“Living with Argentina’s most abandoned people”
- Edmund Rhatigan, volunteer 2004

Edmund Rhatigan, a medical student from Bolton, writes about two months spent working as a volunteer in homes for abandoned people in the remote Argentinian town of Oberá.

“Gooaal,” I cried in a poor imitation of South American football commentators. With his arms held aloft and with the broadest smile imaginable Samuel let out a squeal of delight as he celebrated another goal and victory. The old M&B football card game that I brought out with me proved a big hit and many hours were being whiled away as England and Argentina locked horns.

Samuel is a young man of 20 or 21, one of a large family, and as I write his mother is at an advanced stage of another pregnancy. Probably disabled from birth Samuel was born into a very impoverished family. They were unable to care for him and a few years ago he was found ill, undernourished and living in sub-human conditions in the family home (a wooden shed built on hard clay at the end of a long dirt track). Shocking and tragic stories such as these are commonplace in Misiones, a peripheral province in the North Eastern corner of Argentina, where the vast majority of families, normally large in size, are acutely impoverished and where there is a complete absence of social welfare coming from central government.

Fortunately for Samuel help was at hand from St Teresa’s Home in Oberá, the second city of the province. St Teresa’s is a residence for abandoned people with disabilities founded and run by Divine Word Missionary Fr Liam Hayes, an Irishman from Cappamore in County Limerick. For seven weeks in July and August St Teresa’s was to be my home. I was to have the privilege of being a member of Fr Hayes’s special team, to learn a little about life there and see how the other three quarters of the world live.

Fr Hayes founded the home in 1993 after coming face to face with disabled people abandoned by their poor families who through no fault of their own were unable to look after them. The fortunes of the various residents have changed dramatically for the better and after years of neglect and in some cases abuse they now find themselves in a clean, secure and loving environment. Unfortunately, for many the damage is irreversible. One resident, Miguel, was terminally disabled, very fragile and prone to infection; during my stay he spent many a day in the local hospital and to our sadness he died recently.

Nonetheless the transformation in every single individual has been startling and in the light of what each of the residents has been through I was amazed at the joy and happiness I found in the home. During my short stay I had the pleasure of making lots of new friends and of getting to know each and everyone of the residents; to a person I found them all full of life and joy, appreciative of any company and friendship I could offer them. A good case in point was Loraine, a lady in her mid-thirties, suffering and slowly dying from Huntingdon’s disease, which has already accounted for her two siblings who died in front of her in the home in recent years. Every day is a constant struggle for chair bound Loraine as she shakes and as the phlegm flows continuously, making speech and feeding very painful. Yet everyday as we held hands and shared a few words she exhibited her radiant smile and said that everything was ‘muy bien’! and this remarkable and generous woman proceeded to respond to Fr Liam’s reassurance that she was in all our prayers by replying that he was in hers. Which was most moving when one considers her own suffering, a living saint no less. Beautiful moments like these were not infrequent and helped ensure that my seven weeks in Obera were unforgettable.

This is all a testimony to Fr Liam and the small, dedicated team of workers he has collected together, all of whom have a vocation for the job. Seeing them work nearly everyday of the week and all hours; washing, cleaning and caring for the residents and with such good grace is a very humbling experience. They are very natural with the residents tending to them with great care and attention as if they are their own children or siblings. Their great love for the residents was particularly evident when two members (Marcello and Jorge) of the community fell ill and later died. Every hour of every day during their spells in hospital there was always somebody by their bedside and back in the home each day the daily rosary was dedicated to them and their health. Their funerals and burials witnessed a considerable outpouring of grief but also the coming together of the entire community; residents, staff to give their brothers a fitting send-off. The dozens of freshly dug graves at the cemetery was a chilling reminder of the realities of life in Misiones and the scale of the problem, sadly many others will not be so fortunate and will not have friends and family by their sides at their final moments and nor will they be given such a dignified and warm goodbye. This love and unswerving belief in their mission is very special and it needs to be as all the staff are of humble means and have families of their own. Many of them are very young too; Raquel and Paula two inspirational ladies of 22 are mature beyond their years and are both married with children.

The wider remit of the homes is to serve the wider community by providing medical care and supplies for many in dire need. On one occasion I joined the delivery of a crate of food to a family of 14 living in a hut designed for two people. Fr Hayes has many other responsibilities too. He celebrates Mass most days of the week in outlying chapels around Oberá. He is also in charge of the health pastorate for the local diocese of Posadas but it was his work as chaplain to the local hospital in Obera that made the greatest impression on me.

On numerous occasions I accompanied the priest into intensive care and throughout the hospital as he administered the last rites, gave communion and made general pastoral visits to the patients. Hospital Samic, with only 120 beds serving a population of 60,000, is a place of great suffering. It is an institution more concerned with employing people than with curing the sick; though resources are scarce, doctors and nurses are far outnumbered by bureaucrats. Most real healthcare is confined to the private sector, so that very little is done when poor people like Ariel become seriously ill. As a result Fr Hayes is a busy man and has a very harrowing time comforting and praying for the many ill and dying people. It is not unknown for him to spend over an hour visiting people at one time or for him to be making visits in the dead of night. The toll this takes is enormous and often after a draining session in the hospital Fr Liam unwinds by taking his pack of what can be best described as wild dogs for a run, an experience I was fortunate enough to be able to share. Having rounded them all up with the help of a young neighbour we would drive off in the priest’s unmistakeable red truck, six dogs in the back with their heads dangling over the side producing a cacophony of noise. This daily ritual sends all the other dogs in the barrio into a mad frenzy and they follow in hot pursuit of the truck. As we continue along our way dogs rush regularly out onto the road and bemused locals look on. It makes for a surreal scene.

Most volunteers in the homes of Oberá discover that they receive a great deal more from the experience than they can give; there is the chance to live in solidarity with those less fortunate than yourself, to grow in awareness of their plight, to discover that you care and want to do something about it. The experience is a reminder of how fortunate and privileged we are in the first world and gives us a new reference point from which to see how minor our problems/sufferings are. By coming face to face with the injustice and inequality that we hear and see so much about in the media at home and by entering the lives of real people and making new friends the general problem is personalised and the poor of the third world are no longer a faceless amorphous mass. For me as a Catholic it was special to attend Christ in his most abandoned friends and to live and work for seven weeks in the company of living saints

As the founder of Cheshire foundation, Captain Leonard Cheshire once said, it is only through small projects on the ground that real change can be effected; bit-by-bit, attitudes and lives can be changed. Throughout history it has been seen that far reaching change is not necessarily achieved in the corridors of power but at grassroots level by ordinary people. Apart from transforming the lives of the people here, the enterprise demonstrates how the first world can empower the third world to help themselves and it is thus a part of the greater struggle for the poor and forgotten people of the world without a voice.