(ANS – New Rochelle) – Salesian Lay Missioners Michael Gotta and Patrick Sabol were commissioned in August 2013 to serve at the Salesian secondary school, parish, and youth center in Gumbo, a suburb of Juba, capital of South Sudan.  An interview with the two volunteers is given below.

by Fr. Mike Mendl, SDB

They’re both alumni of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and they arrived at Gumbo on August 30, 2013, and remained until mid-July 2014 but had to be evacuated for a month to Kenya at the height of South Sudan’s civil war in January 2014. Both Pat and Mike assisted with an SLM discernment weekend in New Rochelle on April 11-12, and enjoyed their reunion, that made a big impression on the SLM candidates.

What were your responsibilities in Juba?

Mainly we taught in the secondary school, which enrolls youths and young adults of both sexes between the ages of 14 and 30. That spread comes from the unavailability of schooling in much of the country, and its interruption by years of war. So when some teens or adults get a chance to start or return to school, they come. There’s no GED program!

When the school year started, we had about 65 pupils, but when the fighting broke out in December, refugees flowed into the city and the Salesians welcomed everyone in our compound—which not all places did. Consequently, our school enrollment went up to 180.

We also had administrative duties; in fact, just two weeks into the school year the principal, Fr. Patrick, died very unexpectedly. Fr. David was named principal but was so busy with his other responsibilities that a lot of the administrative work was delegated to us. One of our particular duties was to interview prospective students. Entrance criteria weren’t very strict, but the kids did have to know English because that’s the language of instruction.

We helped out in the parish and ran the attached youth center. The parish has three Masses each Sunday, one each in Arabic, English, and Bari, the local language. The Bari Mass got the biggest crowd; altogether, about 1,000 people came to Mass each Sunday, and of course on major feasts like Easter there were many, many more.

What was your most rewarding experience?

Mike: Learning to love the people. They came from many different places and brought a great cultural diversity, which we got to experience. And we shared some of our own culture with them. This displayed the universality of the Catholic Church.

Pat: Seeing the relationships of the people there, the struggles they went through, and walking alongside them in their daily lives and seeing them grow.

What was the most difficult or most challenging part of your mission?

Pat: Seeing the suffering, particularly when the fighting began again. We had so many IDPs (internally displaced persons) in our compound. When we arrived, they were still experiencing the joy of their newly won independence (…) and then in December it all fell apart.

Mike: Seeing the hardness of heart of the leaders (who instigated the war), and of some of the people too. Some members of the two main tribes, the Dinka and the Nuer, display great hatred for the other tribe (…).

What’s been challenging about readjusting to life at home?

Pat: It’s been a big change to shift from living in a Salesian community to living on my own; from working with the Salesians in ministry to working a secular job in the Philadelphia area. My life is no longer so church-focused. I have to find different ways to bring my faith into my daily life.

Mike: I have to make an internal attempt to live more selflessly in my daily life, as I saw and was so much encouraged to do on mission. I have to try to understand the struggles others are facing here. I have to try to be intentional about what I do and why I do it. Living and working in the mission was much less distracting because there was so much less materialism around us.

More information is available on: Mike Gotta and Pat Sabol blogs.

Published 16/04/2015