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Clean Water for Honduras

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A young man from St. Mary’s Parish in Colts Neck, NJ is traveling to Honduras tomorrow as part a his college’s chapter of “Engineers Without Borders.” They’re going to work on supplying clean water and better sanitation for a poor area of the country. You can read about the project at

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~ewb/current_project.htm

I emailed Alec this morning:

Alec,

I wish God’s blessings for you and your companions as you take off for Honduras tomorrow to be part of your college’s chapter of  “Engineers Without Borders.”  Lafayette College should be commended for encouraging this outreach to supply clean water and sanitation to the Yoro district, one of the poorest areas in that country.

From your work there last year you know the blessings you get when you go to a place like that and offer your skills and talent to the people. Those blessing will be there for you this time too, I’m sure.

I was thinking of something Pope Paul VI said years ago, “Development is a new name for peace.” You are bringing peace by what you are doing, peace because what you do brings those people the promise of a better life, peace because they realize the world beyond them has reached out to help them.

I told you I thought it was nice that you are going off after we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus yesterday at church. He made water one of the ways he brought life to people.

May he be with you there too. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you and seeing the pictures when you get back.

God bless,

Fr.Victor

Clean Water

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Sacraments,  earthly signs of divine mystery,  also shed light on some social questions we wrestle with day by day.

For example, water is the sign of Baptism, and what is more urgent today than the world’s use of this vital element for life? Like the air we breathe, we depend on clean water for drinking, agriculture, sanitation and hygiene.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) says that more than 1 billion people – about one in six people in the world – have no access to clean and safe drinking water, which then is a cause of poverty, conflict, disease and death.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates  that 1.8 million children die every year as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. Women and children, the usual providers of water, spend long hours walking to get water, often from polluted sources. The time they spend prevents them from benefiting from other work or from school.

The feast of the Baptism of Jesus usually ends our celebration of the Christmas season, as it does this year.  Jesus came that we might have life, and among his great signs promising life are signs of food and drink. Can we fulfill  his promise of life by working today to eradicate hunger and the lack of clean water in so many parts of the world? Doesn’t  a cause like that follow from our own baptism? It’s part of the first of the Millenium Development Goals agreed upon by the peoples of the world at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that among the earliest directions for the rite of Baptism in early Christianity–found also in Jewish purification rituals too–is the instruction that people be baptized in “flowing water, ” clean, fresh water.

The signs of our sacraments take us beyond personal salvation; they are signs for our wider world too.