“One of the biggest mistakes everybody does in mission work is they go there to try to change the people instead of changing ourselves for the first year, and then see what we can do to help after that. This is a three-year mission, and you can blow it in the first three months.”
Nebraskan Matthew Kadavy was telling Angelus News about the four months of formation training he and three others — Karen Hunka from Pennsylvania, Maria Luisa Garcia from El Paso, Texas, and Diane Yonga from Minneapolis — were finishing up to be commissioned as Lay Mission-Helpers.
They were following a sacred tradition started by Msgr. Anthony Brouwers here in 1955 of sending laymen and laywomen to toil mostly in Third World countries as “God’s Helpers.”