DOMESTIC: We Still Need to Help People

I’m back in the neighborhoods where I grew up, and the people are the same as I remember. The problems, though, have changed, and the government has as well. It’s not helping much any more.

I have worked as a pastor for almost 50 years, half that time in Bolivia, where I saw a harsh and cruel life for ordinary people. There, the political leaders were indifferent. Now I’ve come home to see the same thing repeated in my own country.

I was a kid on the streets of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood in the ‘30s. The residents, like my parents, were immigrants--uneducated, intelligent, resourceful, hard-working, family-oriented and faith-filled. Life wasn’t easy, but the support systems were abundant. Doctors lived in the neighborhood and made house calls, as did the nurses and the midwives. The schools were the center of social activities, cultural events and sports programs. I went to summer camp compliments of the Boston Police Department. Adults watched over us and inspired us.

Now my parishioners in Dorchester are immigrants from different islands--the West Indies, Haiti, Cape Verde--and the old support systems are gone. Ask Peggy Nelson, the Catholic nun who works as a nurse practitioner in the local health clinic. Most of her patients, she says, suffer from a combination of malnutrition, stress and depression. She sees clients who work three jobs to survive. Few get help from anyone.

Ask Ashley Brooks, a former Peace Corps volunteer, who worked with youth in my parish, kids in dead-end jobs or no jobs who have turned to guns and drugs.

We’ve begun a program at St. Peter Church to train the people who refuse to succumb to indifference. To get started, we asked them, “What makes you angry?” Alfredo Andrade said, “A boy tried to steal my son’s jacket and my son resisted. So the boy put a gun to my son’s head and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed, but I almost lost my son. That makes me very angry.”

We had 600 people at one meeting. They talked about how housing prices in a booming Boston have left them behind. Barbara Davis, who is 62, told us she has 40 years in the work force and is now retired on a small pension, but she is unable to afford her rent. She worries she’ll end up living with the homeless.

My people pray the government will spend money on affordable housing, on health care, on community policing, on fixing up the schools and paying for crime prevention programs we know will work but that get laughed at in Congress. They want job training, a chance for promotion and decent salaries and benefits.

I cannot believe how indifferent my country became while I was away for a quarter-century working in the barrios of America’s neighbors to the south.

What in the name of God happened to our priorities?