One day, the Korean sisters who also live in the parish came to cook for the old people who go to the center behind the church for classes every Tuesday and Thursday. That day the sisters cooked Korean food. Watching them prepare the meal, I felt very excited. I could finally eat my favorite Bulgogi, a beef dish. When the food was ready I was so excited that immediately after we said the prayer, I took my chopsticks to pick some Bulgogi. When the chopsticks were about to touch the meat, one of the parishioners shouted to the Korean sisters, “Fr. Taemoon does not eat meat!” So I changed the direction of my chopsticks and picked up the kimchi instead.

Whenever I think of this story, I cannot help but laugh. Because of what I told them, I could not enjoy my favorite Bulgogi that day. It would have been my first Bulgogi in Taiwan. Yet even if I did not get to eat it, I feel consoled by the knowledge that the parishioners paid attention to what I told them and that they care for me.

the sooner we´ll choose to love.
Every one of us
needs unceasingly
to know and to love others.
The earlier in life
we learn to accept this
the sooner we´ll know how to love

Therein lies our “image and likeness”
of the God who created every one of us.
It was God´s own infinite need
to be known and to be loved
that brought us into being.
We are the answer to God´s own prayer.
Unreal, if you like, but more than fact!

Columban Fr. Leo Donnelly lives and works in Peru.

Kathleen Sabol

Name: Kathleen Sabol
Hometown: Orlando, Florida
School/Major: Graduate student at George Washington University; master’s degree in women’s studies with a concentration in international development
Assigned Issue/Country Concentration: Communications & Media; Election 2012; Refugees, Domestic Workers; Burma & Taiwan
Most look forward to: Working with others who are passionate about actively creating a more just world.

Joanne Angbazo

Name: Joanne Angbazo
Hometown: Rockville, Maryland
School/Major: University of Maryland; Government & Politics major, International Development & Conflict Management & French minors
Assigned Issue/Country Concentration: Environmental Justice (climate change, water, genetically modified organisms); Britain, Fiji, Japan
Most look forward to: Experiencing her dream job working as a humanitarian/social advocate.

Kevin Butts

Name: Kevin Butts
Hometown: Montgomery Village, Maryland
School/Major: University of Maryland; Arabic Studies and Spanish Language, Literatures, and Cultures
Assigned Issue/Country Concentration: Economic Justice (Trade, extractives, debt, food); Chile, Philippines, Australia
Most look forward to: Applying her Spanish skills to promote human rights.

Sarah Perret

Name: Sarah Perret
Hometown: Silver Spring, Maryland
School/Major: University of Maryland; double major in Chinese and Linguistics and minor in Spanish
Assigned Issue/Country Concentration: Migration (CIR, DREAM Act, Border, Lomas del Poleo); Peru, China, Ireland
Most look forward to: Using the skills and languages she learned in school in a place where her knowledge is valued and useful.

Juanita Abii

Name: Juanita Abii
Hometown: Houston, Texas, but grew up in Nigeria
School/Major: George Washington University; International Affairs with a concentration in African Studies
Assigned Issue/Country Concentration: Peace & Conflict Resolution (Nuclear arms, SOA, Afghanistan, Defense budget); Pakistan, Korea, New Zealand
Most look forward to: Expanding her knowledge on new topics such as the SOA and learning more from a Catholic point of view.

Upcoming Dates:
2/1 CCAO at George Washington Career Fair
2/21-2/22 CCAO at University of Maryland’s Career Fairs
2/27 Advocacy Call @ 9:30 a.m. EST
The Columban Center for Advocacy & Outreach (CCAO) offers part-time Spring and Fall semester internships and full-time summer internships in Washington, D.C. and Omaha, Nebraska. To learn more about this and other programs the CCAO offers, please visit www.columban.org/get-involved or call 301-565-4547.

Kathleen Sabol

I really take to heart the Catholic Social Teaching principle of “solidarity,” which states, “We are one human family whatever our national, racial, ethnic, economic, and ideological differences. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, wherever they may be.”

I strongly believe we have a responsibility to care for our brothers and sisters, regardless of age, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, or race. As followers of Christ, it is our duty to question our leaders of government and compel them to act in a way that is just for all – especially the marginalized and oppressed. Every human being, no matter what social status, educational attainment, or any other label is a being created by God and deserves to be treated with the same love that God gives us.

I have been privileged to receive a wonderful education and to be able to live and work in Washington D.C., a city that influences the world. As a result, I believe I have a duty to actively work in a position that can impact others in a positive way. By following the principles of Catholic Social Teaching as a lens which to observe and analyze the world around me, I can faithfully and powerfully influence lives directly.

My role as the marketing, communications and media intern is to be the voice; to assist in being the bridge between the office of advocacy and outreach and the surrounding political world. My role is to make sure the message of the research interns gets communicated to people of influence in the most effective ways. Taking into account the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, I have the obligation to provide a space for all to participate, learn, and work toward justice for all.

*The content of these blogs are the personal reflections of the author and do not represent official Columban positions or statements

Sarah Perret

Much of what goes into the immigration process seems to go against Catholic teachings.  Instead of welcoming and loving our neighbors, we challenge them to prove their worth.  People from all over the world come to the United States in hopes of a better future for themselves and their families.  Some immigrants do achieve this dream, but in a much more difficult way than those who were born in the United States.  Once an immigrant is granted permission to live in our country after a lengthy process, they face more challenges.  There is discrimination and judgment, language barriers, and if desired, an even more exhausting process of gaining a green card or citizenship.  In making immigration difficult, we actually challenge Catholic teachings.  We should remember that we are one human family.  Protecting ourselves and our own country is important, but even more so we have to protect all humankind.   A recent Washington Post article titled Pitting brightest immigrants against one another discusses some of the challenges immigrants face even against fellow immigrants.  In a proposed Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, immigrants are granted a green card based on who is most worthy by the skills they demonstrate in the workplace.  Hard work and skills are important and should be rewarded, but I wonder how these skills are being assessed and on what terms an immigrant is determined to be ‘highly skilled’.  However, I believe all people all over the world are highly skilled in something.  I understand that it would be impossible to leave our borders open to all of our neighbors, but I have faith that there must be a better way to open our doors and treat all peoples as the equals they are.

*The content of these blogs are the personal reflections of the author and do not represent official Columban positions or statements

I walked along the lane leading to the Beijing Diocesan seminary with one of the priests one day last week. “That wasn’t there when I came here last,” I said referring to the three hillocks of mud and rubbish on the left side of the lane. “Neither was the huge crater in the ground on the right side, from which the earth had been excavated. Where is the vibrant community and the marvellous market they had?” I asked. My friend replied, “the town has been demolished like many of the old communities and hutongs [narrow streets or alleys] in Beijing; the families are gone, and the workers are scattered across the country as in many similar situations before.”
All along the road to the seminary was a construction site, a kind of coliseum all lit from below. Before my eyes, another vast expanse of the new, modern Beijing suburbs was about to rise on a twenty acre site. Even in the darkness, the welders were still working, very high up, possibly twenty fi ve stories. In the darkness, we could see the sparks rising from the outline of the half-fi nished buildings.

Over the past ten years I have seen a gigantic construction boom not only in cities like Beijing with its Olympic feast of building but also in small cities and the expanding suburbs everywhere. Highways are being hewed out of mountains; airport terminals are sprouting like mushrooms. Malls are everywhere, often quite empty, and conference centers and hotels are to be seen even in third-tier cities. Land is being extracted from farmers for this expansion, because cites and skyscrapers are the fashion. The process that marks the end of an old community’s destruction to the grand opening of the new with banners and fanfare is sometimes only a matter of months.

The television ads and glossy magazines are harbingers of this new development from slums, hutongs, and old communities to sweeping yuppie suburbs with underground car parks and massive malls where every western luxury brand item can be purchased, even diamonds.

However, there is little or no space in the Chinese media or in the minds of many for the men and women from the countryside who construct these buildings, who labor hour after hour, day after day on minimal wages, terrible working conditions, and who live in the most basic, unsightly shacks that are just bulldozed when the project is over. I feel these are the real heroes, whose blood and sweat have created all the new buildings of this massive transformation of the landscape of Chinese cities and countryside that has taken place in China over the past years, including the now world famous Bird’s Nest of the Olympic Village.

I have seen these workers arrive at railway stations, in groups, sometimes with their families of little children, with plastic bundles strapped to their backs holding all their possessions. They may have walked, cycled or hitched rides from their villages, often from houses with mud floors, trying desperately to make something of their lives, and especially for the lives of their children. I have been in a couple of villages, where the only people remaining are grannies, granddads and the children. The mothers and fathers are so missed by their children, but they are just another statistic in what has been described as the greatest internal migration in human history. It is a migration that contributes immensely to what many consider will be the first economy in our globalized world in about fifteen years – China.

Individually and collectively, they are heroes, the men and women who come to the cities and the old and very young who remain at home. The workers move dirt, mud, water, glass and rubbish. They shovel cement and run between jobs; sometimes the women are indistinguishable from the men as they work. Their features are burnt black by the searing sun, rain, humidity and pollution as they shift bricks, steel and earth, and their hands are full of welts. Their food is very simple. The old who are left at home in the villages are heroes also coping with a young generation; they knew poverty prior to the 1950s, now they have deep feelings of loss in their community, and uncertainty in coping with the social challenges that arise in parentless villages. Yet, they firmly believe their grandchildren will have a better life. These families, ripped apart from each other, are providing the comfortable world where the rising middle class of China live in, while they, alas, will never be able to afford it.

As I walked to language school four years ago, I had to pass what must have been the biggest building site I have ever seen. The men and women were often on the morning break as I went by, and I must have been gawking at them. A man, later known to me as Mr. Wang, gestured me to join them, offered me a breakfast, a split pancake with a fried egg and some vegetables. On that cold morning, it was delicious and led to a similar curbside breakfast for two weeks. We laughed, joked and gestured about our language capacity, mine in Mandarin and theirs in English was pretty low, and their dialect may not have been Mandarin, but I wouldn’t know the difference anyway! But still, we communicated. They had photos of those most dear to them, children, wives, parents and their old home towns. I had photos too of my nephews, nieces and grandnephew. I don’t think I ever convinced them that they were not my children! My gang was moved to another site, but before that Mr. Wang welcomed me to visit his family in South west China.

As we had breakfast, hundreds of well-dressed passers-by rushed to their air-conditioned offices in the new national television tower or the posh multi story buildings nearby. They were dressed in their immaculate suits, shoulder bags and exuding deodorants. They sometimes slowed down, clearly bemused at this strange scene, some laughing, maybe scoffing, their disapproval. I often reflected on both groups: the workers, whose labor was taken for granted and whose names would be written out of history, except in the hearts of their dear ones. It must have been, I thought, like the laborers who built the cathedrals of Europe or “won the West” in the great American adventure. For many of the yuppies passing by on the street, and their glitzy media culture, their internet exchanges, silvery computer screens and rolling images of a vibrant, young star of the month, there is no place for Mr. Wang and his fellow manual workers in the Chinese dream. These workers are seen by many as dirty, uneducated peasants, to be avoided and even feared for what they might do to you.

Recently, I had a retreat in Worth Abbey, where I was informed that the architect chartered to redesign the Abbey Chapel was also the one who designed the U.K. Center at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Tens of millions of people went to the Shanghai Exhibition. The local and the international press marvelled at the buildings, and praised to the sky all of their foreign designers, but I scarcely saw a word about the real heroes and their families at home, who constructed these marvels. Their lives were broken in the making of this exhibition Center and every other urban sprawl all over China. But despite the immense challenges to the workers and their families, lives also were made a bit better in small ways – a builder’s pay packet going to the village regularly, assurances of a child’s education, payment for medicine, a small shop serving the village, or the best house in the area.

The empty rhetoric about the place of workers in this society is being named as bogus by many. The indomitable spirit of Mr. Wang and his colleagues are playing their part in that process. With them I pray that in the near future they will fully reap what they have sown and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Now the pain is more evident, and the gains are simple such as those listed. But deep inside them I sense an unquenchable will which will prevail. It was well illustrated by the father of Mr. Wang and his village mates when I visited them and heard their story of how they managed in their hostile environment over the past 30 years. After a wonderful time with them, their resilience was admirably summed up in the final goodbye of Mr. Wang’s father. He was brought up in the French Catholic tradition, and he bid me goodbye in French with a determined twinkle in his eighty five year old eye, “all the best Fr. O’Brien, I have been the CATHOLIC party secretary of the Communist party of this village for 30 years. Long live Catholicism!”

Kevin Butts

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ publication no. 5-315 on “Themes from Catholic Social Teaching” tells us that, as God’s children, “We believe that every person is precious, that people are more important than things, and that the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person.” I believe that it is around this principle that much of my work at the Columban Center will focus.

My area of concentration at CCAO is economic justice, and more specifically on trade, extractive industries, global food issues, and budgetary planning. I believe that, in these fields, monetary concerns far too often are given priority over real human lives in such a way that leads to the latter’s indignity and suffering.

A world so oriented is antithetical to our responsibilities as servants of God. Jesus warns us in the Gospel of Matthew that earthly treasures will rot, and that that rot will eat away our hearts (6:19-21). He also tells us, “Truly…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:39).

The righteous society—the one we must strive for—is one whose treasures are stored not on Earth but in Heaven. And chief among these treasures are the kindness and love rendered unto those less fortunate.

I’m excited to bring this outlook to my work at the Columban Center this spring, and hope further to inspire it in those around me.

Joanne Angbazo

In the book of Genesis, we find that “God created the heavens and the earth (verse 1)… then God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it (verse 28).” We see here that the earth we live in is a blessing given to us by the Lord and, according to the Church and God Himself, we are responsible to govern it for its well-being. Of course, why should we destroy a gift we have been given? Like anything we find valuable, we should use reason to make sure it lasts for our sake and in respect to Him who provided it for us. God created this earth and all that is in it for his people to sustain and enjoy it together.

Unfortunately, thus far we have not taken that great care of our environment. It is great to see that many people are starting to realize this and are taking measures to become “eco-friendly.” However, in a society driven by media and capitalism, I fear being eco-friendly may result to being a timely fad that will soon fade as the next big consumer-driven social movement takes its place. It is important to inform ourselves that the real reason for environmental justice is for the glory of God in the gift that he has provided us to sustain and enjoy—not because Leonardo Dicaprio drives a hybrid car.
*The content of these blogs are the personal reflections of the author and do not represent official Columban positions or statements

Being There for Others

Today I was talking to a woman who goes twice a week to visit her son who is serving ten years in prison. Listening to her, I began to understand how the family suffers. Pedro, her son, is in a jail built 100 years ago for a maximum of 1,800 men. Today that jail holds 7,000 inmates.

Pedro’s mother, like many other of the men’s relatives, began queuing at 2 a.m. to get in at 9 a.m. In the rain, in the cold, they have no shelter from the elements. The relatives of the inmates bring clothes and food as there is never enough food provided by the jail. In spite of visitors being partly strip searched —a degrading experience — drugs, cell phones and alcohol still find their way inside.

A Repressive System

The system is one of repression and punishment. Up to 30 men at a time sleep in cells that were built for eight. They pool the food and take turns cooking it. When they wash their clothes and hang them up over the passage way, they have to keep watch so that the clothes are not stolen and sold for drugs. Close living conditions with nothing to do, abysmal toilet facilities along with various mental and physical complaints creates a climate of unrest, fighting and drug consumption. Some of the men spend their time taking irons out of the beds, walls and stairs to make weapons like spears to fight each other which leads to many injuries. In one week, 203 inmates were murdered by other inmates.

In spite of these conditions, one is surprised by the depth of faith, hope and solidarity that is to be found there among those who have a change of mind, heart and spirit. Those who recognize they have done wrong, and they are few, want to change their way of thinking and acting; they want a new life. But sadly, for the great majority, life in this prison is a brutal affair where many give up all hope of new beginnings.

New Beginnings for Juan

In another jail outside Santiago where there are 5,000 men, we said good-bye to Juan as he left for Bolivia after serving an eightyear sentence. Over the last two years he worked in a workshop, St. Columban’s, where he learned a lot about copper work through the arts and crafts course. He also took a course in solar paneling. He made one for me and what a treat it is to have boiling water from the sun.

Throughout the last year Juan took four men each month and taught them all he had learned. With patience he even taught some of them to read and write. Juan felt very happy to be going to the workshop; he was one of the lucky ones who had availed himself of the opportunity to learn something he could work at when he got back to his own people. The fact that he was able to share his experience with others helped him in some small way to repair some of the damage he had done by working for eighteen years in drug factories in different parts of the world. In Bolivia he will begin a new and better life.

Realizing the Damage Done

One can never understand the mystery of life where there are some people who do a lot of damage and only fully realize it when they come to jail. As many say to me: “I had to come here to stop doing what I was doing when I was young; the dangers I was in and put others in.” Many see the hand of God in this. It is an opportunity for some to seek help to change, but others continue as they are and refuse any help that is offered.

What would Jesus do?

I ask myself, “What would Jesus do?” How would He relate to the Pedros and the Juans in these prisons? To the innumerable men “spaced out” by drugs, brutalized by violence, alienated from warm human contact, sunk in despair? And every day I hear Him say, “I was in prison and you came…” Maybe, in the end, that is all He asks of us — to simply be there for others.

Juanita Abii

I know what conflict can do to a nation. My mum was a child during my country’s civil war. My aunt was born in transit between two villages because nowhere was safe. War is never the ultimate resolution. Too much is lost, because too much is at stake. It’s an irony in itself. I would love to delve more into this.

I must say that the question of war has always plagued my conscience; I guess that’s why I chose to go into conflict and resolution. A lot of times I find myself caught in a dilemma, trying to figure out where the church stands on war. I am really interested in getting a better grasp of this, because as much as I condemn war, I have come to the realization that it is nearly impossible to convince other people not to go to war. This is why I have taken the stand to avoid it at all costs.

In today’s secular society, the boundaries between right and wrong are disturbingly unclear. The precepts of the Church are relegated.  Many of the Lord’s faithful are led astray. How can we support war when it goes against the sacredness of the human person? Where can we stand when terrorists attack and the only seemingly logical retaliation is war? Our principles and beliefs are distorted in this age because we have separated our faith from our state.