Accompaniment

Our mission here is to accompany the people. Everything that the Passionist Volunteers stand for is accompaniment, but I’m not sure I really understand it. Accompaniment is spending time with the people, ‘walking with the crucified of today’ (if you want to use the Passionist jargon) and I understand this. We spend a lot of time just talking and hanging out. So much so that sometimes I wonder what we are doing. We go to the Casa and chat and tell stories with the internos. We go to meetings of representatives who have bible studies once or twice a week. We visit house after house after house just catching from week to week. And so yes, I guess we accompany—but we have been told that our program is not a project based program. And so here is my question, when does accompaniment start sharing the stage with projects?

Accompaniment by itself in our program is confusing to me. If we spend the year accompanying and develop the greatest friendships with these people and then we leave, what we have accomplished? Have we simply developed a wonderful friendship that must end with our departure? Or even if we have showed them that there is someone out there who cares, then we leave. So what does accompaniment by itself do? Now don’t get me wrong, I am a huge supported of accompaniment. I do not want to be the white Westerner who comes in and tells the people of Talanga what they need. No, that is not why I came here. But our program says that we must accompany first and then start projects from the needs that we have discovered in our relationships with people. It makes sense, but practically it’s a little different. When we go to aldeas and we say we are simply there to spend time with them or make friends with them, they look at us a little strange. Gringos only come to these lands if they are here to do something—aka build a school, go on a medical brigade and so forth. (Side note: There is nothing wrong with these things and they are desperately needed in many of these communities.) And so there we are the gringos offering friendship and understanding…or at least trying to.

And so we walk with the crucified, the poor, the sick of today. Yes, it sounds so saintly—but hardly. Will I ever be able to feel the suffering or truly walk side by side in the sufferings of someone who has AIDS? Will I ever be able to understand what it means to live in one bedroom, one kitchen home with three kids and two parents far away from civilization? Will I ever be able to feel the pain of the women who I visit on my sick visits? I wish I could say yes, but I don’t know whether in all honesty I will ever be able to. I can try—and I do, I try to put myself in their shoes but its hard when I know that though I might struggle, I will be home in a year to comfort and wealth. William Carlos Williams once said, “I try to put myself in the shoes of others. We’re completely lost in our own world—egoists! Or maybe we’re locked into ourselves, and even though we want to break out, we can’t seem to do it. It takes someone else to help us, a person who breaks in or has a way of letting us out. Or we stumble into some moment, some situation, that wakes us up, gets us enough off track to open up our eyes, our ears, our musty minds.” Maybe I am still waiting for my stumble.

And then my third question is if we are walking with the crucified of today, when do we stop and help them carry their cross? If any of my family were in the situations that half of the people we work with are in, I would drop everything to help them, to carry their cross. And so when do we do that with the people we meet? And can we carry the cross for the hundreds of people we will work with and have been working with? You can only see someone suffer for so long and become friends with them or accompanying them just makes that problem even more acute. And so this is my obstacle. I have accompanied and now I want to do. I want to stop watching and walking with the suffering, and instead work with the suffering to empower them. Have I reached the point where I understand their sufferings? I don’t think so and I don’t think I ever will, but maybe my stumble will come.