From Chicago Streets to Peruvian Peaks - A Story of Gratitude From Dan Kuzlik

Ever wondered about the sheer transformative power of gratitude and giving?  Join us on an inspiring journey as we share this incredible story of gratitude and meaningful community change. Hear several first-hand accounts from Dan Kuzlik, whose humble beginnings in Chicago led him to dedicate three decades of his life to supporting a small community in Chimbote, Peru. 

Laugh and learn with us as we navigate through humorous global travels and learning cultural differences, all wrapped up with a hearty dose of gratitude. You'll be touched by Dan's friendship with a phenomenal woman, Maruja, in Peru, and a profound reading on gratitude from Mark Wolak, written by a close friend, Neil. 

We also have a heart-to-heart with Father Jack who shares his 40-year devotion to community work in Chimbote, Peru.  This episode is your passport to the celebration of the human spirit, the power of community, and the magic of gratitude and giving. 

Transcript

Joe Boyle: 0:05

Welcome to Stories in Life. You're on the radio with Mark and Joe. We share stories that affirm your belief in the goodwill, courage, determination, commitment and vision of everyday people.

Mark Wolak: 0:19

Our goal is that through another person's story you may find connection, no matter your place in life. Stories we select will be inspiring and maybe help you laugh, cry, think or change your mind about something important in your life.

Joe Boyle: 0:37

Join us for this episode of Stories in Life.

Dan Kuzlik: 1:02

I think part of it is that I did grow up in the south side of Chicago and, although I didn't notice at the time, you know when you're young living in pretty poverty conditions. I remember growing up and living in the back of a tavern on 51st and Hermitage what they called in Chicago the back of the yards, because it was in the back of the stockyards and when the wind blew the one way you knew you were in the back of the stockyards. So we lived in there. We didn't have any direct heat, we didn't have a bathroom, we didn't have hot water, we had cold water that ran to a kitchen sink and my parents bought a big cattle tub and what they would do is they would set up the cattle tub in the middle of the kitchen floor and then they would heat water on the stove and pour it into water in the cattle tub until it got to a temperature that was relatively comfortable and that's how we take our bath.

Dan Kuzlik: 2:05

The toilet we used was a toilet that the patrons in the tavern used and we had to go out in the middle of the night and go to the tavern bar and go in there and I remember as a kid being kind of really frightened because I would go in to do my duty and lock the door and then drunks would come and pound on the door and get out of there. Get out of there and I'm going, I'm doing my best. So anyway, I think what I've had later in life is a lot of gratitude that. I don't live like that anymore.

Dan Kuzlik: 2:56

Because the other thing my dad taught me he was very simplistic. He said if you get an eighth grade education, you're that much ahead of people that don't have a ninth grade education. If you get a high school education, you're you know, and so on and so forth and so on. And so he was never educated, he never graduated from high school. He understood the importance of it and while we didn't get along, he taught me that and I really appreciated that.

Mark Wolak: 3:28

This is a story of gratitude. This is a story that comes from experiencing life in meaningful ways and wanting to use this feeling of gratitude to give back. This is a story of making a commitment to people who live in another part of the world and making an annual effort to help them in some ways with time, information, money or other needed resources. This is a story of my friend, Dan Kuzlik, who for 30 years has offered his skills, knowledge and financial support to a small community in Chimbote, Peru. I think you will really enjoy this story. Okay, joe, we've got a couple friends today visiting with us. Long time friend of mine, Dan Kuzlik, who I met, I think, sometime in let's see, 1996 or 1997, way back there, and it's just a real joy to have you here. So, with Dan Kuzlik and Sally Latimer, two great travelers, and they've got a wonderful story to share.

Joe Boyle: 4:35

Welcome Dan, welcome Sally. Thank you guys. We're here to learn a little bit more about Dan's 30 years plus with friends of Chimbote.

Mark Wolak: 4:49

So let's start with that, Dan. Tell us a little bit about Chimbote and how you got started, where it is in the world. First of all, our listeners are going to have to Google it, otherwise so I'll start with that.

Dan Kuzlik: 5:00

So Chimbote is a seaside city. It's about 400 kilometers north of Lima, Peru, Lima being the capital city. So it's a coastal city and I'll get to some specifics later. But how I got involved is I got a job offer in the Minnetonka schools where I met Mark and I was living and working in Oregon at the time.

Dan Kuzlik: 5:26

I recruited a Minnetonka and the person who I replaced said to me you know? He said have you ever heard of Rotary? And I said I've heard of it. I don't know much about it. He said Well, I belong to the Rotary Club here in Excelsior, Minnesota, right next to Minnetonka Lake, Minnetonka. And he said you don't have to, but I would suggest that you join rotary because as the executive director of community education you'll meet people there that are great contacts to work with. So I said Good, I can do that. So I joined the rotary club and what I found out about rotary was that it is an international organization but the Excelsior club didn't have any contact with any international group. So I kind of pressed out a little bit and finally myself a female lawyer, margaret Grath Hall who goes by her childhood name of Pook.

Dan Kuzlik: 6:26

I in a retired FBI agent went down to Chimbote to see if it'd be a project that'd be worthwhile. And the reason you chose Chimbote because Pook had been in the Peace Corps and she had worked in South America and she had gotten together with friends, like Peace Corps people do, and they kind of tour. And she ended up in Chimbote one time and met this priest, catholic priest, father Jack Davis, and Jack had taken his they call Parochia, which is a Catholic parish, and expanded it almost like community education which I was involved in. So he didn't just do religious things and masses, he helped people where they needed help. It could be medical, it could be social, it could be housing, whatever it was. He was there. So Jack got the thing going. We went down there and Pook and I and Mr Gray, who was the retired FBI agent said, brought it back. We said this is a good project. I mean, if we want to get involved in a project, these people need help.

Dan Kuzlik: 7:28

And let's talk about why Chimbote as a coastal city had been there for eons. The Incas had been there and what the Incas survived on was seafood. Obviously right there, easy fishing. They didn't overfish, of course. Well, now we're getting to some issues where we talk about climate change. Climate change started to change things. It took currents warm currents way away from the coast and that's where the fish followed. So it was not economical anymore for fishermen to go that far out to catch fish to bring back to market it to make money.

Mark Wolak: 8:10

So, Dan, tell us a little bit Now. You're part of the board of directors of a foundation.

Dan Kuzlik: 8:18

We have a nonprofit called Friends of Chimbote and they are organized out of Fargo, North Dakota, and in addition to that we have set up a Peruvian nonprofit. That are kind of boots on the ground in Chimbote. Our role primarily up here is fundraising. We raise the funds and then the board down in Chimbote decides what are the immediate projects that we they would like funded. They present their plans to us and then we fund them at whatever levels we feel appropriate or have resources to do so. When we go down there we definitely meet with the, with their local board. They talk to us about needs. We come back, we raise money and then we fund it to there.

Mark Wolak: 9:13

It sounds like what a really creative way for people to support people in another country.

Joe Boyle: 9:21

How do you do your fundraising?

Dan Kuzlik: 9:24

The founders of the organization back before was formerly friends of Chimbote, was called Friends of Father Jack, and he and a nun down there worked very closely to set up all of these programs. Now the story I can tell about Jack is that he's a saint, absolutely a saint. He's got no good skills on management, and when I say management I mean financial management. So, like the first time we're down there, he would take us through the various Esteras and the people and a little old woman you know about four feet ten, would come out all shriveled up and whisper in Jack's ear and he'd say, Dan, give me a hundred sores, which is a Peruvian money, and he'd give it to no accountability, no records, no, nothing. But he did it from the heart of course.

Dan Kuzlik: 10:17

And then finally, when it got very much bigger, people decided you know, we need to have a little bit more organization here. We've set up a 501C3 up in Fargo and they've got to follow certain rules and regulations and accountability. So that's when the friends of Chimbote came above the fundraising I'm going to get back to. He was a very good evangelist. He would come down and do groups in the United States, for example, in other countries too England, Germany, France, Ireland and he would just tell the story and it really would move people. And I remember he would do a lot. He'd take like a can of Campbell's beans and he would hold it up and they say you know, I just bought this at the local store. He might have bought it three weeks before. I just bought this at the local store and it cost me 87 cents. This is what the average Chimbotan earns in one day. 87 cents, wow, American. And of course the people would. Just they couldn't believe that object poverty existing anywhere. And so he got followers. People would donate to them.

Dan Kuzlik: 11:39

We used to do some big fundraisers here in the Twin Cities and in Prior Lake. There was a church there. There became St Michael's. That became very, very involved and they would do big fundraisers like 200, 250 people and that fell out of. You know it's not what people do anymore, you know to go to big things like that. But the continued followers and we do have a website people go to the website and they can see stories and they can hear what happens. And then some of us on the board and others though a little bit of evangelism, you know will send out a little letter and say no pressure. But if you're thinking at the end of the year of giving a little bit, here's a project that you might want to think about. So that's the way we do our fundraising.

Joe Boyle: 12:30

And can you tell us about how the money's used?

Dan Kuzlik: 12:34

Yeah, it's very eclectical in the sense that there's a main thing soup kitchens, medical services, social services. It became very important during COVID of buying and supplying oxygen, which just wasn't available, and they had the resources to do that. They had the resources to teach people how to wear masks, you know, wash your hands, do things like that. So that was important. But also currently a big thing is housing and I've had the opportunity to purchase two houses for families down there and what we'll do in, what Sally and I will do next week, in that following week, the social workers down there who we've hired, who identify families and they'll say these people are in much need.

Dan Kuzlik: 13:32

Very typically it's a single mother with three, four, five children living in an estera, all sleeping on the same dirty mattress or on the floor, and the first thing we do is we go in and we tear that thing down and it's ugly work. I mean you don't want to go in there and think that people actually lived in those conditions. You tear it down completely and start over. And then we've contracted with groups out of Lima. They build prefabricated wooden housing and it's not to the standards that we would have. They're probably like two by two framing, but it's wood and there's a good frame. And the houses that I bought, I made sure that they had a concrete floor. You can do them without a concrete floor, but I just think there's so much more dignity If you live on a floor that you can clean rather than sweeping dirt. So anyway, so we're doing a lot of that lately.

Dan Kuzlik: 14:34

A lot of housing is big, and then the other thing is water. At any developing country, clean water is just it's the biggest thing. So currently in Sally we'll see this when we go down and I've had a chance to see a little preliminary You've taken some wells that have been dug and we're working on a distribution system to pump water up into a large cistern water tank that we see around here in Minnesota and then, through gravity, bring that it's up on a hill, bring that water down right now to central places. We don't have enough resources to deliver them to each home, but eventually then to deliver them to homes so that people have clean water.

Joe Boyle: 15:21

Do you have any stories about Chimbote?

Dan Kuzlik: 15:25

Of course I've got a lot of stories, Some that kind of jump into my mind. When I first went down there and I had referenced the priest, Father Jack Davis, he was very unconventional as a priest. In fact he always got in a lot of trouble with the bishops down there and the archbishops.

Dan Kuzlik: 15:43

So if you would go to as would we, Of course if you would go to one of his services, dogs would be walking up and down the aisles. They'd be walking across the altar. One of his altar boys had Down syndrome and just bought a house for him about two years ago and unfortunately just passed away. But Topo was his name. He served and very focused. When it was time to ring the bells he did them just right. You know what to do.

Dan Kuzlik: 16:19

But then you also had other characters move around and one person that I really became very good friends with. Her name was Maruja. Maruja was born way up on a terrible pig farm on the border of Peru and Ecuador, and she was born crippled and blind. Now, up there that would be what they call a throwaway baby. She's female, no good to anybody. She's crippled, she's blind. I mean, literally put her on the ice floor, if they had one.

Dan Kuzlik: 16:54

So anyway, her mother was smart enough to take Maruja and take her down to a city on the coast called Trujillo, and in Trujillo she literally gave Maruja to a convent of nuns and the nuns took her as a child, educated her, you know, fed her, clothed her, taught her braille, taught her Spanish and then English, and then eventually she moved around a bit to various agencies, but she ended up with Padre Juan, Jack Davis and Chimpote and he gave her a job, which was some dignity, and she basically swept the kitchen and took care of the kitchen duties as best she could. So I met Maruja and she was just great. I was so impressed at somebody with that many handicaps. She was multiply fluent in English and Spanish so she translated a lot for me. But she also, because of visitors that came into the mission, picked up French, German, Italian and could speak at least conversationally with those languages. So we became friends and she had a wicked sense of humor. Smart gal.

Dan Kuzlik: 18:14

Very smart and she was just stubborn about her handicaps. She didn't think she had any handicaps, so she confided in me. She said you know, Don? She would say, Don, I would really like to go up and see my brother, Aldefonso, up where I grew up on the on the pig farm. I said, well, I'll take you up there if you'll take Jackie a yakky as they call her, the cook, because I was in to go up with the woman to take care of her. So she said, fine. So we went up to this place on the border and we went to Trujillo, we went to Aqabaqa, and each time we went we were on a different mode of transportation. We took like a relatively large bus up to Trujillo and a smaller taxi bus up to Aqabaqa. Then, finally, we're on the back of this pickup truck up to Sakaya, which is the name of the town, or not a town, but a place, that where she grew up.

Mark Wolak: 19:20

And about how far was that from Chimbote that?

Dan Kuzlik: 19:23

was about three days and so, anyway, when we got to Aqabaqa and we're going up to Sakaya, I said no, Muruja, how does Aldefanso know to meet us? Because he's going to bring horses up. And what they do is they tie Muruha onto the horse and the saddle with bedsheets because she doesn't have the balance, so she can't see what's going on, so they tie her in. I said well, when Aldefanso comes up with the horses, how does he know we're going to be there? He says, oh, we talked on by radio. Well, that's pretty sophisticated, I don't know yet Two-way radio. You could talk to your brother, I thought it was an old pig farm. So we get up there and the truck drops us off and we're up on top of a mountain, nobody there. And I said well, muruha, did you tell Aldefanso to come up? He said yes, he heard on the radio. And I said well, what did he say? What do you mean? I said, well, what did he say when you talked to him on the radio? He said oh, no, we just tell the little local station that's doing Peruvian music to say Aldefanso, if you're listening, muruha, and the gringo is coming up. I mean I'm up in the mountain. I said, oh boy.

Dan Kuzlik: 20:36

So we waited probably about two hours, fingers crossed, and finally I said Muruha, is this the path to your deal? He said yeah, it's a couple of kilometers away. I said I will go down. So I went down and halfway down I met a young man that said he was Muruha's cousin or something, and he said I will take you right to where we need to go. So we started walking down and we were in kind of heavy bush. We came over a hill.

Dan Kuzlik: 21:07

Down in the valley there were about a dozen men in white pants, white coats and white hats. He goes arbajo and get down. I said, okay, what's going on? What's going on? He said the banditos. The banditos are protecting their cocaine and we don't want them to see us. So they finally went away. And then a little further down here comes Aldefanso with the horses and I said well, I'm not gonna walk back. Aldefanso I forgot his name, the cousin. He'll take me down, you get Muruha and Yaki and you can come down later. So that's what happened. But it was just an interesting story that culturally I thought a radio meant a two-wave radio and for them it meant we just broadcast over the valley and hopefully Aldefanso is listening to the radio.

Mark Wolak: 22:03

Not unlike a podcast.

Joe Boyle: 22:14

And now it's time for Stories in Life. Art from the Heart, deep Thoughts from the Shallow End. Each episode, we bring you a poem, a song or a reading, just for you.

Mark Wolak: 22:43

This is a communication of gratitude sent from my friend, Neil, to his children, and I wanted to share this one as our Art from the Heart today. Here goes. "The one thing that has had the most positive impact on my life is being thankful. Gratitude unlocked the fullness of my life. It turned what I have into enough and more. It turned denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It turned a meal into a feast, my house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It has turned problems into gifts, failures into successes and mistakes into important events. Gratitude helped me make sense of my past and brings peace to most days. Gratitude makes things right, turns negative energy into positive energy. I said thank you until I meant it. I said it long enough until I believed it. When I feel lonely, alone, wanting someone to be there for me, I found the quickest way out of that feeling is to give love and to give thanks.

Mark Wolak: 24:58

So we also need to ask you a little bit about your global travels, because I know that, first of all, dan, you're the only person I know that can pick up and go to another country in a few days. You're really good at that. You've done that probably for 40 years, maybe for sure 30, as long as I've known you.

Dan Kuzlik: 25:18

Sure.

Mark Wolak: 25:18

And I was sharing that with Joe earlier that I don't know anybody who travels as much as you have with the frame of learning, you know, and I have a son that's doing that now as part of his profession. But tell us about that. What got you? I mean, come on, you're a kid from South Chicago, south Side Chicago, right. Yeah, and what got you the bug to step off a dock and go travel?

Dan Kuzlik: 25:45

Yeah, well, it's interesting to me. Anyway, I never was in the airplane until I was about 25 years old. You know, that wasn't something that you would do, at least with the way I grew up and I loved it. And then I got into my profession. I ran for some, I threw my name and I should say, rather than ran to volunteer to be a various part of the leadership of certain groups, and I became the president of what was then called as no longer existence, the National Community Education Association, and the National Community Education Association had international conferences every four years. In one year, because I was president, I was able to go to Thailand where they had their conference here, and I just loved it. I mean, I love the difference, the cultural difference, the architectural difference, the language difference, and I just said this is for me. Then I also professionally, just jumping, because I was just telling somebody on the telephone this this morning I did a keynote presentation in Krasnoyar, siberia, and it was just after the Berlin Wall had fallen and all of the stands who were under communist rule you'd Vic of stand Turk, of stand Afghanistan they said, okay, now we're not communists anymore.

Dan Kuzlik: 27:22

What do we do? You know, we're supposed to be a democracy. What do we do? So they set up this conference and I did a keynote and at the end of my keynote a woman came up to me, an old woman, and she spoke English and she says I heard your, your talk and I liked it very much and I want to let you know in our village the name Kuzlik means little go to, and if you will come to my village I will make you a meal of camel and goat.

Dan Kuzlik: 27:54

I didn't make that appointment, but I did know that I was a little goat and and of course, my my, my maternal background is Polish. My father was born in the United States but his parents were born in Poland and two or three years ago, where we live in downtown Minneapolis, they had a Polish festival and they had a booth. We could go in there and trace your name to where that name was in Poland. So I had always thought that maybe my parents or grandparents had shortened my name from Kuzliski and dropped the ski, like they did at Ellis Island for a lot of groups, and became Kuzlik. But they said no, kuzlik is a regular Polish name and they live in the Krakow area. And, by the way, your name in Poland means little cow, so I don't know if I'm a little cow or a little goat, but I'm a little something.

Mark Wolak: 28:50

We love that about you, dan, so you guys are heading there next week. You're going to take down a couple houses. What else do you have planned?

Dan Kuzlik: 28:59

I'm on the board, so there's a group of but 40 of us going down. This is larger than usual. People bringing spouses, some bringing children, are going to work. So the organizer has put this together very well put people in groups so that when our board is meeting and we're meeting with the, with the local board down there talking about what's going on and what we can do, people that are not on the board will be out there doing various things in the community working the soup kitchen, other things and then sometimes we as a board will be working with them and sometimes not. One example I just love this.

Dan Kuzlik: 29:40

I've done this a couple of times now this year for a lot of reasons. I'm not. I don't have the resources to buy another house, but what I am supporting is called the loaves and fishes campaign, and what they do is they go up into a very, very impoverished neighborhood the night before. They contract with fishermen to go out and catch sea bass, ice them down in the early morning, they bring them up and then they bring some kind of a vegetable it could be a yucca, it could be an avocado or something, or avocado is a fruit, but something like that and then they bring pond. Pond is bread and of course, pond is like a staple bread, bread, bread, and what we actually do.

Dan Kuzlik: 30:22

Give people plastic bags like a target bag, and they come. We drop a couple of fish in there, we drop a loaf of bag of a pond which are rolls, throw in some yucca, throw in some avocado and they for at least one night and probably more than one night. They're going to eat well and they're just. You know, they just line up and I've given fresh water. Water is important up there too, but it's so I get to sponsor one of those this time, and and Sally will be up there with me.

Mark Wolak: 30:51

Oh fun.

Dan Kuzlik: 30:52

Yeah, it's very. It's very because it's so direct. You know it's immediate. Yeah you know that those people at that night, even if they're usually go to bed hungry, are going to eat fish and pond avocado and yucca, that's great.

Mark Wolak: 31:06

Yeah, that's just wonderful.

Joe Boyle: 31:08

If our listeners would like to get involved or learn more about your organization. What's your website?

Dan Kuzlik: 31:15

It's called Friends of Chimbote. org, so friends, just like the word, and Chimbote is spelled C, h, I, m b, o, t, e and that's one word Org. And we've got a website that talks about some of the things we do, actually has a couple of videos out there to show. I think they've got one of me kissing a fish before I gave it out, and yeah, and so if people were just interested in finding out more about it, that would be great, just so they'd have that information If they ended up. There's a place that they can donate online. They could click on there and give a credit card and secure credit card and donate something.

Mark Wolak: 32:01

So we'll, at the end of our episode, we'll put the website, we'll say that again for people.

Joe Boyle: 32:07

I'd also like to ask you one more thing, a very important question what kind of music do you listen to?

Dan Kuzlik: 32:14

I'm really pretty eclectic in music. I have to admit I just can't quite get into rap. It just hasn't done it for me at old rock and roll, folk music, classical music, jazz. I really like jazz. Growing up in Chicago especially, you know some of the.

Joe Boyle: 32:33

The older jazz Duke Ellington stuff like that, oh yeah exactly Dave Brubek Progressive jazz you know.

Dan Kuzlik: 32:43

Then also, I really like and this was even before I got involved in shambhote I like the kind of bossa nova, south American, sergio Mendez, some of those, some of the saxophone players From South America right.

Mark Wolak: 33:01

So we want you to come back after shambhote with some recordings from the field and We'll take another shot at this sounds great.

Dan Kuzlik: 33:10

Thank you so much for doing this. It was wonderful. Thanks for being here, great job.

Mark Wolak: 33:15

We have one special addition to this episode. Sally Latimer interviewed father Jack and, if you're interested, you can keep listening for a few more minutes and hear firsthand his story of 40 plus years of working in shambhote, peru, in Leading community efforts for improvement and change. So thank you, sally Latimer and Dan Kuzlik, for providing this wonderful episode.

Father Jack: 33:46

Don't remember exactly the year, but one day I was visiting with Marlene Christiansen and Fargo and she said that she knew of Gary Zespi, who had heard me speak at Holy Spirit, barish and Fargo and he would like to meet me, and so I said, well, yeah, let's get together for coffee. So he went over to Marlene and Boyd Christiansen's home and we started talking about Chambote and I said, gary, the most important thing, I think, is for you to go down to Chambote and See Chambote, and then you you respond how you can. So Gary went down, he came back to Fargo and he set up a 501 C3 status and and and we named he named basically the the new organization called Los Amigos del Padre Juan, and Because of that and that wonderful decision on the part of Gary, we were able to receive major donations from people who wish to claim it on their income tax as a donation to a charitable organ organization, but to do that, it has to be of a 501 C3 status. That was actually the beginning and through that effort of Gary Zespi, things really took off and we were able to help so many more people with many different types of projects and when I left the parish 2013, we had seven soup kitchens, seven libraries, a medical post, a Hospice for the dying, we had four centers for delinquents for and he is over Niles, and so many different projects taking place thanks To the support that we received. And then, later on, we changed the name to friends of Chambote, and that is what is continuing, and Years ago, when we started 20 some years ago we were building homes out of a stare, and now friends of Chambote and the organization in Chambote called a cough Association civil, a poyo familiar is now building homes with material, prefabricated wood and cement floors, and they're wonderful, wonderful little homes, sometimes two, three bedroom homes, and it's such an upgrade from what we did was a stare.

Father Jack: 36:30

These homes will last 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, because it's a dry climate. However, the stare would last two, three, four, five years maximum. So it was it. Really. Things are moving up and we're working in developmental projects more so than individual help, and they've now taken a community called Cambio Puente and I was there just before I left to come up to Fargo and they Putting in water to the homes. They built something like 2025 houses, prefabricated homes out there. They set up a beautiful daycare center and this group from Evangelical Church in Charlotte, north Carolina Waypoint Church. They were painting the Catholic Church and it was marvelous stuff. So it's it's really Going strong. I'm so terribly pleased and Grateful the support that Friends of Chamboti continues to help the poor in Chamboti, and not only in Chamboti itself a Cambio Puente out outside of Chamboti, but many neighborhoods in Chamboti that are poorer Than the one we started with, la Victoria, yeah, when I went there in 1986. So it's a great. Great things are happening, progress, and it certainly deserves all the support.

Father Jack: 38:10

Peggy left Fargo shortly thereafter and up and became president or became principal of a school in Langdon, north Dakota, and then she went down to visit me in 1982 and then came back to work and from 1982 until about four years ago maybe five now, time goes by did marvelous, marvelous work in Chambotty, especially in education. We started out in the parish of San Francisco de Asis and then we moved over to a more poorer parish called Nuestra Señora del Perpetro Sacorro, and that was at the time where there was a lot of violence and atrocities taking place up in the mountains around Cusco and Aicuccio and the wildest in those places, but it hadn't arrived in Chambotty. We were pretty much immune to this terrorist violence. However, in 1990 and the 9th of August 1991, excuse me there was two young Polish priests, franciscans Miguel Espiegniw, were up in a place called Pariocoto and they were murdered by the shining path. And that was just 12, 10, 12 days after Padre Miguel Company, a priest from Spain, from New York, spain, who had been ordained the same week I was in 1969, he was shot in the head and the bullet went under his ear and over his tongue and he survived. But that was an attempt by the shining path, cenderu Luminoso, and they were the ones that attacked and killed Miguel Espiegniw.

Father Jack: 40:03

And in August 25th Padre Sandro D'Orti was murdered by them and he had planned to leave on the 26th to get out of his parish in Santa. But he said well, I've got baptisms, I've got things to do in Vinzos, and so on the way back from Mass in Vinzos, the Communists put up a roadblock. He got out of his jeep, begged them not to kill him and they shot him, left his body in the sand and drove away in his jeep. So it was a pretty difficult time for us and my name appeared on the death list. I had heard about it in August 15th. I got a death list on August 13th myself, and then we were warned that they were going to kill three foreign priests per week in the 15th of August, and then they killed Padre Sandro on the 25th and then the 27th my name appeared on a list of bulletins distributed in a place called Trapatio and the bishop said I had to leave and I went on the plane with him down to Lima with accompanied by three Italian sisters.

Father Jack: 41:19

Padre Sandro was from the Diocese of Bergamo in Italy and on that trip, conversation with the three nuns, they were talking about Sandro's last days, 15 days of his life, and he said to them, when he got news that they'd killed Miguel and his big nephew, he said I will be next, and after me Juanito, the shining past, we're going to kill him. And then we kill me. Well, they did kill him, and so I was down in Lima and hiding in Lima and then finally the superior said I had to get out of the country. So I went up to Guayaquil, ecuador, and I stayed up there until the 10th of December and went back to Chimbalte. The bishop said I could return and then they sent me down to Lima, in Caraballillo, and after Christmas, and then I went back to Chimbalte for Lent and then they sent me back and I ended up in Holy Week in Monagua, nicaragua, and then I went over to study in Belgium and around the United States and then got back for my right after my birthday in August, and then they captured Abemiel Guzman, the founder of San Dero Luminozo, and we felt a little more secure.

Father Jack: 42:41

But it actually took years and the post trauma and all this that happened. I used to stay in a different house every night, and so it was not fun to be on a death list and Sister Peggy and Wilder when I'd go to a different place, wilder Benitez, who lived in the house, wilder and Sister Peggy didn't know where I was. So that meant that if they did come for me, they would know, and that enabled me to get a good night's sleep, because I knew when I was at my place in the parish, the dogs would bark and I'm thinking they're coming over the wall and I couldn't sleep. So it went on for months and months, even after Abemiel Guzman. But we got through it and the Lord blessed us and the Lord gave us courage and most of us continued on in Chimbalte and until I left in basically that parish in 2013.

Mark Wolak: 43:47

Amazing, amazing story. Thank you, Father Jack.

Joe Boyle: 43:51

Boy, Mark, father Jack's commitment, 40 years, friends of Chimbalte and Dan's 30 years. I mean that's real commitment, that's making it happen down there, that's amazing.

Mark Wolak: 44:05

That's impressive. It is a very impressive commitment.

Joe Boyle: 44:09

Just think how many lives they've changed in that 40 years.

Mark Wolak: 44:13

Yeah, very true, there was some reference about Shining Path. What did you find out about that?

Joe Boyle: 44:19

Well, the Shining Path is a communist group in Peru. Let's see here. The Shining Path launched its war against Peruvian society in July 1980. Its goal is to destroy Peru's governmental and social institutions and replace them with a radical Marxist, maoist regime.

Mark Wolak: 44:42

Interesting name Shining Path. And then, how about our music today?

Joe Boyle: 44:48

Well, there was the Peruvian instrumental Elsa, that's by Los Destes. We also had the infamous Dave Brubeck, an office timeout album that was Take Five from 1959. And then the Bossa Nova music was Samba Sarava by Pauli Croze.

Mark Wolak: 45:14

And then folks, if you're interested, friends of Shimbotayorg is the website where you can gain more information about making donations and the work that's being done down there. Thanks, joe, thank you Mark.

Joe Boyle: 45:33

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please join us again next time on Stories in Life on the radio with Mark and Joe, and visit our website at storiesinlife. buzzsprout. com or email us at storiesinlifepodcast@ gmailcom.