Day 7: Dios Le Pague

by Joe Quinn ‘04

“El domingo es para la minga.” - Don Edison

While the Lord rested on the seventh day, the members of the CMT keep holy their sabbath with an honest day’s labor. Despite what its sounds like, minga is a corruption from the Quechua meaning “communal work”. And yet, for we Regians, the experience was far from foreign, and truly central to our mission of living out the gospel’s message of service.

Gringos looking for work.

We started one man down as the noble Frank Aguilar took ill and rested on the home front. The rest of us were up-and-at-’em by seven o’clock, joined by kind and able-bodied folks from Dubuque, Iowa. Gloves in hand and work-boots shod, we were met by Edison, one of the Center’s teachers in charge of placing the working boys after finishing their technical studies. On the long bus ride to our destination beyond the outskirts of town he explained that the purpose of our minga was to help Marciela, a local autobody-shop owner, build a new garage. While Marciela and her husband were not members of the center, their shop has employed many graduates of the CMT. In this we saw the widening circle of the Center’s “family of families”; while traditionally mingas are devoted to building places to live, a place to work must come next in the order of “felt needs.” Treating Marciela’s business as another kind of “home” offered us an added object lesson in the Center’s spirit of generosity.

You see a giant hole in the ground. We see jobs for working boys!

The site, when we arrived, was not much more than a cleared-out tranche and two mounds of dirt. A pit about thirty feet deep sat at the far corner of the property, bordered by a deep retaining wall. First to meet us there was Myrian, one of the directors of Center #1 (La Marin), who introduced us to Marciela, “la duena de la minga”. Our task was to move all that dirt into that big hole, and though you could hardly tell to look at it, a little prophetic vision made it all add up one day to a beautiful garage with jobs for the muchachos we met on Friday.

"La cadena" está en vigor.

The work was laborious, and seemingly endless -- but healthy activity for muscles atrophied by laptop typing and all-night cramming. By picking, hoeing, and shoveling we broke down the mounds, and it soon became clear that the best approach would be a collaborative one. “Se necesita cadena,” Myrian and Marciela agreed, which added to my store of Spanish working vocabulary by one, for it referred to a “chain” of loosening the earth and shoveling it from one man to the next and finally into the great open pit. We learned other choice modismos that day, but the most delicious of all was the chicharron -- pork chitlins -- eaten heartily for lunch.

We all stood a little higher that day.

By day’s end we couldn’t say hole was wholly filled, but those massive mounds were sure cleared out. Some even sacrificed their pantalones and a sliver of dignity to the effort of literally moving the earth… (Yours truly.) And yet, we had played our part. With hope in your heart you could see that bottom really had risen a few feet -- and even if you didn’t believe your own eyes you had to believe Marciela’s. “Dios le pague,” she told us. God will repay you. It’s an expression sometimes used as a mild joke here, a kind of “I owe you one, and since I can’t pay you so the Good Lord might.” But when spoken sincerely it conveys more gratitude than mere “gracias” ever could.

What a choir!

We got back in time for a local mass at the Iglesia del Divino Nino. While hewing closer to the Sunday services we were used to at home, a spirit of child-like joy brought the ceremony closer to the kids’ daily masses at the Center, and we were impressed by the moving songs and deep faith of the parishioners. Since the cooks were off duty we conceded to our American appetites and ordered entirely too much Dominoes. What pizza we had left over we gave to the midnight-flying Fordham group -- both in a spirit of Jesuit brotherhood and a preemptive peace-offering for the inevitably heated soccer matches played out on la cancha.