In mid-April 2020 we began a food collection campaign to face the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic contingency, to help the neediest families in El Paraiso and nearby villages in Xochimilco south of Mexico City, where the MCSPA has been working for more than three years.
We launched the campaign among friends, family and collaborators emphasizing what Pope Francis mentioned in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 27: “Like the disciples in the Gospel, we were surprised by unexpected and furious storm. We realized that we were in the same boat, all fragile and disoriented; but at the same time, important and necessary, all called to row together, all in need of mutual comfort”.
The response did not take long, those months we felt wrapped by so many generous hearts, full of hope that we wanted to bring to these families along with a bag of food and hygiene items. Then we became aware that the necessary information about Covid-19 that could have saved several lives had not reached these places.
Sadly this did not surprise us, in El Paraiso, live more than 3,000 migrant families from regions that have been devastated by poverty, insecurity or drug trafficking. Most of these families found nothing more than a piece of land “hidden from the authorities” where they live in wooden, plastic and cardboard rooms without the basic services to live with dignity, the rest is unaffordable for them.
These settlements are called “The invisibles”, they are families that do not appear in the statistics, that are not counted in the urban development plans, is social programs, etc. Officially they do not exist. Here we saw a clear manifestation of what Pope Francis talks about in the apostolic exhortation Evangelli Gaudium and which was already mentioned since 2007 in the V General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate:
“Today everything enters into the game of competitiveness and the law of the strongest. As a consequence of this situation, great masses of the population are excluded and marginalized: without work, without horizons, without a way out. The human being is considered in itself as a consumer good, to be used and then thrown away”.
Faced with this, in addition to the bags of food and hygiene items, we took on the task of bringing workshops about Covid-19, in addition to giving them masks and antibacterial gel necessary to follow the prevention protocols.
With this activities and by inviting people to help us to help these vulnerable families, they become less invisible. We are becoming the “voice of the voiceless” and we are turning the good news of the Gospel into concrete actions, not only the members of the MCSPA who are in charge of the activities, but all the people who have wanted to listen to the cry of these families and who want to be co-responsible with Christ in the construction of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Blanca Beltrán
MCSPA
