A Special Baptism

J. Calvitt Clarke, III is a professor of history at Jacksonville University and a member of the board of directors of Children, Incorporated. He shared with us this moving account of his recent visit to the Puente Piedra Girl's Home in Lima, Peru. 

"Last Thanksgiving, I presented a paper in Peru’s capital, Lima, at the annual meeting of the Association for Third World Studies. I took advantage of the opportunity to take my fourteen-year-old daughter for sightseeing.

    While there, we visited an orphanage, the Puente Piedra Girl’s Home in Lima. The home serves the needs of 150 girls, ages five to twenty-two, and all are with Children Incorporated. Our generous
sponsors help care for 128, and Children Incorporated carries the last 22. With more sponsors, the home could house 30 more children. All the money that comes through Children Incorporated goes to feed the children.

Puente Piedra is a crime and drug-infested suburb of Lima. The neighborhood children and their families suffer from high unemployment, hyperinflation, the government’s neglectful spending, and broken families. Disease, malnutrition, and abuse have left Puente Piedra’s children desperately needing care and love. The Girl’s Home offers its children an opportunity to rise above the limitations of their difficult lives.

    Franciscan sisters, who founded the home, also saw a need for a better education for Puente Piedra’s poor, and launched and run the adjacent, state school that all the girls in the orphanage attend. With 1,120 attending, it is the best public school in the area, and local parents, seeking better lives for their children, beg to have them educated there.

Sister Mercedes of the Franciscan Order picked up my daughter and me at our hotel. We entered a van full of flowers and happily animated nuns. They spoke no English, so my pidgin Spanish and gestures had to do and naturally produced much laughter.

    The hour-long drive to the orphanage provided an education. For drivers, staying in lanes seemed only a mild suggestion. The air was cool, hazy, and humid—typical for this time of year. In the city, all the buildings were gray and dirty from air pollution and dust, both of which hung heavily in the air. The city is trying to create garden spaces but must irrigate them, because Lima receives almost no rain.

As we moved out of the city, on either side of the road and not far away, the homes of the poor clung precariously and tenaciously to barren, dusty hills. Along the route, I saw what appeared to be prefabricated homes for families. They looked less like the small sheds sold at Home Depot or Lowes than like less-stylish versions of the small playhouses for children such stores also sell. Dust was everywhere, and while there was a fair amount of construction in and out of the city, most of it languished unfinished.

As we entered the grounds of Puente Piedra Girl’s Home, girls happily rushed up to our van. They eagerly exchange greetings with the nuns.

On the day we visited, we saw a wonderful example of the difference the orphanage can make for these girls. My daughter and I attended a Sunday, baptismal mass for Isabella, the child of Decia Marivel Vicuña Castro. Marivel lived at the home between 1987 and 1997 with her sister after their mother had died. When they arrived, the two were suffering from malnutrition. After ten years Marivel left the home and went to Germany as an au pair. There she married a German, whose family has many contacts in Latin and South America. Marivel’s sister still lives in Lima.

Father Bernardo Byrne, an American and a Maryknoll priest, officiated the mass. He has been at the home for a long time and knew Marivel as a child. He had married the couple in this church the year before. 

Beautiful music, especially the girls’ singing, marked the service. The hymnal tones were joyful and the melodies haunting. The sisters and Father Bernardo were as excited to host the baptism as the girls were to participate. Father Bernardo explained to me that, with male machismo smothering women, these girls never see examples of a stable family life. They need to know, he continued, that there is another way to live, where women and men live as equals. He saw the baptism as a life lesson for the girls."