International Summer Service Learning Program

‘When There’s No One to Blame’

CSC News & Reflections
Fall 2004

For her International Summer Service Learning Project last summer, Cassie Herman worked with disabled children at the Casa Hogar Juan Pablo in Querétaro, Mexico. A junior double major in Theology and Peace Studies, Cassie plans to spend her spring semester studying treatment strategies for cerebral palsy.

 The first time I entered Casa Hogar Juan Pablo, I was admittedly frightened.

Walking through the hallways toward the mattress room where I was to work, I caught my first glimpse of the children. Many were wailing and crying, some were blank and silent, a small boy sat on the floor spinning around in circles making gurgling noises, another boy who was locked in a cell yelled and banged his body against the metal bars, one boy was covered in burns, another was eating a piece of tape, another girl stared out a window weeping.

Casa Hogar Juan Pablo in Querétaro, Mexico is home to eighty-four mentally and physically disabled “kids” ranging from ages one through 40. Few of the children can talk. Few of them can walk. All of them cry. One of the children, Miriam, must wear a corset because her spine is twisted. When the nurse took it off to show me, Miriam screamed in pain. I felt ill and helpless, and this was just my first day of what was to be a two-month international summer service project.

Some days later, Senora Paty beckoned me to the sick room, where one-year-old Juan Pablo laid in her arms. “He has cerebral palsy,” she told me handing over a small dish of puréed bananas, “Feed him.” She gently placed him in my arms, and I sat for the next hour staring into Juan Pablo’s big brown eyes–eyes that were disproportionately large compared to the rest of his frail tiny body. I wondered why that was.

Why any of it was, I thought angrily, why are they sick and deformed and abandoned? We’re so quick to blame when problems confront us – the government, the parents, the teachers, the lack of education or food or water – but who is to blame at the Casa?

As I examined the abnormal bumps in Juan Pablo’s skull, I thought back to Miriam’s deformed spine, which I had seen days earlier. Her scream echoed in my thoughts. Yet, there seemed to be eloquence to Miriam’s scream, an eloquence beneath that cried out to all who could hear – “Where is justice?” Maybe it is overly sentimental to imagine Miriam’s scream as saying, “Where is justice?” Perhaps there was something more, something harder – “Where are you?”

Initially at the Casa, I was filled with fear. Fear was my response to that question. I was afraid of giving without purpose. I could not bring their parents back. I could not correct their deformities. I could not mend their minds. I was there, but what could I do? I wanted to hide, run away, clothe myself against the children’s nakedness, and against my own weakness and my inability to change anything.

At first I was afraid of Oscarito, blind little Oscar. Stuck in a cage, without sight, alone. It is frightening to be with a person who cannot see you or recognize you, or walk to greet you or talk to tell you he’s frightened.

In the book Compassion, Henri Nouwen writes, “We are liberated by someone who became powerless, strengthened by someone who became weak, find hope in someone who divested himself of all distinctions, find a leader in someone who became a servant.”

Weeks after reading this, I discovered that Nouwen’s description of Jesus is entirely true of these children too – they are imitators of Christ. Like Him, they are powerless and weak; they spend their entire lives bowing in one position before the Lord. They are poor, defeated, and dependent. They are suffering. They are the suffering Christ.

And so the children taught me. They exhorted daily, albeit inaudibly, “Do not be afraid! Empty yourself! Empty yourself to the point of humiliation; wrap yourself in humility and be a servant to me, a servant to Him.”

Slowly, fear began to subside as I tickled Oscarito’s back to make him laugh, and played patty-cake with his hands. Lying next to him, completely horizontal on the mattress, he shared his pillow with me, and put his hand in mine, and I began to learn, slowly, how to empty myself.

I went to the Casa each day and I fed the children their pureed mush. I gave them their bottles of apple juice. I changed their diapers. I sat with them. I scratched their backs. I held their hands. It was the least I could do. Still, despite my abating fear, the questions remained. Was it and is it still the most I can do?

The children in the Casa will never be able to ride a bike, read “Green Eggs and Ham,” eat an ice cream cone, play in the mud. They’ll never hug their mother. They’ll never stick their heads out of car windows and feel the wind blow through their hair.

But is my life that much more valuable because of the things I can do that the children cannot, because of what I can produce, because of the pleasures I can enjoy? If not, and there is true equality of value, than what is the value of life? Perhaps our individual value is not something measurable by our standards. Perhaps it is something beyond our vocabulary and even our minds.

Still, what about quality of life? Their mattresses are but a few inches thick, their sheets are torn, their bottles leak. There are no wet wipes, or fresh air, and many never see the sun.

For only two months I was at the Casa. But I am back in the United States now, and the distance between the children and me prevents me from being with them any longer. The least I could do this summer, I no longer can. Still, every day I hear their distant voices asking me – “Where are you?”

Toward the end of my stay, Senora Paty encouraged me to adopt a child from the Casa.

“Take one home,” she told me. At first I scoffed at this suggestion; taking a child back with me on the plane seemed silly. Raising a child, and a child who needs 24-hour care at that, seemed impossible.

But how am I to respond to the children when I hear their faint cries pleading – Where are you?

What if I had brought Oscarito, or one of the other children home with me? How would my life have changed? How would Oscarito’s life have changed? Why didn’t I? Why couldn’t I? We all have our lives to lead, and many of us try to be unselfish. But really, what stopped me from taking him home, of giving him the individual love he needs and deserves? This was the only question to which I had the answer — my own life. I pray that some day my answer will change.

Fr. Gittens, a Spiritan priest who spoke to the ISSLP students at a retreat this fall repeatedly told us, “as Christians, we have a duty to be permanently disturbed.” It is the mark of a Christian to be permanently disturbed by the injustices and oppressions of this world, he said.

The questions that affected me so this summer must continue to disturb me. I must remain permanently disturbed.

—Cassie Herman