Ronni Pruhs, a Milwaukee nurse, didn’t think
twice about taking her three children to South Africa
in 1968 when she and her husband, Ron, a dentist, volunteered
as clinicians through the Catholic Medical Mission
Board. The family stayed until 1970, and Pruhs even
gave birth to their fourth child in Malawi.
By 1976 the family — which now included two more
children — headed to Brazil on another medical
mission through Project Hope. The couple’s oldest
son was in eighth grade, the youngest was 2 years old.
“The kids went to school there and learned Portuguese.
They just got around the city and kind of got a taste
for it,” Pruhs recalled.
Over the years, the Pruhs’ six sons accompanied
them on similar trips to Uganda, the Dominican Republic
and Haiti, helping their parents set up extraction
clinics or travel from village to village, treating
residents’ teeth.
Pruhs remembered her parents and her husband’s
parents were anxious about their grandchildren traveling
to Africa. She herself worried about the boys getting
seriously sick or injured in countries that couldn’t
provide specialized care. Still, the couple wanted
their children with them. Part of the reason, she said,
was exposing them to people and places they would not
normally have encountered growing up in the United
States.
“It’s always appeared to me that their
outlook has been global, probably because they’ve
been immersed the way they have been,” she said,
noting that three of her sons have spent a year or
more volunteering at the Working Boys Center, a family
center sponsored by the Jesuits and Sisters of Charity
in Quito, Ecuador.
Sponsorship is
teaching opportunity
Jacci Gambucci has also tried to broaden the horizons
of her three children — Alyssa, a high school
junior; Joe, an eighth grader; and Gina, a fifth grader.
The family sponsors Odette Bernard, a 15-year-old girl
from Haiti, through Christian Foundation for Children
and Aging, a lay Catholic organization based in Kansas
City, Kan.
Gambucci’s West Bend parish, St. Frances Cabrini,
has a twinning relationship with a parish in Kobonal,
Haiti, so she found a monthly sponsorship another way
to get involved, but also saw it as a teaching opportunity
for her kids.
“I know there are (social justice) issues here
at home, and you hear and read about those all the
time, but this just kind of gives the picture a little
bigger scope,” she said, adding she’s now
more attuned to newspaper articles and news reports
about Haiti, and has searched the Internet to learn
more about issues there.
Odette’s annual letters to the family are read
aloud at the dinner table, and have spurred enlightening
discussions about the differences in life between the
countries. Once she wrote how thrilled she was because
her family had obtained a corn grinder. One of Gambucci’s
children, who couldn’t understand her enthusiasm,
marveled, “That’s like me getting excited
about a washing machine.”
“I said, ‘Yeah, it is, but you just take
it for granted because it’s there and if it breaks,
we just get a new one. You never think twice about
it,’” Gambucci said. “(The sponsorship)
is another opportunity to see how fortunate — or
how spoiled — we are; I guess it’s really
both. It’s so easy for all of us to lose sight
of what we have. And this reminds us of the responsibility
we have to give back.”
Twinning relationship unites children
Students at St. Anthony Parish Elementary School, Pewaukee, play a large part
in the twinning relationship with a sister parish in Peru, said Maureen Michaels,
Christian formation administration assistant, and coordinator for the parish-wide
program.
Money that students from the school and the religious education program raise
through a “Pennies for Peru” campaign funds a program that provides
breakfast for Peruvian children.
St. Anthony families also sponsor more than 300 families in Peru with monthly
donations that provide such staples as rice, beans and powdered milk. Michaels
tries to match children of similar ages in both families for a more meaningful
experience. She said children here participate by sending letters and photos
to their sponsored families, or by helping to pack items — from dish towels
to T-shirts — for a semi-truck-sized shipment of goods sent to the sister
parish every June.
The children learn about the parish through videos taken by St. Anthony parishioners
who travel to Peru each year. A few weeks ago, the Peruvian pastor and a few
parishioners also visited Pewaukee, and met with students during a school Mass.
Sr. Frances Cunningham, director of the Milwaukee Archdiocese’s World Mission
Ministries office, believes that developing an awareness of mission ministry
is especially vital today, given a growing attitude of isolation toward people
of diverse cultures since Sept. 11, 2001.
“As members of a universal, global church, our hearts are challenged to
be open to our sisters and brothers everywhere,” said Cunningham, a School
Sister of St. Francis. “In their 1997 letter, ‘Called to Global Solidarity,’ the
U.S. bishops said so well, ‘We are members of a universal church that transcends
national boundaries and calls us to live in solidarity and justice with the peoples
of the world.’”
World Mission Ministries, which offers resources from educational materials to
immersion experiences intended to help parishes, schools and individuals learn
more about the lives and needs of people throughout the world, focuses on international
missions. But even on a national or local level, children can learn that mission
is part of their identity as followers of Christ, Cunningham said.
“Mission is primarily about forging loving relationships of mutuality and
solidarity and being able to walk side by side with others in our joint efforts
to transform structures and systems of our world,” she said. “Our
commitment to mission begins at baptism, and one responsibility of … educators
and parents toward children is to nourish and support the understanding of mission
as a way of being a sign of God’s unconditional love for the world and
the people of the world.”
Mission awareness opportunities abound
Opportunities to teach mission awareness — from mission society Web sites
offering games and newsletters to school-sponsored immersion trips abroad — abound
for parents and educators.
Mary Alice Rubach became a volunteer for Heifer International years ago, after
the JI Case Corporation made a winning bid at the Racine County Fair on the lamb
her grandson had raised as a 4H project. The morning after the auction, Rubach
learned the company was donating the lamb to Heifer International, a charitable
agency that provides farm animals for rural families in need around the globe.
Today, she promotes the agency at schools around southeastern Wisconsin. Heifer
offers a curriculum for third through eighth grades that combines social justice
issues with subjects ranging from science to social studies, she said.
For children, as for adults, seeing and hearing how they can actually make a
difference for someone across the world is a strong incentive to help, said Terry
Hansen, a guidance counselor at Union Grove High School, who has given group
presentations about Heifer.
“It’s very concrete to children to think that a gift of chickens
or a goat or cow can help people with not only better nutrition and milk, but
in terms of the sale of the milk and any offspring from the animal, and even
manure from the animal for growing their plants,” Hansen said.
“Plus, I think it’s a powerful thing to learn that families just
need a little input — the gift of an animal and the training — to
break that cycle of poverty instead of rolling that rock of survival up the hill
and seeing it roll back again. It’s an investment that can help them improve
their lives.”
A World Mission Ministries appeal for help at Sagrada Familia, the Milwaukee
Archdiocese’s sister parish in the Dominican Republic, sparked a number
of schools to fund-raisers. Children from St. Joseph Parish in Lyons raised enough
money for an urgently needed stove in a new children’s nutrition center.
At St. Dominic Parish, Brookfield, students from religious education classes
baked for, and staffed, a parish bake sale, raising about $3,000 toward building
the center.
“(Some of) the kids were just totally covered in flour by the time they
were done, but you wouldn’t believe how excited they get,” said Susan
McNeil, pastoral associate for human concerns at St. Dominic.
School-wide sponsorship
draws excitement
Patti Keller, a teacher at St. Bernadette Elementary School in Milwaukee, said
the school-wide CFCA sponsorship she initiated in 2003 draws excitement even
from her second-graders.
Annual fund-raisers at the school have paid for the tuition, school uniform,
shoes, school supplies, and even medical appointments of Enid Suque Viceral,
a 13-year-old from the Philippines. Extra money has paid for Christmas and birthday
gifts that students choose.
About 20 schools in the Milwaukee Archdiocese have CFCA sponsorship projects,
according to Loretta Kline, the organization’s communications director
in Kansas City. That the sponsorship relationship breeds close ties doesn’t
surprise her. During last December’s Asian tsunami, her Kansas City office
was deluged with calls, e-mails and letters asking about the welfare of sponsored
families. After Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, CFCA’s overseas offices
were swamped with contacts from children asking about their American sponsors.
While parents may pay for a sponsorship, it is often their children who actually
nurture the relationship, Kline said. “The children enjoy relating to other
children. They write the letters, correspond back and forth. They hang up pictures
in their homes. They go on the Internet and research where their sponsored child
lives. They’ve shown an interest in learning not only about that individual
child, but they want to know about the country and the living conditions there,
the lifestyle, the culture and the faith traditions.”
While sponsorships can be a great way for elementary students to learn about
international missions, some high schools go a step further.
At Divine Savior Holy Angels, an all-girls high school in Milwaukee, Spanish
teacher Terri Holt accompanies eight juniors and a chaperone each year on a two-week
service work trip to The Working Boys Center in Ecuador.
The students serve as teachers’ aides in classrooms, working one-on-one
with students. On Sundays, the group goes to a family’s home, doing whatever
maintenance projects are needed.
“They’re always telling me and other people how much the trip affected
them, and how things that they thought were important in their lives before have
taken on a totally different lack of meaning. It’s just made a huge impression
on the girls,” said Holt, who added many participants want to return to
Ecuador for longer volunteer stints.
Hands-on experiences
are eye-opening
Hands-on service programs are often an eye-opening experience for teenagers,
said Cathy Pinter, who coordinates three archdiocesan-sponsored social justice
programs for middle-school and high school students. “Justice Do It” for
children as young as sixth-grade, and “Reach Out/Reach In” for high
school students, get participants involved in service activities at sites ranging
from the AIDS Resource Center in Milwaukee to a family farm.
Global Youth Missions are annual immersion trips for high school juniors and
seniors to Guatemala, St. Lucia, Ecuador, Belize, and the Dominican Republic.
Besides service work in the latter two programs, participants also examine social
issues, and discuss Catholic social teaching. But the emphasis on all the programs — and
in Catholic social teaching, Pinter adds — is to work with people, not
doing something for or to them.
“Most high school kids that come to these programs think, ‘I’m
going to come, and I’m so important, and I’m going to help and I’ll
make a huge difference,’” Pinter said. “What we hope happens,
honestly, is all of them realize that whether they came for a week or not, it’s
not going to make much difference. These people’s lives are going to go
on. It’s for the kids to learn, and most kids realize that they get more
out of the experience than they give.
“It’s really shifting the mission mentality in the church from ‘We’re
the white Americans that are going to come save you’ to ‘We are going
to join with you in solidarity and work together for whatever that might be,
and you are as integral to that as we are.’ It’s not like we know
better, and I think that is very critical.”
The other critical aspect of missions is broadening its very definition, she
said. “I’m a parent of a 9-year-old, and I think I have a responsibility
to teach. I have a responsibility to do service and to see that it’s not
just putting money in an envelope, but it’s touching and being with others,
whether that’s right in our backyard or another country.”
For the Ron and Ronni Pruhs, service has meant more than writing checks. The
couple, still makes regular trips to Haiti, and will be returning to that country
later this year to establish a dental clinic.
Three of their sons — one a dentist, the other two, attorneys — continue
to volunteer time there annually as well.
“They realize that we are not the center of the universe,” she said
of her sons. “They realize that there is a big, needy world out there outside
of our own country — that many people have fewer opportunities, less access
to health care. It has impressed them all.”
Resources for mission opportunities:
• World Mission Ministries Office, <www.archmil.org/dept/wmo> or
(414) 769-3406, offers a resource center and library,
links to related social justice sites, and numerous
mission opportunities. Contact Dominican Sr. Rosemary
Huddleston, international mission coordinator for the
archdiocese at <huddlestonr@archmil.org> or (414)
769-3405 for information on international service and
immersion experiences for both adults and youth.
Cathy Pinter, Global Youth Mission coordinator, Milwaukee
archdiocese, <cmpinter@sbcglobal.net> or (414)
962-8155, can provide information on Global Youth Mission
and other service programs.
Laurie Kish, associate director, High School Youth
Ministry, Milwaukee Archdiocese, <kishl@archmil.org> or
(414) 769-3361, coordinates national immersion experiences.
• Catholic social teaching. For a look at Catholic
bishops’ views on Catholic social teaching, visit <www.usccb.org/sdwp/projects/socialteaching/socialteaching.htm>.
For a more “kid friendly” version of Catholic
social teaching, sample “Please Send Round Pizza
With Square Corners” by the late Bishop Kenneth
E. Untener of Saginaw, Mich. at <www.saginaw.org/
christian_service/justice_pizza.htm>
• Heifer International, <www.heifer .org>,
(877) 663-1684, is an organization involved in 50 countries;
participants can provide animal gifts, volunteer, or
get involved in local programs and projects. Educational
materials include “Read to Feed,” a fund-raising
and reading-incentive program with curriculum for elementary
and middle-school students.
• Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, <www.
cfcausa.org> or (800) 875-6564, is a lay Catholic
organization that joins individuals, families or groups
as sponsors to children or elderly individuals in 26
developing countries. Program involves a monthly donation,
and participants correspond one-on-one through letters.
Also has a network of missionary priests who serve
as speakers for the organization.
• Holy Childhood Association, <www.worldmissionscatholicchurch.org>,
(or contact World Mission Ministries office), is one
of four Pontifical Mission Societies; focus is on mission
activities for children of elementary and junior high
school ages. Offers a Web site for kids, educational
programs for Advent and Lent, a Christmas artwork contest
and other materials.
• Columban Fathers, <www.columban.org/missioned>,
(402) 291-1920, is the Missionary Society of St. Columban,
founded in 1918, which provides resources for teachers,
games, prayer cards and a network of speakers. Mission
educational materials include videos and guides, some
of which are available from the World Mission Ministries
office.
• Maryknoll Missionaries, <www.maryknoll.org>,
(888) 627-9566 (educational materials), is an international
organization for religious and lay missionaries. Sponsors
an annual student essay contest, and offers educational
materials for classroom use. |
