‘Chaty' For Charity Work
‘Habang may buhay, mayroon akong ibibigay.’
By Mary Joy Rile
A story about Mrs Mery Elgen ‘Chaty’ Harris from Bacong, Negros Oriental, near Dumaguete City, who is married with two children and lives in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, where she works as a registered nurse in the Ballarat Health Service.
Four years ago Chaty started a charity work by doing fund raising for an orphanage in Dumaguete. She collected some money from her friends back in Australia and bought goods such as rice, milk, sugar and biscuits as Christmas presents. Before returning to Australia she happened to pass by a second-hand store, popularly known here in the Philippines as ‘ukay-ukay’, where she saw a Salvation Army tag on some clothes. These were supposed to be given out free, not to be sold. This gave Chaty the idea for another charity work.
Ms Kathryn Boyle is a lecturer in the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.
Phone calls for me from Japan are rare, so I was surprised recently to receive a call from Mrs Murakami, the wife of a man who was my catechist from 1951 to 1954. She told me that he had died, aged 88. That phone call marked the end of a 55-year friendship with a man of remarkable personality and one of the finest gentlemen I came to know during my 35 years in Japan.
I would not have been able to sustain myself in my work as a Columban missionary priest if I had looked for immediate results during my 29 years in Pakistan. Year by year, I have come to understand that the real issue is to serve for the love of God, not to look at what I have in my hand or what I can count.
Since I joined the Columbans in 1972 I have visited 32 countries, even if some of them only very briefly. For 22 years from 1978 to 2000 I was assigned to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. 