Ten days that shook my world

...She called neighbors only to cut the umbilical cord...

...Our time was spent, not relaxing in swimming pools in the weekend homes of the wealthy but with "the other Mexicans," for many of whom water is one of life's pressing problems rather than an ingredient of recreation...

...Seven years ago, three women again organized, in the face of masculine jeers, and were successful in raising the funds necessary to install ten water spigots to serve the entire population...

...Another visitor was Mary, a slender Irish-Cherokee woman from Chicago's South Side, who stayed several days to rest...

...The contractor they hired absconded with their money, an all-too-familiar pattern seen in dealings between the advantaged and the disadvantaged we met...

...The boy died in her arms in the doctor's waiting room...

...For the last ten years he continued his schooling while working for the government and had been promoted to'supervisor of ninety people...

...Groups of up to twenty persons stay in Plankey's home and are intensively exposed to the realities of third-world poverty in order, as Plankey said, "to go through in ten days what I, and other missionaries, have in ten or twenty years...

...A former Peace Corps volunteer, she fought with the Sandinistas...

...For instance, when the price of tortillas goes up, we give facts behind the increase for analysis and possible action...

...card in his pocket and left...

...Part of one stanza, loosely translated is, "We, the oppressed, are also your brothers...

...They give food for the spirit...

...Direction for the base Christian communities comes from the bottom...

...When officials came to pick them up, they said the city didn't have the money to pay for them...

...Geraldo Thjsen, a former Sacred Heart missionary from Holland, is in charge of the four-hundred base communities in the Morelos diocese under Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca...

...However, he only comes to see her and give her a little money every two weeks, as she, her ten children, and grandchild are his second family, a very common practice among Mexican men of all economic levels...

...Her mother-in-law had taken her seven-year-old son, who was ill, from their village into the city on the bus...

...She gets her children off to school and leaves at 8 A.M...

...Her husband was killed in the revolution.' The last of the quiet revolutionaries was Antonio, a Sal-vadoran who, with his brother, spent an evening singing haunting songs of his country, many of which he had composed...

...two people were killed for not revealing his whereabouts...

...At night, she embroiders tortilla covers for tourists...

...Another trip home to make more food to sell at a school, and then to the market to buy supplies for the next day's work and for her family's meals...

...to sell the sandwiches at a construction site, carrying them up the hillside in buckets...

...They released him when they found his government I.D...

...After threatening phone calls, she knew she had to leave, but she also knew that the airports were checked and people on government lists arrested...

...CCIDD studies the political, economic, and religious structures of Central American countries and the influence of the United States on those structures, and those studies are shared with students like ourselves...

...Study of the New Testament in the base communities has been a source of liberation for women: . Adela, in her fifties, a widow of little formal education, is a leader in base communities...

...She is in charge of credentials for foreign press in Nicaragua...

...She began to walk out of the country, and in a small village, near the border, lost the baby she was carrying...

...They just live in difficult situations...

...In addition, there is a constant stream of visitors...

...We get out of work at 4 P.M., go to school until 10 P.M., get home at 11:30P.M...

...We never knew why, because we were not at all involved in politics," she said...

...She invited them to live in a chicken coop on the roof of her humble home...

...government support of the right-wing Salvadoran regime, he concluded with another song lie had written...

...One kind of attack on poverty to emerge from base Christian communities is the formation of cooperatives...

...He tried selling his wares on street corners as other craftspersons do, but thugs, hired by the shops, broke the pottery...

...She and her architect-husband had worked several years, finally moving into their dream home less than a year before...

...Antonio moved around, sleeping in different friends' homes for the next three months...

...He sells his pots to a shop at the top of the ravine...

...He began at age seven and was twenty before he finished elementary school...

...He left the clergy, not because of problems with faith, but to become part of the people to whom he ministers, "My Christian being changed completely by contact with the poor," he said...

...When he began getting threatening phone calls at work, he left the country...

...Now I know that most people here aren't bad...

...185 people were hospitalized and 35 died...

...Inhabitants of an area must pay in advance for water or utilities to be brought in, which these desperately poor people managed to do almost ten years ago...

...to make a second batch of food and returns to the construction site...

...Antonio was also a member of a base Christian community...

...She is secretly giving her husband medicine to make him sick when he drinks, hoping to stave off his beatings, which have impaired her sight...

...Bombs were thrown into the crowd...

...At one point, Brenda interrupted a lecture on Guatemala with her story, one that began like that of typical upper-middle-class suburbanites in the United States...

...Angela rises at 5 A.M...

...No one in her right mind would come near here," she said, repeating her mother's warnings...

...When asked why he continued his education against such odds, he answered, "I could see that without an education, I'd end up like the old people in village, working so hard until I die...

...So often, when Mexican women describe their marriages as "good," they add, "My husband doesn't beat me...

...Tomas, a potter like his father before him, lives with his family, on the bank of another ravine, Sacatierra, an area of special clay...

...The middle class and rich aren't hungry...

...One of the twins, Ruth, had the good luck to be run over by a truck...

...The quiet-spoken Thjsen, once a priest serving in Chile, was smuggled out after Allende fell...

...Women who sew shirts in their homes, formerly for factories, now sell them through their own cooperative...

...The problems of life don't come in programs...

...A strikingly beautiful young woman told how she had lived all her life two blocks from La Estacion and had never been there until she was assigned to teach in the colony...

...The rich say they're rich because they work for their wealth, but my uncle always worked hard and never had anything...

...He worked in Chile for eleven years until the overthrow of socialist President Salvador Al-lende in 1973...

...As part of her community action, Adela was visiting the sick in a hospital and found an Indian family, whose child was dying, sleeping on the sidewalk...

...When asked if only the poor are in base communities, she answered, "The communities are organized for action to bring change...

...Scrap lumber, old telephone poles, Datsun packing-case panels, and roofs of specially corrugated newspapers are the construction materials for this colony of seven-thousand people, one of six such settlements in Cuernavaca...

...One day, armed government men came to the door, demanding her husband...

...She had no reason to be on the lists, but neither did her husband or brother-in-law...

...A stinking trickle of water, a foot wide in places, wandered slowly through the settlement...

...I may not have been political before," she said, "but I certainly am now...

...Four vases, each almost six-feet tail, stood next to his house...

...When a member of the group, moved by the songs-of a land so afflicted, assured Antonio that all the Americans present had been protesting U.S...

...It's difficult for peasants like me to ever graduate," Antonio said...

...When his Chilean wife, Gabriella Videla, who had been active in international women's organizations and in 1969 had served as a professor of social work at Catholic University, was offered a job in Mexico, Plankey, with the support of the Weston (Vermont) Benedictines, began CCIDD...

...to prepare meats for sandwiches...

...Three of Josephina's children have died...

...He and another potter worked day and night for ten days to complete them in time for a building dedication...

...She's back at 11 A.M...

...The Cuernavaca Center was founded in 1977 by Ray Plan-key, a forty-six-year-oldlay missionary...

...A thought by Dennis Goulart, framed on a wall of the conference room, answers the question of what Plankey is about-"Yes, there is a link between meaningless lives on one continent and meaningless deaths on another...

...Another primitive cooperative has been formed by three poor fanners who share tools and labor...

...The mother, Josephina, returned from the hospital with a new baby to care for along with her other four surviving children - a thirteen-month-old girl, a nine-year-old boy who is blind from malnutrition, and five-year-old twins...

...Those of us in the CCIDD programs-religious and lay, largely professionals from a variety of fields-saw what even most native Cuernavacans have not seen...

...Rows of individual outhouses, three feet wide, each with a padlock, straddled the stream, and below, women pounded their laundry on the rocks...

...It was thought to be a den of thieves...

...The priest and four young students were murdered by government forces...

...We are learning that we are to have life now...

...We don't have diocesan programs as such," Thjsen said...

...It is to meet the people who are the statistics...

...and get up to be at work at 6 A.M...

...Two other men, also base Christian community members, were picked up that night and have never been seen again...

...She became one of the eighty thousand families with a member missing...

...Plankey's dedication to Latin America began in 1962 when he left a promising career as an Atlas rocket engineer to become a Papal Volunteer...

...All my hopes are in my children," she said...

...Antonio was in the plaza outside the Cathedral for Romero's funeral...

...Perhaps, eventually, the production cooperative he and other potters are forming, may grow into another for marketing their wares...

...My father abandoned me before I was born," he began, "and at seventeen days of age, my mother left me at my uncle's door...

...Angela, who lives in La Estacion, occupies a position better than most in the colony because her husband is a policeman...

...His studies saved his life...

...He moved to town to attend high school and got a job in a factory for forty cents a week in 1970...

...She saw that they already had her brother-in-law in handcuffs...

...She said, "We used to think we suffer now to have our reward later...

...For ten days, our group of eight middle-class Minnesotans took part in a program on culture and poverty in Latin America at the Cuernavaca Center for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (CCIDD...

...Antonio was the only child in his village to go to school, walking several hours each day, sometimes in rain or dangerous conditions...

...She grew strong and healthy while in the hospital recovering from her broken legs...

...Marta, whose family of four girls under seven, a son, eleven years old, and husband slept on the dirt floor of their nine-by-twelve-foot hut until Plankey brought a bed...

...But the primary purpose of CCIDD is not to give facts that can be learned in an academic setting...

...One night, a death squad of fifteen National Guardsmen arrived at his home...

...The Cuernavaca Center feeds and lodges program participants, the staff of three volunteers, and of course the Plankey family - Ray, Gabriella, and their three children...

...OF THE seventy dioceses in Mexico, three encourage the development of base Christian communities, seven tolerate them, and all others oppose their formation...

...The grandmother, fearful of officials and knowing the expense of city red tape, carried him back to the station, waited several hours for a bus, and returned with him to the village for burial...

...He decided at the last minute not to go on a retreat given by Father Octavia in order to prepare for an exam...

...Brenda fearfully read in the newspapers each day the descriptions of bodies thrown in the streets, some decapitated, as warnings to those who support the guerrillas...

...The men, under the influence of drugs, terrorized Antonio's family, and held guns to his head...

...They stayed for months while the father tried to find work...

...I don't want them to have to work as hard as I do...

...we know the genocide is not a product of your hands...

...One of our first tours was of the infamous squatter settlement of La Estacion in a mile-square ravine filled with a maze of huts jammed between sets of railroad tracks...

...Her father-in-law paid a huge ransom, but the two men were never found...

...This incident has been credited with inspiring Archbishop Oscar Romero to speak out against the government, earning him in turn death from a sniper's bullet as he celebrated Mass a year later...

...Tomas wisely refused to let the vases go...

...Even giving birth was hard - alone, in one of the three beds in her one-room shack...

...NOTES ON A SUMMER VACATION Ten days that shook my world PAT RYAN GREENE MY vacation TAN this year was acquired in Mexico's resort area of Cuernavaca, on ancient pyramids, in narrow, noisy, pollution-filled streets, and in garbage-filled ravines...

...A sociology professor from Syracuse, a minister on the national staff of his denomination studying Spanish, and Brenda, an attractive, aristocratic young woman from Guatemala were among those who dropped in for discussions...

...the shop offers them to tourists at prices three to five times what he has been paid...