Going to Nicaragua

On a recent chilly January Sunday night, Dr. Julie Rubio invited me to speak to Christine Keogh, Christina Gebel, Rachel McCullagh, and Andrea Heyse, who received this year’s Mev Puleo Scholarships in Latin American Theology and Culture. In five months these four students will be living, studying, and working in Nicaragua. We had an invigorating discussion on The Book of Mev, which they are now reading. It’s gratifying to me that something in Mev’s story encourages them on their path of deepening their commitment to justice, as well as enjoying plenty of ice cream along the way. By their openness and fire, these students challenge and inspire me, as have their predecessors in this program, such as Cab Gutting, Tina Modde, James Meinert, Megan Heeney, and Tom Gill. Mev’s parents started this scholarship as a way to enable some SLU students to have the kind of transformative immersion experiences that Mev herself had in Tijuana, Chiapas, San Salvador, Port-au-Prine, and Sao Paulo. The scholarship is bearing much good fruit.