Faith in Focus

My mother now lives in a place called The Village. It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child, but perhaps a village can be helpful at any age. It certainly seems our family requires the help of this village to care for our mother. She lives in the part of The Village labeled “assisted living,” which implies that she needs help breathing or maintaining a pulse. She does not. She does, however, need a level of intimate care that we, her six...

The anticipation was stifling. For days we knew that our little one would be leaving us forever, on her way to a place where she would be a part of a family forever. We readied ourselves as best we could. We threw her a going-away party, though at only 9 months she knew nothing of the life-changing event that lay ahead of her. The party, we knew, was merely an attempt to ease the pain of letting her go out into an unfamiliar world without the safety of the...

When I was a Catholic schoolboy, several hundred years ago, the custom of our teachers, each and every one a sister of the Order of Preachers, was that if you forgot your lunch or had it stolen under assault and occasionally battery, you were sent, curiously without ignominy, to the adjacent convent. There Sister Cook, a spherical woman with the immense burly forearms of a stevedore, would make you a peanut butter and jam sandwich or a peanut butter and...

There are a few sure things in the life of an international volunteer. One is routinely experiencing the death of preconceived notions about “normalcy.” For instance, I occasionally get the feeling some of the teachers at the high school where I work find it strange that I never wear exercise pants to school. Another is the frequency of disease. I will say I have not experienced so little control over what comes out of my body and when it chooses to do so...