Paul Franzetti and the Damien House

Galapagos 2009

    My son Joe and I  arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador in August 2006 for a stop-over before our flight to the Islands, five hundred miles east of Guayaquil in the Pacific Ocean.

     At our hotel the next day two workers from the Damien House, Wendy and Jonathan, sent by Sr. Anne Credidio, came to take us to the Damien House. Both of them had been cured of leprosy.

     Our experience at the hospital among the patients and staff, and especially with Sr. Anne Credidio, was memorable. We found serenity, generosity and kindness, the fruits of Sr. Anne Credidio’s twenty years among the lepers.

     One patient was a blind, eighty year-old man named Segundo, without fingers on his hands, missing both legs below the knee, sitting up his bed, singing cheerfully. He was being  cared for tenderly by the devoted staff.

    This same Segundo was on my mind one morning, on the sixth day in the Galapagos,  when I walked on a beach among a group of nursing seals.

     On the beach that morning I saw a beautiful baby seal dying because its mother had not returned from the sea to nurse it. I looked around at all the mother seals nursing their pups and reflected on Nature’s cruel law. It was Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” in action. Instinct forbade the nearby mother seals from suckling this abandoned pup. Instinct kept them from transgressing their biological boundary. Kindness and mercy could have rescued the perishing pup;  kindness and mercy never would, at least not from the other seals. Animals are not free to go beyond their nature.

     I remembered Segundo on his bed and I understood a truth that Darwin had missed --man is more than an animal, more than “a rational animal” as Aristotle said; “man is created in the image and glory of God”: animals  glorify God  by their existence, but man glorifies God by the love he gives to his fellow man. That cute baby seal, with a full life ahead of it, was going to die because no mother seal would share her milk with it; Segundo, an old man imprisoned by disease, was living in dignity because his fellow humans saw in him the face of Christ.

     Segundo is one reason for supporting the Damien House. Sr. Anne Credidio is another.

       When Sr. Anne Credidio went to Ecuador twenty years ago to serve the poor, she  created the Damien House to improve the conditions of the Hansen’s patients.  Since then her life has been one long corporal work of mercy. In the most desperate of times, she says with vivid faith, “This must be God’s work because it certainly is not mine.”               

     This same Sr. Anne, a second Father Damien, has changed our lives.

     When we returned from Ecuador we resolved to find a way to help, but were unclear what form that help would take.  We promised to donate our Galapagos wildlife art (my paintings and Joe’s drawings) to the hospitals. If her patients could not visit the islands, then we would bring some of the Islands’ beauty to them. As we worked we thought to  make a calendar that might provide needed funds for the Damien House.

     Out of this inspiration  was born the Galapagos 2009 Calendar.