Mission views degrees of poverty

from The Plattsburgh Press Republican

North Country volunteers in Nicaragua horrified by 'surreal scene of living hell'

By: Suzanne Moore

PLATTSBURGH — Amid piles of smoking, putrid garbage, a 2-year-old girl squatted by herself in the mud, eating out of the trash.

"I just burst into tears," said Florence Reynaud, who spotted the child from a North Country Mission of Hope bus rolling out of the Managua city dump.

"I thought I had seen a lot in my life," the Plattsburgh woman said via cell phone. "But (the dump) was a surreal scene of living hell.

"We came back with big questions — how is this possible, how is this accepted?"

There are degrees of poverty, first-time mission helpers at the dump's clinic and soup kitchen learned in Nicaragua this week.

"I've never seen people this poor before on any mission I've been on," said Matt Jennings, a veteran of four Nicaragua trips and a Peru High School senior.

The people Mission of Hope helps at its home base in Chiquilistagua — "they're clean," he said. "These people are so dirty. They have the stomach that sticks out with parasites ..."

"It's so smoky here my eyes are burning," said Marilyn Knutson of Plattsburgh, who normally oversees the kitchen in Chiquilistagua during the February trip but on Thursday dished out rice, noodles and bread to dump dwellers.

"Everything everybody has on has come from the dump," she said.

So do the cups and bowls they hold up for the free food.

"One little boy didn't have anything, so we gave him the end of the bread bag for his plate," Knutson said.

The soup kitchen, held under a pavilion with cement benches, operates daily for about a half-hour at a time and has been run by a local church and its pastor for about a decade.

"I take my hat off to them," Knutson said, almost in awe.

Behind the pavilion, a chicken pecked through a mound of garbage; at one side sits a rude shelter draped in plastic that Knutson said a family calls home. A rusty barrel nearby held rainwater collected for washing and, maybe, she speculated, drinking.

"I wouldn't want anything that's been through all this smoke," she said.

By contrast, the families visited Thursday by Mission of Hope's outreach program live in relative comfort.

At least there were homes with sturdier walls of cinder block, said Reynaud, even a few with electricity.

And a clean breeze cooled the small room where nurse practitioner Cathy Hill of Cadyville and her team evaluated a woman named Benigna, who wore a bandage around her right hand.

"She thinks she's about 75 — she doesn't remember," said Sarah LeFloch, campus minister at Santa Fe High School in Lakeland, Fla., who's taking part with her husband, Evan, and two students.

Benigna's daughter and seven children share the small house with her, where on Thursday a chicken roamed the cement floor and a washboard told of the labor that produced the clean laundry fluttering outside on the line.

Inside hang photographs of Benigna's grandchildren who've graduated from high school, wearing caps and gowns; a statue of Jesus holds a place of honor.

It had been a year since the woman had seen a doctor, she told Hill through translator Ilona Flores of Plattsburgh.

Along with a strained wrist, she had asthma, malnutrition and fatigue, determined the nurse practitioner, urging her to visit the Mission of Hope clinic the next day for medication.

At another home, nurse Nicky Lundy cleaned an open wound on the arm of a 94-year-old man who suffers from congestive heart failure. Another elderly man was housebound by partial paralysis.

Heart disease, stroke and diabetes were among the ills Dr. Clark Knutson saw during his round of outreach, their unchecked symptoms an indicator of another kind of poverty.

"It's the same stuff we might have at home," said the Plattsburgh pediatrician and Marilyn's husband. "The problems here are getting the right medicines and getting the right care in an appropriate time."

Whether in the dump or on the hills above Chiquilistagua, the people accept their lives with grace and dignity, observed one missionary after another.

"I don't think it's really right to feel ashamed for these people because they don't feel ashamed," said Eliza Anderson, a second-time missionary and Plattsburgh High School student.

"The children are so full of life and happy just from living," said Rachel Luscombe, 17, and a junior at PHS, who charted living conditions during the outreach project.

"And the adults are proud and happy, also.

"It's amazing how happy they are when they have so little."