When the companion relationship ended I stayed on and with Miram Lazo of Managua and Ted Copland of Sarasota, Florida, I founded Casa Ave Maria as a ministry of hospitality and service. We had to move a couple of times, but now we are in our own place-two houses that adjoin each other, with a chapel tucked in between them. We also have classes in guitar, recorder, marimba, and all kinds of dancing-folkloric, reggae, and popular. We receive guests from everywhere, and we help them forge links with poor people in Nicaragua, in projects in health, education, agriculture, the rescue of street children, the rescue of hope. A group I served with in Chicago, called Synapses, was made up mostly of Mennonites and Quakers and Catholic Worker folks.
Homeless children are a problem of plague proportions in all of Latin America.
One of the parishes in the States that took a special interest in our ministry was St. Matthew's, in Evanston, Illinois, where John McCausland, now in this diocese, was Rector. He led a group of pilgrims from that parish to our Casa. Pilgrims from across the U. S. and from other countries have come to Nicaragua in these years. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco sends pilgrims each January, and they have helped to build a classroom for the only Episcopal high school in the republic, and houses for the damnificados of Hurricane Mitch in an asentamiento called Nueva Vida. United Methodists come from Missouri, and have done actual hands-on building for a clinic in Mulukuku, in the heart of the Nicaraguan campo.