(This week’s column is taken from a reflection our Fr. Dennis wrote back when he was superior General of the LaSalette missionaries around the world.)
My name is Fr. Dennis Loomis, M.S. Several years ago while I was visiting our missionaries in Argentina, I heard about a special woman who felt called to make a difference. Here is her inspiring story.
Her name is Mercedes and she is a short, thin middle-aged woman living in a barrio (a poor neighborhood) in Cordoba, Argentina. Not the kind of person you would suspect of creating and running her very own, self sustained soup kitchen for over two hundred people a day in her own home! And it’s all the more impressive when one experiences the small, tight quarters she and her family live in.
I met her when one of our LaSalette missionaries asked if I wanted to see where and how some of the money sent by the LaSalettes in North America is being used. Naturally I was interested.
When we arrived at her tiny residence, I was a little taken aback. I asked: “There are fifty people currently being served a meal in the house?” No, I was told, the “lunch” room is in the back. What Mercedes and her family have done is to construct a simple structure consisting of four walls and a roof where she can feed twenty-five people at a time and behind that another simple structure used as a kitchen.
There are two sittings, twice a day, and over one hundred meals a day are sent out for the elderly who cannot come to the meal site, or for mothers and their small children. With our North American sensibilities, we might want things a little neater and tidier, but no one can question the results –two hundred people a day are being fed by this remarkable woman.
“How did this come to be?” I asked my LaSalette priest guide. He smiled and said, “Let Mercedes tell you herself.” At first she was a little embarrassed to be speaking to this “foreign dignitary,” who at 6’3” towered over this 5’2” woman. She soon felt at ease enough to tell me her story.
“I have been very fortunate and blessed by God,” she began. One day, I was watching my programs on the television. These were interrupted by a news bulletin from Buenos Aires where hundreds of thousands of people were conducting a march protesting their hunger and that of their families. At first I was upset at the interruption. Then as the people's faces were being shown, I began to feel more and more sympathetic with their pain.
“When I finally turned off the television, I kept thinking, ‘Mercedes, you have to do something! - But what can you do? - There are so many and you are only one!’ That night I shared with my family my concern and they agreed I should do something, but they had no ideas. The next day I think I heard God telling me in my prayers, “You cannot feed everyone, but you can feed someone!’ I began in my kitchen and it grew and grew until what you see now. Now, many of my neighbors, and people I did not even know from the neighborhood help me.”
As the conversation went on, this humble lady would take no credit for what she was doing. She was only doing a small part, she maintained. “Where does she get the money for all the food she needs” I asked? Father John Higgins, (the LaSalette priest) gives me money every week. But Fr. John went on to add that she has gone to the supermarkets and asked for the produce they are about to throw out because it is beyond shelf life.
She has bargained with farmers to buy their surplus at reduced prices. She has found owners of vacant lots in her neighborhood and has gotten permission for “community gardens.”
This remarkable woman does this Monday thru Friday and has done so for a couple of years now. “I take Saturdays off to clean the house and to do my own work and on Sundays I rest,” she told me (a little embarrassed that I might think she was lazy).
Maybe you and I cannot change the world with the little we have - but like Mercedes, we can make a difference.