[Wisconsin] Sheboygan women spend 30 months fighting poverty in Nicaragua

from The Sheboygan Press

By Belia Ortega
Sheboygan Press staff

For some, graduating from college is a time to start a career or maybe travel for a few months. For Sheboygan natives Janet Hendrickson and Susan Lenn, it was a time to share their faith with others.

"I felt a sense of responsibility to do something to alleviate the poverty that the world suffers," said Hendrickson, 24. "I wanted to see what I could learn from poverty … to see what I could learn from that kind of solidarity."

Hendrickson and Lenn, 25, joined the Cap Corps, a Capuchin Fransican program that serves the community through ministry, and spent 30 months in Bluefields, Nicaragua. The city of about 42,000 is located along the Atlantic coast of the country.

They returned from their trip in January.

The two Sheboygan natives lived together in a house that had a yard with about 10 different kinds of fruit trees. They drank rainwater and washed their clothes by hand, Lenn said.

Hendrickson said she was first inspired to volunteer her time abroad when, as a student at North High School, she went to a seminar that featured a week of human rights speakers from around the world. Two speakers really moved her – one was a woman who had escaped a civil war in Guatemala and another was a man who had some part in overthrowing the dictatorship in Uruguay.

"Those two speeches in particular, they just sort of awoke me to the fact that injustice and oppression existed in the world," Hendrickson said. "There was another world besides the one that I was living in, and so at that point I just knew that I had to go to Latin America."

In Bluefields, Hendrickson taught 17- to 57-year-old adults to read and write in Spanish, and also started a newspaper and magazine.

"It was such a good experience … we really loved each other," she said about the adults in her class. "I learned a lot about community. I was moved by people's astounding generosity. It was really amazing like that."

Lenn primarily worked with the church as a lay missionary. Among her work, she taught Sunday school, confirmation classes and set up conferences about the church within a 13-county region that she visited about 4 times a year. She traveled by boat and hiked to some of the areas.

According to statistics Lenn gathered from the World Bank, 80 percent of the population along the Atlantic coast is living below the poverty line and more than 44 percent is living in extreme poverty.

Keeping this in mind, she started a sewing class because she wanted the women to be able to make clothes for their families and sell some of the clothing they made.

One of the things Lenn said she realized from her time in Nicaragua is how to live on less.

"It is humbling to see how people live very happily with less," she said. "The Nicaraguans that I lived with are very joyful people. We've (Americans) taught ourselves to need everything we have."

Spending more than two years in Nicaragua also taught her to appreciate time.

"I learned how to talk to people … how to slow down and how to enjoy that (and) … find simplicity and to really enjoy that," she said.

Don Mueller, director of Cap Corps, said the relationships the two women developed with the people was important for the program.

"It's the relationships that they build with the people that's really helpful," he said. "Both of them did exceptional jobs in terms with working with the people."

Mueller visited the woman in Bluefields three times and said it was great to see how the people responded to them.

"They really built a rapport with the people," he said. "The people really respected and admired them."