Fr Martin McCormack is taking students on an educational trip to Swaziland where the average life expectancy is 36 years, reports Éibhir Mulqueen
On June 19th Fr Martin McCormack will be taking seven students from the Salesian College, Pallaskenry, Co Limerick, to visit Swaziland, the tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa for three weeks.
A teacher at the west Limerick school, Fr McCormack's heart remains in Africa where he first went as a seminarian in 1976 and spent much of his time post-ordination before coming home in 1983 with liver malaria. "Once Africa enters your heart it never leaves. I look at the sun, it is an African sun, I look at the sky and it is an African sky. Africa will always be home."
The student trip, the second such one he has organised for pre-Leaving Cert students, will be part educational, part sightseeing. "They will go around with our own people, with our care workers and our social workers. They have made a huge impact by their fundraising. It is important for them to see how much."
They will be accompanied by another teacher, and a further two nurses and a healthcare worker will stay on with Fr McCormack for six weeks.
After last year's group of students returned, they raised enough funds for the building of five wells after they saw a watering hole being shared between people and cattle.
But Swaziland is defined more by its Aids epidemic than its poverty. The greater sub-Saharan region has an estimated 25 million people with Aids. The figures for Swaziland are bleak: it has the highest known rates of Aids/HIV, with an estimated 42.6 per cent of the 1.2 million population carrying the virus. This has reduced the average life expectancy to 36 years.
Fr McCormack says: "The whole fabric of society is breaking down." The Salesian mission in Swaziland - a monarchy where political parties are still banned - is over 50 years old and was originally aimed at providing education. Basic education programmes have since branched into care and education of street children and orphans, and adult education. "Education is not free in Swaziland. Part of what we are trying to do is organise bursaries. Education is a huge way forward," he says.
Through its Hope House care programme, the order has built 16 hospice homes and the Bosco Skills Centre programme, a workshop system, teaches orphans such skills as woodwork, mechanics, computer skills, hairdressing and welding. Based on a domino principle, each person who passes through is requested to train four more people in their own locality. Often it does not work: Aids mortality rates continually cut a swathe through the country's wage-earners, leaving a huge dependency population of children and elderly in abject poverty.
Aids, says Fr McCormack, is just a word in Ireland. The treatments can now keep the illness at bay indefinitely. In Swaziland, it means a lingering death, where carers struggle to provide even basic palliative care. When caring for the dying, the Salesians aim to allow death with dignity. "In the latter stages they cannot close their eyes or mouth. Their lungs are filled with fluid so they cannot breathe. You do not have drugs because of the cost of them."
The hospices have a two to three-week turnover rate. "We are planning an outreach programme to the rural areas, to encourage people to be cared for at home. But that is a huge cultural thing."
Despite the overwhelming problems, he does not see the situation as hopeless. "I see tremendous dignity in the African people in the midst of poverty and disaster. You meet young people and they are always smiling and they have little or nothing. What motivates me is that if you can make one person's life better, it is worth the effort. If people like me do not get off our knees and do something, nobody else will."
The West has let Africa down by refusing to abolish its debt and the drugs companies have also failed it, he believes, while a lot of aid is tied in with Western company contracts, "a kind of bondage". "I was very upset that our own Government cut back on aid and we are one of the richest countries in Europe."
On a day-to-day level, he is aghast at the food wastage here. "I have seen people rooting through dustbins trying to make a living and feed a family. I see people living on one bowl of rice. There is something wrong with a world society where children are dying when there is plenty."
He remembers one student on last year's trip to Swaziland who was about to throw away a half carton of chips at a fastfood restaurant. A woman with a child said, 'Girl, can I have that?' That left a huge impression on the students."
Much of the Aids awareness programme is aimed at tackling cultural and superstitious norms. The average child of 13 in Swaziland has already had five or six sexual encounters. "There is a daft nonsense going around that if you have the virus and you have sex with a virgin, you will get rid of the virus."
In addition, health educators are up against a strong patriarchal tradition. "In the African culture, a woman cannot say no to sex. She cannot refuse a male advance. If women are empowered we have some chance of changing the attitudes of young people."
The issue of contraception and the Catholic Church's stance on it does not even arise. "If people want to use them, they will use them. But they are not. Some of the most explicit leaflets on sex education I have seen are in southern Africa. But it seems to be making no impact whatsoever."
He believes health education will be a long struggle because the concept of equal rights is unknown and superstitions about being bewitched prevail.
Fr McCormack does not compare the suffering people have in the West and what people have to endure in Third World countries. "Everybody's pain and concern is unique and real for themselves. I would never make a comparison.
"There is another emptiness in Ireland. There is a different kind of emptiness, an emptiness of meaning."
Anyone wishing to donate funds for the Salesian missions in Swaziland and South Africa should make them payable to the Salesian Mission Funds, c/o Fr Martin McCormack, Salesian College, Pallaskenry, Co Limerick.