Thanksgiving is a special time to share a meal in the company of family and friends. Unfortunately, for many people, spending time with family during the holidays is not always possible due to distance, finances or work schedules. No one knows this better than Marta Valle, who for the past eight years has been organizing a charity dinner at St. Catherine’s Catholic Parish Center on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. She and a group of volunteers serve those who are away from their families, especially the day workers in our community.
I first met Marta in the fall of 1999 when she, along with a group of volunteers from Morgan Hill, traveled to Nicaragua to help rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Mitch, one of the most powerful and deadliest hurricanes on record. From October 28 to November 3, 1998, Mitch pounded Honduras and Nicaragua and its trail of destruction was responsible for over 18,000 fatalities. Between 500,000 to 800,000 individuals were left homeless.
During our first meeting, Marta shared with the group that she was born in Nicaragua and in her pre-teen years had come to the United States with her father, a civil engineer by trade who had worked on the Pan American highway and was offered a job in Chicago.
During the political unrest and eventual civil war in her home country, she and her father completely lost contact with the rest of her family, unable to call or send mail for fear of political retaliation. All these years later, she volunteered to go with us because she felt safe traveling with an international relief organization. She wanted the opportunity to go back and see her home country, but was afraid to travel alone. Her fears were legitimate, I later learned, because many Nicaraguans were considered spies if they had any contact with individuals in foreign countries, especially the United States. She assumed her family members were casualties of war.
We arrived in Nicaragua, and at the orientation, we were told that, due to recent flooding in the area, we would be reassigned to build homes near the village of El Mango in the province of Esteli. Upon hearing this news, Marta jumped up and screamed joyously, “That’s where I’m from! That’s where I’m from!”
The next day we were off on an eight hour drive in the back of two military cargo vehicles. We finally arrived at the house of our host and for the next two weeks we slept on a crowded concrete slab in a warehouse. The volunteer group before us has excavated the home sites and poured the foundation footings where we would stack and mortar the concrete blocks to build the walls. There were no electrical connections or plumbing. The group coming in after us would build the roofs. We were scheduled to build 23 homes for families that had lost everything in the hurricane, and members of the families were required to work side by side with us.
The change in our diet caused a few in the group to develop stomach problems, and after a couple of days Marta became ill. The driver was scheduled to make a supply run, and since Marta couldn’t work, he offered to take her to her home town of Esteli to look around. She accepted and was gone all day. Late in the evening we saw the headlights of the supply truck returning. The driver came out and began to cry as he retold the story of how Marta had gone into the local church looking for someone who might know her family. After a series of contacts, Marta ended up at the house of her godmother who told her that her mother had died, but that she had two sisters living– one in Managua, and the other one in Los Angeles. After several phone calls, two of the sisters were reunited, having been separated for 42 years.
On our final weekend before returning home, Marta’s sister in Managua prepared a special dinner for our group. Although we were a few weeks early, it was a “Thanksgiving” dinner. As we sat and ate, I looked at the oval shaped black and white photos of distant relatives that adorned the dinning room walls; I could see Marta’s face in all of them. Looking across the table I could see Marta, her face glowed with thankfulness for having found her family.
Since then, Marta and her sisters have caught up for all those lost years. She knows what it’s like to be away from family during the holidays, and she remembers how wonderful it was to celebrate a meal together. Every year at Thanksgiving, she tries to fill that void caused by separation from family by offering a communal meal to share with others – a time of sharing food but also sharing the stories that make each person unique. She hopes to create a feeling of “family” for those without.
