Battle Weary and Exhausted

I am within a few days of leaving Argentina for home. I am counting down the days and looking forward to going back. I can feel the exhaustion and the battle fatigue. This week has been exceptionally busy. Because Newman is a school with so many different groups, there were lots of meetings and presentations. Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Solidarity with the Poor to the Third Year students, about seventy in total. The event took place in the Library. As usual, I had prepared carefully and was fully multimedia operational. I even included a photograph of Felilpe Contepomi to gain some favour with the home side. The presentation went down well and I got a very warm applause response at the end. But it was hard work.

Yesterday, I visited one of the worst slums in Latin America, a place called La Cava. A teacher from the school, Silvia, came with us as a translator. She had never been in this slum before. We walked precariously on stepping stones over the flowing rivers of sewage and tred our way warily in the narrow alleys of the slum. We were accompanied by Padre Annif, the Abbe Pierre of the La Cava slum, without whose protection we would not have lasted five minutes in the place. It was an education. Sheer, harsh grinding poverty is smelly, filthy, diseased and,yet, somehow human despite the misery. It is hard to explain at times.



One of the ironies of the situation is that teachers from Newman visited Zambia this Easter to immerse themselves in the experience of third-world poverty. Here was poverty on a scale that equals if not exceeds that of some of the worst African slums, and it is only about two miles from the school. Few Newman people set foot in this place. However, what also needs to be said is that under the leadership of Alberto Olivera, the current principal of the college, Newman is becoming a place of strong social commitment and the college is bringing a great deal of intelligent social action to bear on the problems. I have been impressed day after day with the different forms of social solidarity that have been initiated by the school. We have nothing on this scale in Ireland. Period. A lot of credit has to go to Paddy Keohane who has done so much to conscientise the students of Newman.

Earlier this week I had meetings with Raúl Vinuesa, an international jurist currently sitting on the International Court of Justice in the Hague. I also met with Emilio Cardena, former Argentine Ambassador to the United Nations, and current Co-Chair of the International Bar Association. These are heavy hitters, to use the jargon. Everywhere I am receiving the same message. Liberation theology is dead, and deserves to be dead. Now all the discussion and thinking is about an integral non-political vision of human rights and social justice. It will take me some time to come to terms with this. But I have heard the same message from so many people that there is clearly a basis for this new way of thinking. Most recently, the Latin American bishops gathered at Aparecida gave voice to this "nuevo camino". There is no longer any allegiance to what we used to call the "preferential option for the poor". This is considered here to smack too much of ideological thinking. Still, I notice that there are references to the concept in the Aparecida document from CELAM V.

We had an extended supper last night in the community with a lively discussion fueled by a few bottles of Malbec wine. Present were Stan Hayes from Woodford, County Galway, Jim Doherty from Oldcastle, County Meath, and Ferdi Foley from Tipperary. Paddy Keohane and tom O'Connell live in another house although they both work in Newman.

I am resigning myself to the fact that I shall probably leave Buenos Aires without having seen the city and without having seen the River Plate. I was to have gone to Montevideo this week but the airports were socked in by dense fog. And neither airport has the advanced radar to permit operations during fog.

Roll on Wednesday when I arrive back in Dublin.