Serving Others a Job, and a Passion

While transporting patients on a recent volunteer mission in El Salvador, José López encountered a woman on her own at the makeshift clinic where he was working.

He noticed the bandage she was wearing and asked her what happened.

"She said that her husband had recently died and she was on her own on her way into town to get something to eat," López said.

"I’m old. I’m 85-years-old. I fell off the bus," López recalled the woman telling him and, sensing her fear and fragility, stopped and gave the woman a hug. She embraced him back.

"We can't fix the world, but we can make it easier for them," he said.

López is a familiar face to the Harvard Divinity School community. He's worked at the Rock Café since it opened at HDS about five years ago and currently serves as its manager. In November, he took some time off, not to rest, but to continue serving a different community.

He left El Salvador 35 years ago because bad things were happening. The country's nearly 13-year civil war was just beginning. For the last two years, he has returned to his home country because bad things are still happening and he wanted to help.

López traveled with a group from his church, the Boston Church of Christ, on a volunteer mission with HOPE worldwide. In the past two years alone, his church's service missions to El Salvador have helped nearly 700 adults and children receive medical, dental, and vision care.

"You get a sense of how privileged and how lucky we are to live in this country, because poor people here live as the rich live down there," he said. "So imagine how the poor sleep. They eat maybe once a day."

He said he wanted to go because if other people who couldn't even speak the language were traveling to help those in his home country, then he felt he should, too.

As part of the service mission, the group brings with them multivitamins to hand out to those in need. López said the members of the HDS custodial staff donated money to help him buy the vitamins to bring along.

"I like the sense of community here at HDS. It means a lot to me. It makes me feel like we are family," he said.

While on the trip, López found any way he could to help, even if it came down to pressing a folded $20 bill into the hand of a woman who said she didn’t  have enough money to afford the blood pressure medication the volunteer doctors told her she needed.

"It's just heartbreaking to see the need, the suffering. And it is a reality," said López. "It is life-changing because you know you are doing something right. You are helping people who really need it."

—by Michael Naughton