I have been serving as a Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) missionary at the University of Pittsburgh for about seven months now, and it has been the best and most transformative time of my life.
We started talking about taking a mission trip with students back in August, and to see this trip come alive and to see students encounter Jesus all over again on the trip was the most incredible experience. For our recent spring break trip, March 3-12, 14 students, six missionaries and the chaplain from Pittsburgh traveled to Peru to serve in the mountains and desert shantytowns outside Lima.
For each trip, FOCUS partners with a local religious order, apostolate or organization that understands the community’s greatest need. Some teams serve the homeless and renovate community infrastructure, while others teach children or provide patient care services at medical clinics.
In Peru, we partnered with a local organization to meet this community’s greatest need by evangelizing there and helping the residents to live a more dignified life. We built relationships with them as we built public staircases for them.
Our days would start with hiking about a mile up the mountain with lots of rock scrambles and treacherous conditions, a route that did not faze the locals, who make the trek daily. Then, we would greet the residents and catch up with all the kids, playing games, holding them, laughing and spending time together.
After that, we would get into the construction of the stairs. Some of us would mix concrete, while others would stand along the staircases to help the locals pour the concrete and level it off. The locals would prepare lunch for us, and we would eat with them and the children.
In the afternoon, we played with the children on the basketball court, and really entered into a time of relationship-building with them. We would then head out and reflect as a group on our days up on the mountain.
It was no coincidence for me that this mission trip took place during Lent, where I encountered great poverty while physically being up on a mountain and in the desert. Going up the mountain, Jesus asks us to leave our possessions and attachments behind. It makes hiking up the mountain easier when we drop whatever it is that is preventing us from bringing our freest hearts there. It is also here that we are able to see more clearly what areas of our hearts are poor.
The joy of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ meets us in our brokenness and loves us deeply in our poorest places. I was able to encounter this in my own heart, but especially in seeing our students encounter this in their relationship-building with the neighbors.
The people who lived in these shantytowns are some of the poorest of the poor, and loved with all their hearts — and the students really met them in that love.
A student who went on the trip with us, Regan Quigley, shared a stunning testament to how the trip changed her heart for good.
“Encountering true poverty allowed me to see where authentic joy comes from,” she said. “A week is not that long, but little by little, each interaction brought us closer with one another and thus, so much closer to Christ. The language barrier between English and Spanish, though an obstacle at first, allowed us to communicate in a deeper way: through truth and charity. Being stripped of the supposed comforts of the life I am accustomed to allowed me to be so filled and free to let Christ pour himself into my heart and those around me. And I am confident in saying that it is not a trip-high or a fleeting flood of happiness but a radical conversion of heart and realization of identity and purpose.”
I think this trip will take a lifetime to unpack. The fruits of encountering poverty in the neighbors and in our own hearts will last throughout the rest of college for these students and into their lifelong mission. Going on this trip was a great blessing as we start to bring this year at Pittsburgh to a close.
