Mission Possible!
Called to serve: from Chicago to Honduras

By Michelle Martin
Contributor

If there’s one thing Erika Myette isn’t looking forward to, it’s the bugs. The spiders and scorpions, to be exact.

But Myette, her husband, Michael-John, and son, Michael, are looking forward to spending more than two years at a rural Honduran orphanage, the Farm of the Child.

The Myettes and fellow Chicago resident Daniel Johnston will be part of a team of nine U.S. volunteers who will work in support of the children and their houseparents and teachers.

The three, all Notre Dame graduates, said they feel called by their faith to serve others, and this is an opportunity they might never get again.

“The real short answer as to why I’m doing it is that I think I’m going to make the world a better place,” said Michael-John Myette, a 2000 graduate of Notre Dame who has been working a not-for-profit Catholic high school scholarship program. “I’m working to bring the kingdom of God here. I don’t mean it to sound like it’s all selfless—I’m really working for my own salvation.”

Plus, Myette said, he likes to travel, having studied in Jerusalem and visited several Middle Eastern countries. His salary in the not-for-profit sector, and Erika Myette’s earnings as a part-time researcher, won’t pay for international adventures.

Johnston, a 2001 Notre Dame graduate, works as a freelance computer consultant and volunteers as a tutor at the Midtown Educational Foundation. He was raised in Montgomery, Ala., but was born in New Mexico, where his parents were houseparents to 15 Navajo orphans.

“The fact that it’s an orphanage … I just love working with kids,” Johnston said, when asked why he chose to go to the Farm of the Child.

He has always wanted to live a life of service, he said, and moved to Chicago after graduation to do a one-year internship at Midtown. But now that he’s on his own, he’s finding it harder to live the way he wants to in Chicago.

“I told myself I don’t have to go to another country to live that way,” Johnston said. “But my time has been taken up more by trying to pay the bills. I kind of wanted to stop and redirect where I was headed.”

Where he is headed now is an orphanage with a Catholic school and medical center on the Honduran coast outside the town of Trujillo. The farm—“la finca” to the children—is home to 42 youngsters, ages 1 to 17. Some have lost both parents, some have been abandoned, others have parents who are temporarily unable to care for them.

The volunteers all will spend about two months in Spanish language school in Guatemala before arriving at the Farm Oct. 1. Once there, they will get a taste of the jobs that need to be done and a chance to meet the outgoing group of volunteers. After they have a couple of weeks to decide what they like, they will be matched with the available jobs.

Erika Myette said she doesn’t yet know what she or Michael-John will be doing, or how they will arrange child care for Michael, who will celebrate his second birthday next January.

But staff members at The Farm of the Child have said they will find a way to work something out.

“When we applied, I said I didn’t want him in child care full-time,” Myette said. “I work part-time now so that he doesn’t have to be in child care full time. They said that what they do is raise children, and they wouldn’t do anything to stand in the way of us raising our child.”

That said, she’s looking forward to the opportunity for Michael to be in preschool classes with the Honduran children, “I’m looking forward to parenting him in a different culture.”

“So much of my work is teaching parenting skills to people from other cultures, whether immigrants or from here in the United States,” said Myette, who grew up in South Holland and has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago along with her 1999 bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame. The Myettes will be the first family with a child to serve as volunteers at the Farm, which was founded by a Guatemalan couple in 1995. The man, Vincent Pescatore, died in a plane crash just as the project was getting off the ground, but it was continued by his wife, Zulena, who also continued to raise their five children. She is still involved, although the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception took over the operation at her request in 2000.

“It’s really a grassroots kind of thing,” said Michael-John Myette. “It runs to a great extent on the strength of the volunteers who come back and spread the word.”

Some of the first were Notre Dame alumni, who came back and talked about the Farm at their alma mater. That’s how the Myettes and Johnston first heard about it.

The first time the Myettes applied to be volunteers, in 2001, they were turned down because the Farm didn’t have the facilities to accept a married couple. At the time, all the volunteers lived in community in one house.

Most of the volunteers still do, and the Myettes will be part of that community, but with their own small house so that they can have some private time as a family, Michael-John Myette said.

All three now are in the final stages of preparing to go. They must raise enough money to cover their expenses while they are



there—$22,000 for the Myettes, $10,000 for Johnston—while finishing up work. The Myettes have sold their Hyde Park condominium and are temporarily living with Erika Myette’s parents in Mokena, who are soaking up time with their first grandchild.

Most people they meet are excited to hear about the trip, and many have been generous, the group said.

“Most people, especially people around my age, say, ‘Oh, wow. I wish I could something like that,’” Johnston said.

“And they can,” Erika Myette broke in. “They just don’t think they can.”

“They have this idea in their head that it’s something they could never do,” Johnston said. “People have this idea of where they are and where their lives are going, but they aren’t very accurate. … An important part of faith is that we don’t really have control over our own security. Most of that stuff is really out of our hands, and if you spend all your time working for your own security, you’ll miss out on a lot of important stuff.”

Michael-John Myette said he and Erika made a conscious decision to turn some of those decisions over to God.

“Erika and I both basically had to quit our jobs and sell our condo before we knew if we were accepted,” he said, “just because of the timing of it all. It’s a scare space when they Holy Spirit has control. It’s kind of scary and comforting at the same time.”



For more information, visit www.farmofthechild.org, www.myette.org or www.danieljohnston.org.