Thanks to all who have been sending emails and posts, it is always wonderful to hear from home and to know how your lives are going too. En el amor de Dios...Maribel

PS. If you actually want to know what we are doing, check Mariya´s blog at www.missionarynurse.blogspot.com (you can use the link to the left). She´s much better at play-by-play than I am :)


Mariya y "Mamita" Fatima