This guest post is the third in a series by Episcopal Relief & Development Volunteer Network members. Michelle Boomgaard, Seminary Coordinator at Yale’s Berkeley Divinity School, poses a thought-provoking question—and presents her answer, based on her experience at the recent meeting hosted by the Anglican Diocese of Belize.
The Anglican Communion has gotten a lot of ink over the last few months. For many, the Communion seems to be a rather abstract concept or a theoretical construct. But after my trip to Belize as part of Episcopal Relief & Development’s annual Network meeting, I can say, “I have seen the Anglican Communion at work, and it can be a very good thing.”
St. Peter's Anglican School has an extensive special needs program, including classes for deaf children. Photo courtesy of Bill Hogg
Appropriately enough, the first thing on the Network meeting agenda was worship. Shortly after I arrived in Belize, I boarded a bus to the Cathedral in Belize City for a service of Evensong and Eucharist. The Rt. Rev. Philip Wright, Bishop of Belize, presided, using the prayer book of the Province of the West Indies, and the Rt. Rev. Robert J. O’Neill, Bishop of the Diocese of Colorado and Board Chair of Episcopal Relief & Development, preached, telling a story about a Benedictine monk. There was incense, laughter and music. It was the Anglican Communion at worship, using somewhat familiar traditions to honor God in the way we felt most comfortable.
I can still picture the congregation as we sang one of the final hymns. The tune and the words were fairly familiar, but in Belize, apparently, congregations sing it a little more exuberantly than we do in the United States. During the next to last verse, I spied one of the acolytes peering under her uplifted arms at the crowd of visitors, with a quizzical look on her face that seemed to say, “Why aren’t they celebrating with us?” We were celebrating, of course—just in our own way.
Another place where I saw the Anglican Communion in action was in the Anglican schools of Belize. Episcopal Relief & Development has helped develop a pilot HIV/AIDS education program for these schools. True to the collaborative nature of the Communion, after the Diocese of Belize initially suggested the need for an HIV/AIDS education curriculum, the organization partnered with the diocese to create this program. As the two groups worked together closely, they realized that the culture and setting of Belize necessitated innovations on a number of different levels, including teacher training.
During the time in Belize, I got to see these innovative efforts in action. I visited St. Peter’s Anglican School and sat in on a health education class discussion about how HIV/AIDS spreads. “Discussion” may be the wrong word to use—St. Peter’s School has an extensive special education program, and the children in the class were all deaf.
I could sum up my experience at St. Peter’s by writing about how promoting education and combating disease are two of the eight Millennium Development Goals, and how Episcopal Relief & Development is doing both in this single program. I could talk about how this program is getting the word out about HIV/AIDS all across Belize, as parents learn about the disease from their children and students in neighboring schools learn from those in Anglican schools. But that’s not what I was thinking about when I left St. Peter’s.
Instead, I was thinking about how special education programs are usually poorly funded or nonexistent in the developing world. How deaf children are often denied an education and left unable to communicate with most of the world beyond their immediate families. How that inability to communicate leaves these children, and others with special needs, vulnerable to predators of all kinds. And I was thinking about the friendships that were evident among the children in the class, and the support the kids were getting from their teachers and from their proud parents who were waiting for them outside the school. These children, who might otherwise have been cut off from society, were being given the tools to make friends, build relationships, protect themselves and create a future.
Of course, the Anglican Communion is more than these two stories. But at its core, the Communion is about following Jesus’ command to “love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.” In going to Belize, and worshipping and talking with the people, I saw how Episcopal Relief & Development taps into the relationships already existing in the Anglican Communion to live out these commands.
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