God's Gifts: Gehlen continues aid with Mission Honduras

By Kenny Keane, Globe staff reporter
Posted December 5, 2002

LE MARS - When Hurricane Mitch tore through Honduras in the fall of 1998 nothing was spared - electricity, roads, bridges, schools, clean water and most importantly 14,000 people dead and missing.

Two years later, the idea of Gehlen Catholic Mission Honduras - Changing Lives was started at Gehlen High School in Le Mars. The mission began with one senior girl, Catherine Withrow, who traveled in February of 2001 to a village of about 1,000 people a couple hours north of the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

"The village name is El Guante. In El Guante are two Roman Catholic sisters, Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary out of Monroe, Mich.," said Richard Seivert, guidance counselor at Gehlen, referring to Sister Valeria Knoche and Sister Barb Zimmer, who had served as missionaries in Honduras for 30 and 20 years respectively.

"I made the connection to the sisters through my brother Francis, and the rest of it is history," Seivert said. "Hurricane Mitch literally destroyed that nation as it sat over the country for 10 days. You can imagine the aftermath of that - diseases like typhoid, cholera, yellow fever and malaria to name a few.

"It is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. There was a need, and we tried to fill that need."

Mission Honduras has helped to fill that need with four trips so far. The school followed up the first trip with one that Easter sending nine seniors and four adults for mission work. Seivert said there was so much interest in following the large student trip that parents and others had started asking him if he would set up a trip for them, which he did in January of 2002.

"It became a large medical mission as well as a construction mission," he said. "They did fantastic work. Then we did another student trip last April over Easter involving 12 seniors and four adults."

Following that trip, Seivert said the sisters asked the adults on the trip if they would help them build a medical clinic right in El Guante. He said they eventually contacted him, and he agreed to help them raise the money for the clinic.

"We've been trying to raise $50,000 towards the clinic," said Seivert, who also noted that he has formed a not-for-profit organization under the name Mission Honduras Le Mars, which has taken over the fundraising part for the clinic.

"In the meantime, I began last June to set up this next trip for January," he said. "We leave Jan. 9 for 10 days. It is a medical team again and a construction team composed totally of 20 people. They will do their medical clinics in six different remote villages."

One man who will help with the construction of the clinic is Norbert Janning, a K-8 counselor for the Catholic Schools of Sioux City (CSSC). He said when Seivert mentioned the idea to him, he didn't have to mention it twice.

"It's just a lifetime opportunity to actually make a difference in people's lives," Janning said. "That's what Mission Honduras is all about. It's not only for the people that we're ministering to, but it will probably also make a difference in my life. I think from that standpoint, I'll be a very different person when I come back."

Janning said their work in Honduras is the essence of what we are all about as Catholics with the idea of ministering to others. He also likes the fact that adults from the community are going down there, which he thinks is an excellent thing to model for the youth of the community seeing the adults going on a missionary trip.

Dr. Peggy McGinty, a dentist from Ponca, Neb., who will travel to Honduras, has been on a couple of medical/dental missions in the past. She said it really was a wonderful experience and a time to give back and give thanks to God for all the blessings in her life while at the same time helping those who don't have much.

"These people live day-to-day with a tremendous amount of pain," she said. "If you've ever had a toothache or an abscess tooth it's pretty hard. It's worthwhile just to go and take at least a little bit of the suffering out of their life by taking a bad tooth out.

"As our Lord says, 'Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.' So we do have a responsibility, all of us, to reach out and to help those who have less than us and those who are suffering."