Getting to Know Iquitos

I am living at the missionary house.  It is a center with many rooms where missionaries receive hospitality during their stay here in Iquitos.  Missionaries come for meetings and/or for some much-needed R&R.  It is great to welcome them “home” and spend a bit of time chatting with them about their mission and getting to know them better.  Our missionaries come from various countries, including Mexico, Spain, Colombia, India, USA, Poland and from here in Peru.  The diversity, yet unity of purpose…to make Christ known to all…is wonderful to experience and be a part of!

In the past few months, I have gotten to know Iquitos better.  I have been pleasantly surprised to learn that a new Mall, which can rival a regular mall in the USA, recently opened here.  It is a bit far from where I live, but one Sunday afternoon, three sisters and I ventured out to see what this mall was like.  We were pleasantly surprised to learn it was air-conditioned, had a food court, beautiful decorations, escalators, and many nice shops.  We walked around for a while then stopped at the food court and had supper.  Then we returned to the missionary house, i.e. my home. 

 

Iquitos has many stores and therefore it is not hard to find what one needs, though the quality may not always be what one is used to back home.  It has some nice restaurants as well. 

As the days go by, I am becoming more acclimated to this hot and very humid weather.  My fan is my constant companion as is my repellent as many mosquitos, ants, chiggers, small biting flies, etc. inhabit this area of the country.  The vegetation is beautiful and very diverse.  I am seeing plants I had never seen before and many diverse birds.  It is beautiful to behold nature here!

In March we celebrated St. Joseph’s Day, which is a huge feast for us as St. Joseph is the patron of our vicariate.  My coworkers, along with the staff of the Office of Catholic Education and the Office for Peace and Justice (both belonging to the vicariate and whose offices are located on this property) to pray, eat and enjoy time together to celebrate our patron saint.  

The Vicariate

Greetings from the city of Iquitos located in the Amazonian region of Peru. In my February blog (yikes, where has time gone?) I shared my arrival Lima and here in Iquitos where I am working and living.  This is my mission post.  I am working as an administrative assistant in the offices of the Vicariate of San Jose del Amazonas. At present I am learning about what projects we have received donations from, what it takes to monitor a project, and how to compile all the necessary documents to write up a final report for each project. I am also learning how to issue official copies and make corrections to the information found in Baptismal and Wedding certificates.

I am learning more each day about the day-to-day workings of our vicariate.  Our vicariate encompasses an area of the Amazon Jungle region of 155,000 sq. kilometers (59,845.8346 square miles) of land.  It is a very large vicariate with 16 other mission posts on the banks of the Amazon and Napo rivers.  We are a total of 72 missionaries (a bishop, priests, two deacons, brothers, sisters, and lay people) but this is not near enough to meet the needs of the faithful in our vicariate.  

 

I have learned that the needs of our vicariate are many.  We depend solely on the donation of charitable and ecclesiastical organizations to sustain us. In many of the parishes throughout the vicariate Sunday collections average the equivalent of $14.00 per week.  Since our priests are few (14 total), many villages do not have a resident priest but rather have a trained parish agent who conducts worship services focusing on the Sunday readings.  Communion in these worship services are rare and only if a priest happened to celebrate Mass there the week before and was able to leave consecrated hosts.  I learned that consecrated hosts will not last for more than a week due to the high heat and humidity and the lack of facilities to store the hosts.  In the communities where there is no resident priest, the faithful often get to celebrate Mass once or twice a year when a priest visits their community. 

 

Each mission post has anywhere from 30-80 scattered communities in their region, which they visit throughout the year. Most visitations are done by boat, walking, or motorcylces.  These visitations, called “caserias,” are done throughout the year with the hope of getting to visit all the communities in their post at least once a year.  The needs of the native people of Amazonia are many and many look to the church for assistance. Many of the needs have been brought about by the destruction of their land due to deforestation and contamination of the river water they depend on for day-to-day living.

 

My ministry/work has to do, not so much working WITH the native population, but rather working FOR the native population. What I mean is that the job of our office is to make sure that missionaries out at the mission posts have what they need to best serve the folks they minister too.