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KINGSVILLE, Texas (AP) — The 17-year-old boy from Peru and the idealistic young priest from Iowa worked together, serving the poor in Peru. They taught single mothers to read and coached a soccer team for street kids. They attended the funerals of children — too many funerals — who had died from contaminated water and lack of medical care. And when an earthquake destroyed the fishing town of Chimbote they sifted through the rubble and worked to rebuild.
Recently the 80-year-old former priest was reunited with the young man he trained and inspired, who now is 65, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times (http://bit.ly/1uEdWeB) reported.
Mark Walsh, the former priest and a retired education professor and director of international programs at Texas A&M University-Kingsville hosted Wilson Sagastegui for a month's stay in Kingsville, where he participated in forums, gave talks to students and met in a round-table discussion with Kingsville community leaders to address how ideas he gained working to address social problems in Peru might be applied to South Texas.
"It is very exciting to have him here on campus, and I think he has opened the students up to a broader world," Walsh said.
Walsh, now something of an expert on Latin America, could barely find Peru on a map when he was a small-town Iowa boy just graduated from the seminary.
"I didn't even know they spoke Spanish there," he remembered laughing.
After an intensive Spanish program of several months, Walsh was sent to Chimbote in 1966. The experience was transformative, and he began to seek ways to serve the poor as Christ had done. While he was exploring how best to meet the overwhelming need in the community, Sagastegui, who lived in great poverty in a shantytown, also was asking questions and seeking solutions.
Sagastegui grew up in a family of 15 children, the son of laborers on a large sugar hacienda. He asked his mother why, out of 15 children, only five of his brothers and sisters survived. She told him it was because they had no running water, and no sewer system. When a child contracted diarrhea, he often died of dehydration. They could not afford a doctor or medicines.
Sagastegui swore he would try to find a way to change the way his people lived.
"When I met Mark, I saw what being a true Christian was," Sagastegui said. "Not like the churches in Peru, who seemed to exist to serve the rich."
Walsh also was impressed with Sagastegui.
"He was a natural leader," Walsh said. "He was able to bring people together to accomplish a goal, and he was determined to make things better."
The two were impressed with the philosophy of liberation theology popular in the 1960s, an approach that emphasized that the church was meant to serve the poor and help transform social injustices. It wasn't a matter of just going to Mass and saying prayers. And it was about more than giving food and shelter to the poor. The goal was actually to transform the social institutions that created poverty and maintained inequality. It was dangerous work anywhere, but especially so in a country where the elites are as entrenched as in Peru.
The pair also became intrigued with the ideas of popular education advocated by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who emphasized teaching practical skills, but also showing those in need why they live in an unjust society and how to transform the social hierarchy and become involved in the political process.
Over a period of five years, Walsh and Sagastegui worked to address the problems they encountered in Chimbote, helping the poor to obtain food, clean water and medicine, but also working to gain more justice for the oppressed. A young nun, also from the Midwest, began to work with them. She was a midwife, fighting against the high infant mortality rate.
Walsh fell in love with the nun and they decided to marry. So they asked to the church to allow them to resign from the clergy and become lay people once more. They moved back to the United States, where Walsh continued to work with the poor at Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago.
He returned to graduate school to earn a doctorate in education from Texas A&M University, going on to become a professor at A&M-Kingsville. He became involved in distance learning and extended education, whose models and philosophies were similar to those he had learned about in popular education. He and his wife, Amy, who worked as a nurse, had four children and remained staunch Catholics.
They kept up with Sagastegui over the years, first by letter and phone, then by email, as he attended university in Lima, earning degrees in sociology and then working with various nongovernmental organizations, helping Andean villagers. the indigenous of the Amazon, and the urban poor living in the squalid shantytowns in surrounding Lima, implementing his ideas about popular education in various international aid programs.
He has faced great dangers in his work of getting the poor to push back against the strict social hierarchy of his country. He not only has faced opposition from the conservative government, who saw empowering the poor as a threat, but also from radicals, like the violent Maoist Marxist guerrilla group, Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path.
"They would infiltrate our meetings," he said. "They threatened to kill me. They saw us as agents of imperialism."
Manuel Flores, professor of communications and chairman of the Department of Art, Communications and Theater at A&M-Kingsville, said Sagastegui's talks made a strong impression on students.
"They have learned so much about U.S. involvement in Latin America," he said. "They interviewed him and wrote an article about him. It has been an important learning experience for them.
One student has been particularly inspired by Sagastegui. Michael Miller, a senior at A&M-Kingsville, has visited Peru twice as part of the university's study abroad program. He plans to return permanently after graduation in December and is even engaged to a Peruvian woman.
"Many don't understand the level of poverty in Peru and try to relate it to poverty here," Miller said. "But there is no comparison. The poor here would be rich in Peru. I think the forums he has held have really opened the eyes of a lot of students."
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Information from: Corpus Christi Caller-Times, http://www.caller.com
Editor's note: This is an AP Member Exchange shared by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
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