Bradley students receive Peruvian experience

By Anthony Sperando
COM 360
Feature Story Assignment

         

 FOCUS students take a group picture at the house they rebuilt in the shantytown. (Courtesy: Kristen Sharkey)

         
            Mudslides and earthquake damage are not a common occurrence that a Bradley student has to deal with. This was a different case for five students who traveled to Peru for their spring break, between March 15-22, in part of a FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, mission trip.

One of the five included sophomore public relations major Kristen Sharkey, who described the trip as “rewarding” and “incredible”. Her and the other students’ assignment of the week was to help a woman rebuild her home that was destroyed by a mudslide, in a shantytown about 30 minutes outside of Lima.

“I have a better understanding of the world. It renewed my desire to serve and experienced how I can affect someone’s life in just one week,” Sharkey said.

The underlying reason of why FOCUS sends missionaries to third-world countries is to help the poor in various ways, but also to spread the Gospel of the Catholic faith.

“(FOCUS sent us to) spread the love of Christ to everyone we met. They sent us to see Christ in the people were helping also,” Zach Taylor, an ICC freshman, said.

            The trip was beneficial not only to the people the students met, but also to their own faith lives.

            “I have a renewed confidence in my faith. On a college campus, it can be difficult sometimes," Sharkey said.

            Taylor agreed by saying he didn’t realize that he didn’t put God first in his life.

            “To be put in a situation where you don’t understand what people are saying 90 percent of the time, was very cool,” Taylor said.

            The task was very different from other Christian mission trips, being as 95 percentof Peru is already Catholic, according to Sharkey. The responsibility of the students was to show the people the sacraments of the Church.

            “I think they have the core beliefs of the faith, but they don’t have churches there. They understand the morals of the faith, but receiving sacraments, such as the Eucharist or the Holy Spirit at Confirmation, was all new to them,” Sharkey said.

Poverty hits everywhere in the world and Peru is certainly not exempt from this epidemic. The Bradley students first had to help build a retaining wall to keep the sand from falling onto the house again and destroying it once more.

“(Mud slides) are typically are a problem in Peru. Most of the poor live in the desert on top of sand dunes. Many leave their houses unfinished because they don’t have to pay taxes on them. This leads to the sand falling on and destroying these poorly built houses,” Maddie Conley, freshman psychology major, said.

The owner of the house, Senora Rosa, had three daughters: ages 11, 16 and 30. The 30 year-old-daughter had mental and physical handicaps, to top it off.

“(Rosa) was 4’9” and had a really soft voice. She was very kind and loving as you can get,” Taylor said.

The father of the daughters no longer wanted to be married to the woman and was nowhere to be seen.

“To my knowledge, she had no source of income. She would have nowhere to go (if she were to leave her current location),” Sharkey said.

The trip was not all work though, as the students on the trip were allowed to tour Lima for the first two days. Their stops included going to museums and visiting places where saints lived.

“We went to this awesome park (at Moraflores) where there was water coming out of the ground and an obstacle course,” Sharkey said.

A typical day for the students included: getting up at 7 a.m., Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m., breakfast at 8 a.m., 30 minutes of travel to the location of the house and work for four hours. After a day of hard work, they students would travel back to the retreat house, shower, pray a Holy Hour, celebrate Mass, eat dinner and receive a spiritual talk. The talks included topics such as evangelization, looking at passages of the Gospel and answering the Lord’s call.

“We worked with contracted laymen, and they gave a lot of talks on humility, poverty and how to love our brothers and sisters in Christ,” Taylor said.

After the talk, the students were able to spend the rest of their night to themselves, which included “mostly chatting” according to Sharkey.

After a week of hard work, the students finally arrived back in Peoria on the Sunday before classes started. The experiences left the students hungry for more.

“I would definitely do it again. I would raise triple the money if I could do it again,” Taylor said.