Seeing poverty enriches Erin

"I know I'm called to do something to serve the poor," said Erin Conlan, sitting in her Cohoes dining room on the day of her Confirmation.

She paged through a photo album taken during a recent stay in Mexico, noting bone-grey, roofless cinderblock homes and dusty-brown wooden shacks where holes in the walls are patched with dented cardboard. Having seen such things, she no longer feels comfortable living to excess.

"I wouldn't be able to have so much and see others who have just a little," said the 17-year-old junior at Catholic Central High School in Troy. "That's not the way it's supposed to be."

Into poverty

Erin, accompanied by other young people from the Life Teen group from St. Ambrose parish in Latham, journeyed to Mexico two weeks ago to build a home for a poor family. They worked with Casas por Cristo (Houses for Christ), a non-profit organization that employs volunteer work groups to build decent housing for poverty-stricken families in Juarez.

When Erin first met the family the St. Ambrose teens would be working with, she was astounded. The father is a night-shift security guard at a factory in Juarez, which is located just over the border from El Paso, Texas. He is paid 70 cents a day. He and his wife had three small children.

New home

The family's previous home had been built over time; as the father could afford to buy materials, cinderblock after cinderblock was added. A makeshift roof made of plywood boards covered one side of the house; the kitchen was roofless. The front door was a cloth curtain with vertical red stripes.

"To see how we live in America -- we have Social Security and Medicare. We're so fortunate. These people have no way of getting any kind of service," Erin said.

The family's new home, raised within four days, has a wooden frame, supports, brown stucco walls and leak-proof roofing. In total, said Erin, the square footage probably is not bigger than an average American family's two-car garage.

New understanding

Erin said that the experience of seeing extremes of poverty has changed the way she prays and her attitude towards giving. No longer, she noted, can she be satisfied with stingy or partial giving.

Since she returned, she said, "I have not been praying for anything -- just in thanks. It's one thing to know there's poverty in the world and another thing to see it. I have so much compared to what these people have."

Some people, she said, "said that we weren't going to change the world with just one house, but it's changing the world for that one family. We've touched the world in a small way."

Future plans

Erin, who has been inspired by the work of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, has thoughts of becoming a social worker. For now, she's president of the Key Club at Catholic Central, a member of its retreat team and a participant in the school's ambassador program.

Last March, she was exposed to politics when she attended the Public Policy Forum at the State Capitol, when Catholics lobby legislators. She accompanied a group of teens who spoke to a local assemblyman about the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

Later this spring, she will accompany the St. Ambrose group when they help in a clean-up day in Albany's Arbor Hill neighborhood. She hopes other teens will get involved, but she has been disappointed with some of the reaction she gets from others her age.

"They're like, 'Poverty? That's out there?' They won't think about things like that unless they see it -- and a lot don't care to," she explained.

Faith at work

For Erin, the Mexico trip was an exposure to a different way of expressing her Catholic faith: She learned about Mexican Catholics' "vibrant" devotions from daily Spanish Mass and a visit to the Juarez cathedral, where to enter certain sections one needed to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

"That's the kind of respect they had," she said.

She believes that American Catholics could learn from attitude. She dislikes "drive-through Masses," in which the primary motivation for people is "let me get in, let me get my host, let me get out. What are you getting out of that?

"We have so much, and we still have to ask God for more. In Mexico, they had nothing. A dirt floor -- and they were thanking God for that. Maybe that's what clouds us from being thankful. If we had nothing, maybe we would be able to say 'thank you' some of the time. If you're going to ignore [poverty] and live your life to an excess that you don't really need -- that's not a way I can live."

(4/29/04) [[In-content Ad]]