CRIES OF THE POOR
‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying for help on account of their taskmasters. Yes, I am well aware of their sufferings’. (Ex. 3: 7).
If the Book of Exodus is the heart of the 46 books of the Old Testament, we can say that verse 7 of Chapter 3 is the heart of the book of Exodus. It was the starter. It was the hurricane for all that movement of liberation of the Hebrew People from the slavery of Egypt. It all departed from a God who heard the pain and cries of His People. And one day, that God who saw the suffering, chose Moses to lead the whole journey of deliverance that took 40 years through scorching and troubled deserts until they reached the promised land.
The “People Helping People” Association was born of a group of people who heard these cries; who saw this suffering. No one can imagine that on this island of Madeira, so beautiful and so attractive, there is so much suffering and so much misery. There are people who go days without food. We know where they are. One mother confided in me that the only thing she had been giving her children for the past three days was boiled guava leaves. The insensitive and cruel bureaucracies of some institutions leave people on the floor of misery.
One mother, single and unemployed, went to an institution that was supplying her with milk and nappies for her baby. One day, she arrived there, for the usual routine. She was just going to pick up her usual supply of nappies and milk. She was met with a disagreeable “No more. This is over.” Her adorable baby was no longer entitled to nappies or milk because she had turned one year old a few days earlier. I thought it was a misunderstanding. I went there in person and asked if this was true. The answer was a cold and indifferent “Yes, it’s true”. I asked if there was no other alternative. The answer was an even colder and indifferent “No”.
There are people dying of curable diseases because after they go to the doctor they do not have the money to buy the medicines they need. Other people who are very sick cannot get a doctor’s consultation through the state hospital until years later. As they cannot wait that long, they decide they need to see a private doctor. But who will pay?
One day I was waiting for an appointment at the “External Consultations” of the Hospital. After a long wait, the receptionist came in and said, “The Doctor is not coming in to do any consultations today.” A lady who had been waiting for the same doctor as me, said: “I’ve been waiting for this consultation for three years.” The look of defeat on her face was shocking.
Free dental medicine is only available after you’re 60 years of age. I think most people, even after 60, are unaware of this privilege. I only came to know about this at the age of 81. There are unemployed people who are able to find employment, but when they arrive to start working, they are sent away because their missing or damaged teeth “project a bad image of the company”. And image in today’s society is not the “most important thing.” Image in today’s society is the “only important thing.”
The People Helping People Association was born from this. It was born of a group of people who heard the cries of other people, and saw their suffering. This happened after the floods that destroyed part of Madeira Island on February 20th, 2010. The main objective of “People Helping People” is to “mobilize a lot of people to help a lot of people”. It is not to change people, but to alleviate their suffering, whatever the cause. It is not taming people, but helping them to free themselves from poverty.
We have always felt that helping people should be a way of life, with preference for the most vulnerable, the excluded, the discarded… and not an institution. Then, for various reasons, we decided to make People Helping People an official institution. Today, People Helping People is a non-profit association with the same objective of mobilizing many people to help many people. We would like it to always be an open door when all the others close.
However, even though we have a working group, mainly because of the limitations of committed people and financial possibilities, and due to the lack of a venue for meetings that have to be moved from one place to another and from one day to the next (which destabilizes the group), the coordination of family support is being provisionally handled by a wonderful lady called Dalila Oliveira. She has no headquarters (office), nor set working hours. Most of the contacts are made by phone and from there, Dalila schedules a meeting time and a place (usually in a cafe or restaurant) to listen to the pains and needs of each person, and with sometimes only a few possibilities, she is doing her “miracles” to alleviate their sufferings.
All this is done around a cup of coffee, a plate of soup or a meal, and according to the circumstances and our limited possibilities. There are hundreds of phone calls that Dalila regularly receives. But in addition, she also receives many SMS text messages. Some of these messages, we thought would be a good idea to publish in English in the newsletter of the Chapel of Penha de França. These messages, sometimes quite dramatic and desperate, we have given the name of “Cries of the Poor”, which we will start publishing on a regular basis from now on (on the last page of this newsletter). In the messages of the Cries of the Poor, all stories are true but the names of the people who are helped, out of respect for their dignity, will be fictitious.
Love and Peace
Fr. Bernardino Andrade