Our outreach efforts with Buen Pastor began in 2018 during a visit from members of some Episcopal churches in the US. We wanted to support communities in need, so we began some exploration in the south of Merida, where the poorest in Merida live. We wanted to find people who needed our help, not simply in spiritual or liturgical terms, but with the basics, like food, shelter and clothing.

After that first meeting, we stayed in contact and began to go every Sunday. Our first service there was during Easter that year. We brought the Easter candle, and our music maestro Bernardo came with us to play. It was very beautiful!

A few months later, we bought a small shelter and it’s in this humble structure that we have conducted our services, at 5:30 pm on Sundays, ever since. We have a meal together, have had quite a few baptisms and several confirmations as well.

During the pandemic, our efforts shifted. We had to stop services for a time and so many people were without work. We put together baskets and packages of food, 200 or more each week and continued this for several months.

During this time, the need was so great. We are so grateful for the support that our parish here in Merida and our friends in the US and Canada provided. We kept going with these donations. We even had a friend with a factory for packaging vegetables, fish and other foods and they offered us truckloads of foods when they could. One time, a load of cucumbers and another time, frozen egg yolks!

The Buen Pastor community is mostly women – mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers – and children. These women have developed a sense of ownership, a sense of duty and they show up. They clean the area on Saturdays. They have their own bazaars in the space during the week.

Our efforts with Buen Pastor empower these women. They carry the family, they care for the children, they care for the home. They also go out and work as well! And we are for the first time are telling them that they are worth it. We are telling them that they have value. We are telling them that they should look at themselves and be proud of themselves.

Our aim in Buen Pastor is on a human level. It is not evangelism to our faith or to the Anglican church. We are there to gather people and care for them in a social way. This comes from our belief that the church is there to remind people of their dignity of their self-worth and of their worth as a society, as a group, that they can organize themselves, that they are stronger when they organize themselves, that they are stronger when they plan things together and fight for a cause.

Now we are working on a project to buy the land that we’re using each Sunday. When we won the land, we can put more of a structure together, a concrete floor and some walls or columns to hold up the roof. The we would have shelter from rain and the sun. Once we have this, we would also like to do other activities during the week. Our dream would be to have a social center there, with cooking classes, regular visits by doctors and dentists, literacy classes, schooling for the children and a social place for young people.