RBA Hispanic Ministry Report

EXECOM Meeting, Beulah Baptist Church

Warsaw VA

090924

This afternoon I spent a while at the pediatrician’s office here in Warsaw, translating for three families and their children. It’s not unusual for either Leslie or me to spend SOME time there, two or three or even more days a week, depending on the season. The running joke is that they are going to set up a cot for me in one of the offices. Today’s appointments were pretty routine. A couple with their newborn baby son – Jose Maria Andrade Cruz was born on Saturday, and this was his initial newborn appointment. His parents, Jose and Fani, were excited and more than a little apprehensive at the prospect of being parents, but they were both very attentive and very focused on taking care of their precious child. In the course of the visit, I discovered that, though Jose was their first baby, this was their second pregnancy. Though I didn’t ask for any details, I did express to them my condolences in the loss of their first child.

In the next room over, there were two families who are neighbors who live in Village. In one family there are two little ones, Cesar, who is four, and has the distinction of being the first baby I got to the hospital to be born back in 2005 – we arrived at Mary Washington at 2:45 AM and he was born at 3:00 AM. Lucero, his sister, was born this past 4^th of July. The other family has two sons, Victor and Carlos. Victor has apparently been exposed to Poison Ivy or something that has caused him to break out in a rash almost all over his body.

Earlier today I was at the high school with a 17 year old young woman who wanted to enroll in school – she WANTS to at LEAST finish High School, if not go even further in her education, but she has just arrived here from California. She and her boyfriend have beautiful little baby girl. He and HIS family moved here last fall, and her mother wanted her to at least finish out the school year back in California before moving here. The problem right now for her is that her mother in California needs to transfer her guardianship to Marta – her boyfriend’s mother – in order for Marta to be able to enroll the girl in school.

Yesterday I sat with a woman in Callao who went in for a routine mammogram on Monday down at Rappahannock General in Kilmarnock. Her Family Nurse Practitioner received the report Tuesday afternoon early and called me to ask me to relay the results to her. They found a suspicious mass in one of her breasts, and from the size and shape of it there is a high probability that it will turn out to be a malignancy. She cried and I prayed with her. I’d ask you to please add her to your prayer lists – her name is Ana Maria Torres. Over the next days and weeks we will be working on getting her the needed tests and appointments to determine what else needs to happen.

Through your generosity we were able to provide close to a hundred students with the supplies they needed to start school. That number is considerably down from what we did last year, but coincidentally, we had fewer requests to fill this year than last.

I could work my way back through the summer months and walk you through stories of all these families and individuals we have come to know and love, but I know we have other business to attend to here tonight.

What I’d like to leave you with is the understanding that, even though we hear a lot of rhetoric in the public arena that deals in generalities, in labels for huge groups of people, we are still talking about people just like you and me.

If there is one thing that has been reinforced over and over again since we’ve been taking part in this ministry, it is that as followers of Christ, we are called to live in community – meaning we are called to KNOW each other –we are called to share in each other’s lives – CARE for each other, and that is hard to do if you stop thinking of that family in the next aisle over at Wal-Mart as folks with names, with hopes and dreams – in many cases dreams that they may have had at one point for themselves but have had to put away, and are now hoping and dreaming for their children and grandchildren, and start thinking of them in generalities.

Please don’t give in to that temptation, that easy excuse to set aside our responsibility to minister in the name of Jesus to everyone we come in contact with.

Yes, it is hard, and yes, it is messy, but that’s our call.

My final word is, as always, thank you for giving us the chance to DO this. It continues to be a source of joy and challenge for our lives as ministers and as representatives of the Rappahannock Association.