To My Boys: September 23, 2020
Most of you know that every summer we take a group of rising seniors to the mountains of the Dominican Republic to work on a project with the locals. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, the mission did not happen this past summer.
Rest assured we are committed to making it happen in 2021. Even though it is still nine months away, Belen Youth Missions came to mind yesterday because of a picture I came across from my first mission trip.
I have great memories of those experiences when I was a student. Think about it, two weeks away from my parents, hanging out with friends in the middle of nowhere. Sure, you have to shovel dirt and carry bags of cement, sleep on the floor and use a latrine, but it was just me and the guys going head to head with Mother Nature. I had never seen clearer skies at night and brighter stars. I had never seen more pristine rivers and waterfalls, much less jumped in them not simply for fun, but for bathing.
The summer I was a junior, my three closest friends and I went on the trip to a village called La Guama in the area of San Jose de las Matas. One afternoon, Fr. Eddy Alvarez, S.J. ’63 decided to round us up and take us down the mountain and into the city of Santiago. We were loaded into the back of a pickup truck where we had to hold on for dear life as the driver made his way down the steep terrain. After having lunch and spending some time at a local park where we were all mistaken for Puerto Rican soccer players for the Pan American Games, we all bought bottles of Coke to enjoy on our long and dusty trip back. As we got into the pickup truck, Fr. Eddy warned us not to throw the bottles out of the truck. They could be returned for money and we, in turn, could give the money to the poor villagers. Of course, just minutes after heading back, we realized throwing the bottles into the fields was much more fun than obeying Fr. Eddy’s order.
While one of us acted as a lookout, the others began to throw our bottles into the field, hurling them like grenades over our heads, watching them land softly on the native grasses. One of our classmates decided at that moment to be the voice of reason. He reminded us how Fr. Eddy insisted we not throw the bottles away because the pennies we got in return for them could feed a family of four with several bowls of rice and a couple of bananas. It would be wrong to not obey a Jesuit priest, and that we had the moral obligation to adhere to what was expected of us.
I was very impressed with the conviction in his voice and the eloquence of his speech. I admit that for a second, he even made me feel guilty for having launched my bottle. But then the teenage blood that ran through my veins and fed my brain got the worst of me and so I, along with the rest of my friends, proceeded to call him a coward and all the other adjectives that were at our youthful disposal. Because Fr. Eddy was quietly tucked away in the cabin of the truck and could not see or hear us, I encouraged my friend, who up until then was following his conscience, to finally let the bottle rip.
What happened next was disastrous. My easily influenced friend finally released his glassy projectile out the back of a truck and we all burst out into joyous cheers. As we all watched the bottle fly through the air, glistening in the hot Caribbean sun, it made its way as in slow motion towards this little patch of concrete just off the side of the road. The noise it made as it crashed on the floor was like an explosion straight out of the bowels of hell. We all became instantly terrified as the pickup truck came to a screeching halt. “Who threw that bottle?,” screamed Fr. Eddy with fire in his eyes and nostrils flaring. As if perfectly planned with exquisite synchronicity, we all stood up and pointed right at the culprit.
Poor guy. While we all felt terrible for handing him in, we felt that the needs of the many far outweighed the needs of the one. When we made it back to La Guama, Fr. Eddy provided the perpetrator with a garbage bag and ordered him to collect all the trash he found in the bushes and along the dirt roads of the little village. When he had completed his penance, he was ordered to ask a villager where to throw away the garbage. The Dominican campesino took him to the side of the road, emptied the bag on the ground, and then asked to keep the garbage bag.
You just can’t get experiences like that in Miami. And, by the way, if you ever get to go on one of these mission trips, don’t get any funny ideas.
Auspice Maria
BELEN JESUIT PREPARATORY SCHOOL
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
Belen Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana, Cuba by Queen Isabel II of Spain. The task of educating students was assigned to the priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), whose teaching tradition is synonymous with academic excellence and spiritual discipline. In 1961, the new political regime of Cuba confiscated the School property and expelled the Jesuit faculty. The School was re-established in Miami the same year, and over the next decade, continued to grow. Today, Belen Jesuit sits on a 30-acre site in western Dade County, only minutes away from downtown Miami.