Padre Jose : Priest Founds New Family Unit for Children of Peru’s Poverty

Padre Jose, otherwise known as Father Joe Walijewski of La Crosse, Wis., is a celibate priest and happy father to 55 children.

Thanks to Pope John Paul II, who saluted Walijewski’s three decades in the barrios of Latin America with a $50,000 gift, Walijewski presides over a family of orphans from the wreckage of Peru’s wars and social upheavals.

He cares for his family with love and humor.

“When you get married,” he said recently, surrounded by a flock of adoring faces, “you get three or four kids. But when you have 55, you run for the hills.”

Then he added: “I feel like I’m home now. I feel like what I wanted from life I’ve got here.”

After assignments in Bolivia and Ecuador, Walijewski arrived in the Peruvian slum of Villa El Salvador in 1971, along with the first batch of 8,000 squatter families that invaded the bare sand dunes on the desert coast south of the capital after a severe earthquake.

He set up a parish and saw Villa El Salvador grow into a vast satellite town of 350,000. Many of the people had fled from the violence and poverty of the Andean highlands.

Heavyset, with ruddy cheeks and a Joe Palooka face, “Father Joe” helped Villa El Salvador develop into a model of self-help success, culminating with a Mass there by the Pope in 1987.

For the last three years, Walijewski has been at work on another dream: turning unwanted orphans into a community and teaching them to be leaders capable of changing their country.

Building on the Pope’s gift, Walijewski raised $450,000. He bought land in the town of Lurin, situated in a green coastal river valley 25 miles south of Lima. He had decided it would be healthier to remove the children from the capital and its overcrowded desert suburbs. Since then, the children have streamed in, living evidence of Peru’s many woes.

Three of the youngsters were rescued from Ayacucho, the stronghold of Peru’s fierce Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement.

“They were a peasant family,” Walijewski said. “There was a knock on the door, and 10 terrorists with hoods and machetes came in. The three children--two boys, 3 and 7, and a girl, 5, hid under the bed. They saw the terrorists slaughter their father and mother.

“The children buried their parents, somehow got to Lima and ended up here. The youngest one, the first day, was screaming. I went to visit. He was shivering, asking for his mother. This tells you what we’re facing here.”

Slowly, the children have learned to live with what they endured, and “now they’re like any other kids.” Little by little, “they are washing this from their minds.”

Most of the children are victims of less dramatic violence and unhappiness. Most are orphans; a few are abandoned. One girl was sexually abused by her father and sent out as a child prostitute.

“She always looked down,” Walijewski said. “She wouldn’t look you in the face. Today, she is proud of herself, and comfortable.”

He said the idea of a children’s home occurred to him one day in Lima, the teeming capital, “when I saw a newspaper on the street begin to move, and a boy’s head emerged.” He said the boy was 7 or 8 years old. “Then another pile moved,” he went on, “and his older sister popped out. I asked myself, ‘How can I go home to a comfortable bed when these kids are on the streets?’ ”

The children arrive with the help of Caritas, the Catholic relief organization, which helps the needy across Latin America. These are among the hardest cases, for most of the children are not wanted by relatives, and psychological problems are common. Under the law, parents may reclaim children years after abandoning them, and this discourages adoption, the priest said.

He envisions much more than an orphanage, more than a way station. These children, he said, join a new family as soon as they arrive.

The 55 children are divided into eight families, each with a young male and female tutor. Each group eats together and lives together in airy dormitory rooms.

“I want to make sure we have a family spirit,” he said, “that we . . . compartir --what’s that in English?--share.”

As the children mature, he wants them to elect their own “mayor” and develop democratic values.

He said he hopes that the children, imbued with a commitment to help others as they were helped, will devote themselves to rural development in Peru when they reach age 18 and set off on their own lives. He envisions young people from the home going back to the highlands, where warfare drove so many thousands to Lima, to revitalize the countryside.

His vision is not for the short term. Someday, Walijewski said, the children will come back to the Pope John Paul II Home, living here in retirement and being grandparents to a future generation of orphans.

Always ready with an apt aphorism, he said: “If you give someone a fish, you give a meal. But if you teach children how to fish, you feed them for their whole life.”

The center has room for 130 children, but Walijewski said he is expanding slowly because he wants to ensure that there are enough volunteer tutors, the heart of the program, and that they are adequately trained. Helping him train the tutors are four Catholic nuns, who also assist with catechism, discipline and in other areas.

To encourage self-sufficiency, the children are taught to grow crops, to bake bread in a huge wood-burning oven, to raise chickens, pigs, ducks and rabbits. Banana plants at the edge of the soccer field provide fruit.

The children get up at 5 a.m., attend Mass at 6 and have breakfast at 7. They attend classes at a parochial school in the nearby village of Lurin. Wisconsin farmers donate powdered milk.

Walijewski, green-eyed, with short, white hair, said his interest in Latin America began as a boy in Wisconsin, where he saw bananas being unloaded from a railway car and learned where they came from.

He struggled with his seminary studies, “and I promised God that if he pulled me through, I would dedicate five years of my life to the poor in Latin America.” The five years have stretched into many more. After nine years in jungle settlements of Bolivia, he returned briefly to the United States but was soon back in Latin America. He then spent two years in the steamy coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador.

After returning again to the United States, “I was climbing the walls worrying about candles and linen and cassocks,” he said, adding: “Here, it is life and death at stake. . . . I feel sorry for some of my parish priest friends in the United States. Meeting after meeting.”

At Villa El Salvador, he helped create a network of more than 100 food kitchens, cooperative operations, with neighborhood mothers rotating the cooking chores and contributing to bulk purchases.

He is not involved in politics, he said, but added, “You can’t work with the poor and entirely ignore politics.”

Peru is the birthplace of liberation theology, the controversial doctrine of social involvement by the church, in some cases using Marxist theory to explain the causes of poverty.

Walijewski does not use such terms, but he does complain that “this government is not interested in the countryside, in farming.” He said what is needed is “a government that is really interested in its people.”

“The best thing you can give in life is yourself,” he said. “I’m 66 now. I figure I’ve got at least four more years to give. . . . I sometimes shudder; I know my abilities are limited.”

The children surround him and cling to him as he strolls around the grounds. Of one, he says, with an impish smile, “This boy is very good, when he’s asleep.”

The humor does not disguise the priest’s feelings for the children. He pointed to a boy who had come to him from streets and “is looking for something to hold onto.”

“When he came here, he was really a terror,” Walijewski said. “But now he feels he is wanted. He once looked me in the eye and said, ‘Padre, never stop loving me.’ ”