Last Saturday I bought some work gloves and joined the Katrina Krewe that picks up trash block by block. Drivers honked and yelled “thank you” as we scooped up beer cans, plastic bottles, sheet rock, wire coils, cigarette butts and of course, the ubiquitous Mardi Gras beads in many stages of faded glory.
I smiled as we worked, thinking this was not the first time I’d picked up trash after a devastating hurricane. In 1988 I moved to Managua, Nicaragua just ten days before Hurricane Joan. I spent that night with my new roommates sitting on top of a strong dining room table and listening to Sandinista President Daniel Ortega shout feisty revolutionary slogans on the radio as the water began seeping under the wall. Four of us clung together and shared Hershey bars: one terrified Canadian aid worker, yours truly and a tense young Nicaraguan married couple with extramarital problems of soap opera magnitude.
For students who wonder how my path led from cowering on top of a dining room table in Managua to picking up trash in New Orleans nearly two decades later, this is a friendly warning. It all began when I was an undergraduate, young and wide-eyed just like you, because of a Jesuit.
In 1985, I was a student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. My favorite professor was organizing a conference on Central America and I volunteered to help.
There’s a Jesuit priest from Nicaragua staying in a downtown hotel, my professor said. He’s sick. You speak Spanish. Go see what he needs.
I stood shyly in front of that hotel door, clutching some Tylenol and orange juice. A sniffling, feverish, white-bearded man greeted me warmly. Father Xabier Gorostiaga thanked me profusely, and I felt taller as I trotted back to campus.
Three years later in Washington D.C., I saw Xabier at a conference. He was the keynote speaker on U.S. foreign policy and the room was packed with academic and diplomatic bigwigs. Xabier blasted the Reagan administration’s arrogance towards the small countries of Central America and the crowd rose to its feet.
In awe, I lined up afterwards to shake his hand. Xabier regarded me quizzically as I stammered “orange juice, aspirin, Los Angeles.” Then his face lit up and he hugged me.
“What are you doing after you graduate?” he asked.
“I want to go to Nicaragua,” I said.
Five minutes later, I had a job at a Jesuit think-tank in Managua. On any given day, economists, politicians, novelists, guerrilla leaders, unionists, feminists, ecologists, anthropologists and coffee producers sat in our offices, arguing about the architecture of the new societies that they wanted to build. My job was to soak it up and write it all down for Xabier’s monthly magazine.
When I decided to move to Guatemala to write for U.S. media four years later, Xabier took me out for a goodbye dinner and gave me his blessing.
“I know you’ll still be with us,” he said.
Over the years we met in Guatemala City, in Managua and once in Heathrow Airport. When I most needed some life direction, Xabier appeared. The last time I saw him was in 2003 in Spain. Xabier was dying of a massive brain tumor. I was devastated but not surprised. A brilliant economist who wanted to eradicate poverty, Xabier spent his whole life thinking huge thoughts like how to get Japan to build a canal through impoverished Nicaragua, or how to educate the people of the United States about the consequences of our foreign policy or how to get the guerrilla movements of Central America to democratize.
During that last conversation, I told Xabier I wanted to leave journalism and try teaching. He encouraged me again, and when the chance came to teach at Loyola in August 2005, I took it. I moved to Lakeview on Aug. 1.
If I had known 20 years ago that meeting Xabier would mean living through two hurricanes and losing a home, nearly getting lynched in Guatemala and having to tolerate a Jesuit living inside my head who says “take a left” every time I consider financial security and some narcissistic navel-gazing – would I have run for my life? No.
But if you wind up with a Jesuit priest living inside your head because of your Loyola education, at least buy yourself a heavy helmet. Then get ready for a really wild ride.
Trish O’Kane is an instructor in the communications department.
