Mokena resident and St. Mary Parish member Mary Meyers will travel to Bolivia in April, but it won’t be a vacation.
Meyers is part of a group of volunteers who assist the Diocese of Joliet in its mission work to benefit the Navajo Nation in Arizona and native people of the Philippines and Bolivia and at various disaster sites in the United States through the Mennonite Disaster Relief organization.
Meyers’ first mission trip in 2005 was to the Navajo Nation, where volunteers spent two weeks helping a parish priest to paint, clean and make repairs on the four churches for which he is responsible and to assist at the food pantry and help with needs of the parishioners, Meyers said.
“Once you get to know the people and their circumstances … I just wanted to go back to see them again and to help them,” she said.
Meyers has made at least one mission trip annually since her first. Several trips have been to the Navajo Nation, she said, but since 2011 she has been volunteering exclusively in Bolivia where she has found a mission within a mission.
In 2012, Meyers attended a workshop in Kentucky where she met Sister Larraine, the founder of Water With Blessings, a program to provide clean water to impoverished women with children.
Sister Larraine had been providing life-saving water filters to women in Honduras after medical mission teams realized that many illnesses and diseases could be prevented if people had clean water. It was especially the case for children 5 and younger who often died from contaminated water, Meyers said.
After hearing Sister Larraine speak, Meyers thought, “Oh, we’ve got to do this,” and took the idea of supplying the filters in Bolivia to the Joliet Diocese Mission Office. They agreed to partner with the program and began to raise funds to purchase filters, she said.
In 2013, she took 11 filters to Bolivia, and in 2014 took 40 with the help of the “Heart to Heart” program that was organized by a community of Franciscan sisters in Joliet.
“It’s really exciting because you see kind of a web that’s formed, and it’s not just one person or one group that’s doing everything,” Meyers said.
Meyers, who is the contact person with the Joliet Diocese for Water With Blessings, said there is no parish at the Bolivian site in Sucre to identify women eligible for the program. Meyers said her help comes from several “outstanding young men” from Bolivia who take time from their careers to assist her.
Meyers said the recipients of the program attend a two-hour training session to learn to filter the water into a bucket and the importance of using uncontaminated water for cleaning food, washing hands and bathing.
“Another real important part of this ministry is that the women promise that they will share. They will filter water for their closest neighbors,” she said.
The cost of one filter and bucket system, which lasts a minimum of 10 years, is $60, Meyers said, which is “minimal” when measured against its life-saving use in several families.
Despite the gratitude of the Bolivians, Meyers said she and other volunteers feel they benefit more from the mission trips than those they are trying to help.
“We get much more out of it than we give,” she said. “I have a real sense of peace when I’m there. The country is beautiful, the people are beautiful.”
For those who question whether it would be more meaningful to send money to the country rather than people, Meyers responds that getting people of different cultures to meet is meaningful.
“The mission trips are about building relationships,” she said. “They need to know that someone cares about them.”
For more information, visit http://www.dioceseofjoliet.org.
