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Finding ‘Hope for a Family’ in Ecuador

Story and photos by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

A mother from Shiloh decided to sponsor a child in Ecuador after Msgr. Vince Haselhorst visited Corpus Christi Parish to talk about the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging (CFCA) one weekend.

Msgr. Haselhorst, a retired Belleville diocesan priest, speaks on behalf of CFCA around the country and in this diocese.

The Shiloh mother of four said her children are grown and/or in college. She listened to “Father Vince” and looked at the photos of the children and elderly that he brought with him.

“I was looking through the photos and that one struck me,” she said. “It was a little girl.”

CFCA is headquartered in Kansas City, Kan., with its offices in a warehouse where the staff works and many volunteers help.

Right now, CFCA cofounder, Bob Henzen, is walking through Peru. He set out on a 12-country, 8,000-mile journey from Guatemala, where he now lives, to walk through Central and South America, visiting the CFCA projects and families along the way.

This Messenger reporter joined him in Ecuador for a few days in August to see what the walk was all about and to visit some of the people he met along the way.

On this leg of the journey, Henzen crossed from Colombia into Ecuador where he walked for three days before arriving in Mira, the first of three projects he would visit.

Walking with him were two young Americans and other members of the CFCA family from around the world, including: Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda and CFCA headquarters in Kansas City.

People came from these other places, they said, to walk in solidarity with CFCA because they believe in the mission and the message of the organization, not only as employees but also as members of the human family caring for one another.

Teddy Naluwu, in charge of the projects in her native Uganda, was at one time a child sponsored through CFCA.
Growing up in a village south of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, Naluwu said she remembered being sponsored at 13.
Her mother had died when she was 9 years old, but life changed for the better when she reached 13.

“I was successful enough to go to good schools through CFCA. Because of a good education, I qualified for a government scholarship” at college.

Returning to her village after graduation, Naluwu said she began working as a weaving manager with a CFCA project.
Naluwu rose quickly to become Uganda’s country coordinator and has also been a workshop presenter for other CFCA personnel.

As the CFCA sponsorship model evolves to “Hope for a Family,” the name reflects what CFCA wants for each of the families.

“It’s a perfect idea,” Naluwu said. “Sponsored families are involved in the decision making; it enhances a community of compassion.”

With this new approach, the families take increased responsibility for what they need, Naluwu said. Instead of everything being handed to them, they become involved in determining their needs and how those needs can be met through CFCA.

Hope for a Family responds to the needs of the entire family, not just the sponsored child, Naluwu said.
“We are accountable to one another as part of the CFCA family,” she added.

At 28, Naluwu has completed work for her master’s degree in project planning and management.

The local CFCA staffs are predominantly young people, and CFCA insists they continue their educations. The sub-project manager at Mira in Ecuador just finished his bachelor’s degree, and members of his staff are attending college classes working on their degrees.

Ecuador’s national project director, Yole Castillo has her law degree, which helped as she prepared paper work for Henzen’s travels through Ecuador.

“I felt very excited about the walk,” Castillo said, seeing this as “an opportunity for Bob to know the whole country as well as people from other countries getting to know Ecuador.”

Castillo said CFCA’s “transparency and honesty” are important to her as she works with the various projects in her country.

For Henzen, who was joined each day by families who are sponsored, the reason for the walk is “the same as the reason the CFCA exists: not to hand out things but to help facilitate the creation of community. The walk is happening to facilitate the creation of community.”

Each day, Henzen and the entire group of walkers and support vehicles gathered at a staging area between 3 and 4 a.m. to begin the day’s walk of 35 kilometers (about 25 miles). People who were unable to walk rode in the support vehicles, but most people walked.

“Arriving on foot,” Henzen said, “we are saying we are equal in the eyes of our God; we accept the invitation of those living in poverty to walk with them.”

All along the route, the people responded, but Henzen’s welcome to the city of Mira resembled more that of a rock star than a humble man journeying with and for the poor.

He was given bouquets of flowers, hugged, stopped and thanked as he made his way to a rally set up in the town square.

Henzen said he has experienced the love of 185,000 families along the route. “I couldn’t predict how people would react, but we have seen strong mountain men cry when it was time to return home; they have experienced elements of community they hadn’t experienced before.”

The walk began in December 2009 and will end in mid-2011 in Chile. For CFCA, this is a time of transition from handing out “benefits” to involving families in their own futures.

“The Hope for a Family program is based on the belief that mothers are essential to what we’re all about,” Henzen said. “That struggling mother or grandmother is the heroine of our day; we honor the men too, but we recognize the mothers’ potential.”

This was no more evident than when CFCA coordinator in Mira, Juan Pablo Sanchez Gomez, took some of the walkers to visit a family in a small village.

Sanchez was visiting one family because the mother, Jenny, had stopped Henzen on the way into Mira to thank him and CFCA. Her 4-year-old son, Sebastian, is sponsored, and that has made all the difference to her family.

This wife, husband and three children live in an adobe house belonging to her parents. Without the house and CFCA, life would be more than bleak.

Coming from an agricultural family, Jenny, 24, and her husband, Juan Carlos, 25, work when they can. They sell avocados from the trees in the yard, and when work is available, Juan Carlos is a day laborer. Jenny sorts beans in season. Their combined annual income amounts to about $60.00 per month or $2.00 per day.

With Sebastian sponsored, the family income is doubled, which allowed Jenny to finish her high school work. Now, she said, she wants to enroll in college and begin work on a degree.

One class per semester is all she could handle because it is a three-hour bus ride one way to get to the campus. For her, it would be worth it.

“I want to be a primary teacher,” she said through an interpreter. “I want to improve the economic situation of my family. I want to make a better life for my children and be able to form them into productive citizens.”

Jenny hopes more people will sponsor someone in a family to give others “a chance at life,” she said.

Jenny sums up Henzen’s message to the sponsors and the sponsored in this way: “The love and commitment from our sponsors to our children and to me through their mission is admirable because they are giving of themselves to someone they don’t even know.”

As Henzen “gets to know” the people who are sponsored, visits the families along these 8,000 miles, he is more committed than ever to the mission of CFCA: to walk with the poor and marginalized, building community through “relationships of mutual respect, understanding and support … .”

To find out more about Henzen’s walk, go to www.walk2gether.org; for information about CFCA go to www.cfcausa.org.