Once Upon A Rainy Sunday
My first apostolate in the developing areas gave me a lesson I would never forget; I learned this once upon a rainy Sunday.
I walked along the unpaved narrow roads that led me to even narrower passages and could not help but look from side to side, and from every surprisingly strange thing I see. I felt like a character in an adventure book – a stranger in a strange place.
The noise was all around. I looked at my watch, it was about a quarter before eight in the morning but the people there seemed to be awake for almost three or four hours already. Though the noise overwhelmed the entire place, I could hear my heartbeat as we turned left and right and passed through eskinitas.
There I saw stores half open as if they were to be wiped out anytime soon; a marketplace that was very busy and crowded but I could see calmness in the sweaty faces; I saw houses built one after another, and one on top of the other as if they were plants that grew from one and the same pot. Below the bridges are creeks where filthy water and wastes flow and it became the kingdom of mosquitoes, cockroaches, and rats – all of them co-existing with the families whose fathers and mothers are the parents of my students.
I thought there was nothing worse than that until the rain started pouring and in just a few minutes, the flood was everywhere. In an instant, the dirty creek, the canals, and the road became indistinguishably one and the same.
Louder than the rain was a voice in a chorus that sounded like my students. In harmony, they shouted with joy: “Yes! Tara! Ligo tayo sa ulan brad!” It sounded so inviting that I could not help but enjoy that very moment with them.
Going back to the comforts of the four walls of our seminary, I began to reflect: what if God planned my life the other way around?
I could have been the child playing along the street, or the child happily watching the TV inside the house that they do not own, or the child helping his mother sell things in the market, or the child still searching for something to eat because his mother has nothing to prepare for breakfast, or the other child crying beside the sari-sari store because he was bullied for having a drunken father and a jobless mother, or I could be the child sitting on the old wooden bench and looking far as if wondering what life could have been if he belongs to a wealthy family.
Getting soaked in the rain with my students washed away every single ounce of indifference I had for them. Since then, I knew that even my discomforts could already be someone else’s luxury, and being ungrateful about them would only mean injustice on their part and to the God who gave me this life lesson once upon a rainy Sunday.
Bro. Carl Joseph Martinez, RCJ, collaborates in the activities of the Provincial Rogate Center for Vocations. He is in the first year of his theological studies.