PARISH BULLETIN
Welcoming Parish Missionaries Home

by Beth Dotson Brown

Parishioners welcome home overseas workers. Follow-up to article in Winter 2007 CHURCH magazine.

After spending five years as a Maryknoll Lay Missioner in Brazil with her husband and four children, Denise Sandman of Lexington, Kentucky believes it is personal connections that break down barriers among people. She went to Brazil hoping to deconstruct some of the barriers between the United States and Brazil. Upon her return home in 2008, she discovered that members of her home parish, Holy Spirit Newman Center, were striving to do the same—to remove the obstacles the Sandman family would find when they returned to Kentucky to resume their stateside lives.

The Sandman family and the Holy Spirit parishioners have been pioneers in the Diocese of Lexington for establishing a “mission liaison” program. In 2007, Father Tom Farrell acted on his desire to stay in touch with parishioners who had gone overseas to serve by asking for volunteers to act as “mission liaisons.” Parishioners Pat Griffin and Beth Graham stepped forward, dividing the missionaries between them and establishing communication to receive news about what they were doing and how the parish could support them. They then shared the information with parishioners. The hope was that expanding their horizons would educate and involve parishioners at home while it also supported those overseas.

Sandman describes the experience as a mutual exercise in bridge-building, with the Sandmans building their bridge from Brazil to the United States while Holy Spirit parishioners built a bridge from the United States to Brazil. “It gave us a sense of still being tied to our faith community back in the States,” Sandman says. “It’s easy to go overseas and feel very isolated out there.”

Sharing their experience

Life in Lexington is quite a contrast to the way the family lived for five-and-a-half years as missionaries. Besides communicating in Portuguese while in Brazil, they lived in a home similar to those of the local people, in a windowless brick house with concrete floors. In their farming community outside of the city, they had a landline telephone, washing machine and computer, which made them wealthier than most in the area even though they had to pump their own water and hang their clothes outside to dry.

While Sandman worked with an early childhood nutrition program and a local women’s group, her husband, Joe, taught architectural drafting to high school–age students and helped them turn their designs into useful additions in the community. The four Sandman children, the youngest of whom was two when they began discussing going to Brazil, went to a local school and became fluent in Portuguese. They were aware that their playmates didn’t have the same computer access and health care that the Sandman family enjoyed. “Sometimes their playmates would stop by for food if they were hungry,” Sandman says.

As the family created personal connections through their missionary work, they shared their experiences with the folks back home. For example, Sandman learned to value the experience of people living in Brazil’s favelas (the Brazilian term for slums). The population there is generally illiterate, unemployed, and in dire circumstances. Yet, because of their cultural and language experience, they were better able to go to the store and find what they needed than Denise was. “It’s humbling. They helped me because that’s what I couldn’t do,” she says.

The Sandmans began thinking about what they had learned through their mission experience after their initial three-year commitment. At that point, Maryknoll holds a mission integration program that is designed to help the volunteers express what they’ve experienced over those years and to explore how best to incorporate it into the next phase of their lives. Joe Loney, director of the Mission Services Program at Maryknoll, says, “It’s an opportunity for them to catch up on what’s going on in the United States.” The three-week program at Maryknoll’s headquarters in Ossining, N.Y., helps them re-orient themselves to U.S. culture and the social scene. If the missioners are a family with children, they have to find out what U.S. school grade level the children are at.

Another important aspect of the program is sharing mission stories. Loney notes that some of the best listeners are others who have had similar experiences. Therefore, the mission integration program gives volunteers the opportunity to share their stories with the other missioners with whom they originally attended orientation.

Because the Sandman family extended their commitment with Maryknoll for two additional years, they participated in the integration program and then went back to Brazil. When they returned to the U.S. again, they went to Maryknoll for a debriefing, closing interviews, and financial business as well as a closing ritual for their family, but not the full program they had after the first contract.

Honor the missionaries

When families return to their home parish, Loney says, the parish can continue to assist in the transition. “Thank and honor them. It may sound simplistic, but ask them to share some of their experiences overseas.” The simple act of listening, Loney says, will honor them.

When the Sandman family returned to Kentucky, she says, “We are our Brazilian counterparts in the favelas now.” The family had no home, no jobs, no possessions. When mission liaison Beth Graham found out that when the Sandmans returned to Kentucky they would need to rebuild their entire lives, she went to work on a new phase of the mission liaison program—helping the missionaries with the adjustment back home. “I believe we can worship better as a church community when we know each other by name and feel like a family coming together,” Graham says.

So as a parish family, Holy Spirit parish welcomed the Sandman family home with a “shower” to provide them with what they needed to rebuild a home. They received a plethora of gifts to use in re-establishing themselves in the United States—linens, appliances, lamps, even scholarships for their four children to attend Catholic school. “The outpouring from the Newman Center is enabling us to rebuild our lives. Without that I don’t know where we would be,” says Sandman.

Graham has also felt called to help the family with their emotional transition, one aspect of the mission liaison program the parish is still working on. “Being gone five years is hard and I wanted to help them reconnect to the United States and the Newman Center,” she says. “I put them in touch with a couple who had been in mission before so they would know someone who could relate to their experience.”

Through this transition the parishioners at the Newman Center have shown the Sandmans and the community how extensive the “missionary” spirit is through their example. “Just knowing that there are people out there rooting for us, praying for us, wanting us to make this transition back, that kind of support has been the support that at times has enabled us to get up the next day,” Sandman says.

Being part of the parish’s connection with overseas workers has been rewarding for Graham. “It has been a life-giving experience for me to learn of their faith and sacrifice in serving the people of Brazil They are an inspiration to me,” she says.

While Graham says the Sandmans have inspired her, the Sandmans see the entire parish as doing the same for them. Sandman says, “They are true missionaries. They embody a missionary spirit—that unselfish giving of themselves. They’ve been inspirational and hugely supportive in a spiritual way, helping us know we’re not here by ourselves.”

Beth Dotson Brown is an award-winning freelance writer and editor who lives in Lancaster, Kent. Her book is Yes! I am Catholic, (St. Mary’s Press). www.bethdotsonbrown.net