Dominik has worked in the vicariate of San Jose of the Amazon, in Peru, for 37 years.
At age 24, she left her native Poland to fulfill her dream of becoming a missionary in the world’s peripheries. She has worked in various parishes and visits the most isolated communities in the vicariate, a large, rural, border territory where communications and roads are lacking. The absence of roads makes a river the only possible means of transportation from one point of the town to another. The missionary explains that these circumstances are synonymous for abandonment.
DOMINIK SZKATULA
Lay missionary
“The Peruvian governments see these populations as a necessary evil, as second-rate populations, abandoned in a territory that must be exploited; for them they are unprepared and incompetent people.”
Dominik reports cases such as the children of a Kichwa community who for six years have been unable to study, because they cannot cross the river to reach the school. Crossing the dangerous river means the risk of drowning. The community counts on a nearby school, but the academic authorities do not send teachers there.
However, nothing threatens these populations more than the destruction of the ecosystem. Oil spills are so frequent in the Peruvian Amazon that they have long ceased being news.
DOMINIK SZKATULA
Lay missionary
“One of our missionaries, a doctor and priest in the United States, and head of the hospital in Santa Clotilde, was able to conduct contamination tests and discovered excessive levels of cadmium and mercury in the entire population of Santa Clotilde. “The population receives no form of compensation for this contamination, and we must speak out. This is a slow death. If in the past they used genocide to kill the indigenous people, today they use a slow death to achieve the same end.”
The missionary says that despite the suffering that these people have experienced and continue to live through, she remains moved by their spirituality.
DOMINIK SZKATULA
Lay missionary
“The world must learn from these people, because Pope Francis said, 'Listen to them.' Listen to them, for what? To learn from them; they have something to say. We have always listened to others, now we must listen to them. Their joy is so immense despite their suffering… That is Christian.”
This is what Dominik will explain in October in the synod in Rome. She wants the world to recognize the joy and the pain of the people living in the Amazon.
Claudia Torres
