Morning

Maria Ochsner’s day started like any other at one of two Amate House residences in the mostly Mexican Little Village neighborhood. This one, near the former St. Ludmilla Parish on South Albany, is home to seven young women, all of whom work in the predominantly Spanish-speaking community.

Ochsner, a Portland, Ore., native, plans to attend medical school next year, and she spends her days working with clients at Programa CIELO. Programa CIELO began 10 years ago to try to connect the immigrant population of Little Village to the U.S. health care system, in partnership with St. Anthony Hospital. Many clients don’t have immigration documents and no way to obtain health insurance, so the program has a loose network of doctors who have agreed to see patients for nominal fees. A program that began serving 500 clients a year last served 25,000, said executive director Barbara Staley, a Missionary Sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It did so with the equivalent of three full-time employees and the rest volunteers.

Since Ochsner plans a career in medicine, she most enjoys the time she spends providing direct services to patients, whether it’s teaching the new Heart Smart class for women or providing blood pressure, cholesterol or diabetes screenings.

This morning, a young woman wanted a pregnancy test—one of the most common requests from the program.

“She was very young, not married, here maybe two months, all by herself,” Ochsner said. “She was just terrified. She needed to talk more than she needed the test.”

So Ochsner, who is rapidly improving her Spanish, sat and talked and listened for about 20 minutes before doing the test. That’s one of the biggest things Ochsner learned in her first six weeks at Programa CIELO: For people without education, without a good command of English, without the resources to get regular, affordable medical care, almost any interaction with the medical system can be frightening.

The woman’s pregnancy test came back positive, so the Notre Dame graduate helped her with the forms to sign up for KidCare, Illinois’ health insurance program for low-income children. While the mother might not have legal immigration status, the baby will be a U.S. citizen if it is born here, so the mother qualifies for pre-natal care under KidCare.

In another room, three middle-aged clients are meeting with other staff to learn about the complications of diabetes. Type II diabetes is rampant in the Latino community, especially among immigrants, perhaps partially because of genetics, but also because of a change in lifestyle and diet when they come to the United States.

Ochsner, 22, said she was surprised when she started teaching how little the women who joined her class knew about basic nutrition—the differences between carbohydrates, proteins and fats, for instance, or why it’s healthier for adults to drink skim milk than whole milk.

“It’s something they don’t get a lot of information about in their culture,” she said. “And in Mexico, a lot of them had more active lifestyles, so it probably didn’t matter as much.”

Midday

The smell of lunchtime’s fried food lingers in the halls of St. Gregory the Great High School in Andersonville on Chicago’s North Side. The students in Dan Welch’s senior English classes look as if they’d rather be sleeping off their meal than studying ballads as part of a unit on medieval literature. Welch, a tall redhead, decided to return to Amate House and to St. Gregory for a second year, he said, “because I thought there was still work to be done.”

Now he thinks that attitude leads to 40-year teaching careers. There will always be more work to be done. There will always be more students who are struggling with problems at home and at school, more students who need help to even approach a subject like high school biology with confidence that they can master it.

Such difficulties seem foreign to Welch, who was raised in California’s Yosemite National Park.

“I walked 20 minutes to school with a meadow over here and a waterfall over there,” he said. “I had six students in my eighth-grade graduating class.”

And while St. Gregory’s area is far from Chicago’s toughest neighborhood, some of its 275 students still find themselves crossing the territories of rival gangs to make it to school, many of the students come from single-parent homes and nearly a quarter of them are in the learning resource program for students with disabilities.

“The most challenging thing for me hasn’t been classroom management or lesson planning,” said Welch, although he did have to make an effort to learn how to do those things. “The biggest challenge was to take people who have had difficult lives and figure out how much to expect from them—when to make them really work, and when to give them a break on a day when they really need a break. That’s a line we walk every day.”

While Welch is teaching for a second year at St. Gregory, he did move to a new Amate House residence this year. Last year, he lived in the former convent at St. William Parish on the far Northwest Side; this year, he moved into the new St. Gelasius residence, housed in the closed Englewood parish’s rectory.

Since he started teaching, he’s figured out that he can’t change the world, at least not all at once.

“I enjoy what I do every day, and I know a lot of people who can’t say that,” he said. “I feel that what I’m doing makes a small difference for individual kids. … You realize that you’re so small and the world is so big. It’s the little victories that make it worthwhile.”

Afternoon

Andrea Swinehart has known she wanted to do a post-college year of service since she was in fourth grade. Then she was thinking about spending a year as a missionary in Africa, working in a totally foreign environment and having daily adventures. Her reality is a doorless cubicle with a Chicago ward map tacked to the wall, next to the copier at Deborah’s Place, a not-for-profit run by Benedictine Sister Patricia Crowley that provides emergency, transitional and permanent housing for women who are or have been homeless.

Swinehart, who is working as the Deborah’s Place advocacy coordinator, couldn’t be happier. She hopes to work in the public policy arena, and her efforts at lobbying on behalf of affordable housing and other issues will provide valuable experience.

At the same time, she spends time every week with the homeless women who use the Deborah’s Place daytime drop-in center to get mail, use the phone or take a shower. Once she gets to know them a little better, she said, she plans to get them talking about the public policy issues that matter to them—and teach them how to approach their elected officials to get those issues addressed.

“I’ve enjoyed working on short-term projects in the past,” she said. “Now I feel like I’m working on the same issues, but on a larger scale.”

Swinehart, 22, lives at the St. William residence, where she has a chance to attend daily Mass and participate in weekly “simple meals” using no pre-packaged goods. All of the Amate House residences have some kind of simplicity ritual.

“This is the beginning of my adult life, really my first time on my own,” Swinehart said. “I wanted to accept the challenge to live simply.”

It is also sometimes a challenge to accept the gulf between her experience and that of the women who turn to Deborah’s Place for help.

“I had the good fortune to be born into a family that could support me,” she said. “I ask myself why God gave me all these advantages.”

She does not have an answer, but she also hasn’t given up.

“I’m not discouraged yet,” she said.

Evening

All the full-time Amate House volunteers gather for dinner at 6 p.m. at the St. William residence. Such group dinners happen about once a month, said Executive Director Mark Laboe.

Amate House, now in its 20th year, has grown greatly, making it a challenge for Laboe and other staffers to raise the money needed to support it. Although it is an agency of the Archdiocese of Chicago, none of its $600,000 budget comes from the archdiocese. Rather, it comes from fundraisers, grants, contributions from the organizations that benefit from Amate House volunteers and individual donations.

The opening of the new St. Gelasius residence meant additional staff and a larger volunteer corps, both of which added to the program’s cost. Each volunteer receives a $100 stipend each month, plus $500 at the end of their 10 months of service, plus room and board and health insurance.

Those who join the program come at it from a perspective of faith, he said, although they are all at different points on their faith journeys.

“Our mission is predominantly the faith formation of the people who are here with us,” Laboe said. “That’s mission 1A. Mission IB is the service they provide. They’re equally important. It’s not something we put in any of our literature, but it exposes people to things they haven’t seen before, to the underbelly of poverty in our society. That in itself is very transforming.. Our hope is that people leave with a different worldview.”

Of the nearly 389 Amate House alumni who have served since the program began 20 years ago, 65 percent are in social service, public service, teaching or ministry. Seventeen percent are in graduate school, and 12 percent are in other fields such as law, business or medicine. Six percent are at-home parents.

People who volunteer for a year of service are the ones most likely to go into some kind of ministry or service work anyway, he allows. Still nearly a third of Amate House volunteers end up staying and working at their volunteer sites, at least for a while, after they finish their year of service.

After discussing the program, Laboe checks to make sure most of the volunteers have arrived, and the St. William residents, this evening’s hosts, ring the bell for dinner.

Everyone files into the dining room, but no one approaches the side table laden with sloppy joes, salad, cookies and brownies. Instead, they stand around the dining tables, join hands, thank God for the day, and ask for the strength and the patience to get through tomorrow.

For more information about Amate House, or to make a donation, call (773) 745-0002