Christmas 2011 & Holiday Season Letter just for you…

Thanksgiving evening I returned from a Habitat Latrine Building Project in Ethiopia and visits to Kenya, and Dubai. Habitat is what I save for throughout the year as a gift to myself that I hope helps me grasp the true meaning of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and to remind me why pushing People’s Lobby’s AWSC (American World Service Corps) Congressional Proposal is so important.

Most of you who receive this will be state-siders. You already live a gifted life, which you – and I – often take for granted. A few of you may even occasionally fall off the “take-it-for granted” fence and into the “spoiled” neighborhood.

Digging latrines in the rambling slums of Addis Ababa pushes one to think long, hard, and often about taking stuff for granted. It leaves one with some RCS (Reverse Culture Shock), just as Peace Corps (PC) service has done for many of the 200,000 of us Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) who served in less than comfortable situations since 1961.

When we ten Habitaters first emptied the van onto the slippery, rock-hewn streets of our first Addis Ababa slum bewildered stares hung in the air, but only until they learned what we were doing there. In the meantime, we found eight policemen waiting to escort us down the rough street, over its open drainage sewers lined with garbage, papers, plastic, charcoal, and into the 30’x40’ compound, where a mud hut housed four or five people, a windowless mud (chicka) building was to be a kitchen, and another served as a chicken coup.

In the remaining wet and polluted mud/clay, we would either dig and/or construct a 10’x10’x12’ deep latrine lined with rocks/boulders. The new latrines are designed to be periodically emptied and to replace the holes around the compound into which residents had been defecating, while sitting on a board with a cutout hole.

Often, as our digging would reveal to us, they were doing their business into one of the world’s omnipresent plastic bags. Digging was neither pretty nor easy, and after a day’s slogging, you didn’t want to walk around in your boots wherever you went after work.

The latrine building work in Addis often flew my memories decades back to Peace Corps work in Mumbai. There, in the cow-dung lined walls of the Worli Chawls hutments, those gentle Indians would defecate into little holes dug a foot or two deep on an outside corner of their little, squat homes. When the monsoons came, those holes overflowed into the slums’ paths, the stench rose, and some of the poor would use the flows and stench as cover to make their sometime deadly moonshine.

With many holes having served as latrines in this little Addis compound, the results that flowed around were probably infectiously similar. Dealing with RCS after two years in India is also somewhat similar. It sometimes includes ruminating about how too much of the world lives while tapping away on a keyboard.

Back in pre-PC days this Catholic boy went to mass and Communion 5-6 days a week. A Fr. D, from our Parma parish, was a special priestly mentor. Young, articulate, handsome, as well as a Notre Dame grad, he exemplified the stereotypical or perfect parish priest. His mentoring included monitoring CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) affairs, taking some of us to football games, personal face-to-face confessions, and probably had something to do with getting some of us into our cherished and extremely competitive St. Ignatius High.

Many Christmas’ past, right after completing PC training in a tough and poor South Bronx, New York for PC service in Bombay, Fr. D. gave me food for religious thought.

Over lunch with him, I talked about the needs and poverty in our training areas of South Bronx and Harlem, where there were more ministers from the Christian Damascus Church of Christ than from the Catholic Church. He told me that the Church’s duty was to “Tend its flock, and our flock is Middle Class.” I countered with the parable of the Good Shepherd who, with his 99 sheep safely sheltered in the fold, goes out in search of the lost one.

While serving in the PC, I had numerous occasions whilst flooded with needs and poverty to ponder his parish priestly interpretation of the Good Shepherd, especially amidst my PC world that was not politically correct.

Shortly after my return from two years of RCS Returned PCV experience, Fr. D wanted to take me to breakfast at Bearden’s Restaurant. The conversation got to President Nixon’s bombing Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam on --- Christmas Day. I lamented over the bombing of little, poor, brown people on the day of Christ’s birth.

“Do you know what my sermon was on that Christmas Day?” Fr. D asked.

“No.”

“For 20 minutes, my strongly worded sermon was on behalf of President Nixon’s Christmas Day bombing.”

After a few seconds, I said, “Father, if I were in you church that day, I pray I would have had the courage to stand up and say, ‘You’re full of shit.’”

Those were the last latrine bound words I exchanged with Fr. D. I walked home from Bearden’s that day and haven’t seen that mentor since.

As wealth and income inequity surpasses that of the Great Depression and poverty spreads at home as well as abroad, Christmas and New Year’s often makes me ponder more than normally how a shrinking super power dropped dumb policies and smart bombs on cute kids around the world.

With all that religious stuff that many of us were raised on, do you ever wonder whether we’re delivering enough of the right stuff for all the world’s cute kids?

³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Mathew 25:35-40:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” Mathew 19:24

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? MARK 8:35, 36

May you and yours have good health, spirits, and housing!

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year… Dwayne

For those who need music and sensuousness to get happy during the Holidays – click

For those who love the scenery at Christmas – click and ticket --

For those who need to occupy or deck the halls – click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH8FvERQHtM&sns=em

A “”Ho-ho” and hearty gift that revolves around a guy who always acted like Santa is in the book at this link… http://www.dwaynehunn.biz/every_town_needs_a_castle.htm