f you don’t want to wait for the United Nations or other organizations to do something about injustice in the world, you can start by selling doughnuts outside of church. That’s what Alicia Marill and her friends did 25 years ago to raise money for a dining room for children in the Dominican Republic who would otherwise go to school hungry.

That impromptu bake sale is just one small example of a lifetime of dedication to the people of latin America that all began during a trip to Colombia with lay missioners after Marill graduated from college. “I remember meeting this young man who prayed for more people like me. That made me realize I had to dedicate my life to this ministry. I was planning to be a teacher. But I realized that what I had been given freely, I had to give freely, to improve the lives of so many people.”

This relentlessness and desire to change the world had its roots in Marill’s childhood in Cuba. “The Sisters who ran my elementary school planted a seed of concern for justice,” she recalls. After the revolution, she remembers standing in long lines for food rations and the desecrated chapel at her parish church. In 1962, 12-year old Marill and her brother, sister, and pregnant mother fled to the US. Her father, who had been jailed, eventually joined the family the next year in an exchange of political prisoners. 

“I think, at this very young age, that made me very conscious of injustices and very vulnerable to people’s pain and suffering,” recalls Marill. “It also made me recognize the heroic efforts of many people to safeguard their faith.” The trip to Colombia did not appease her restlessness or outrage, however, and shortly after returning to Miami, she took off again, this time to the Dominican Republic. After a year, she almost decided to stay for good. “It wasn’t easy to come back to the First World,” she says. “But I knew I had to do it, because if I stayed there, I could do just so much. If I came back, I could put the fire in some other people.”

“It is not us who go out in mission; rather we visit our friends, who are materially very poor, and we come back as better human beings, more faithful, more Christians.”

So Marill decided to follow the words of one of her role models, Mother Theresa, and put her love into action. Soon after her return, she met a young man, Adriano Garcia, also just returned from the Dominican Republic from a mission with some Religious, who felt the same fire. Together, they started “Amor en Accion = Love in Action”, inviting other young people to join them, knocking on the doors, slowly involving parishes and schools… becoming, in the words of Archbishop Edward McCarthy of Miami, “the missionary arm of the whole archdiocese.”

Over the years, the definition of mission has changed for Marill and her friends, from concepts and ideas to a deep sense of commitment… for life! “It’s an issue of relationships more that anything else”… “It is not us who go out in mission; rather we visit our friends, who are materially very poor, and we come back as better human beings, more faithful, more Christian,” she says.

For example, the poverty of the people has prompted Marill to examine materialism and consumerism in her own life. “They are a tremendous witness to a life of simplicity, of what is to be human, of what is really important to life,” she says. And their value of true community and interdependence challenges American values of self-sufficiency. Marill remembers being inspired by a nurse who continued her work with peasants in the mountains, despite lack of funds for her salary. “The people would share bananas, mangos, and rice. They really cared for each other,” she says. “It’s a different society and allows us to see life in a different way.”

Many of the youth who go on mission return transformed, too. “I see it in the way they relate to their friends,” says Marill. “They live life in a different way and can no longer have relationships that have no substance.”  … Today, the group doesn’t sell doughnuts any more, but over many years they have offered their service in education, nutrition, health and evangelization programs, and to build schools, chapels, irrigation systems.

“We are not about programs but about responding…   It’s all about PRESENCE — our own among the people, their presence to us, and particularly, the presence of God in all of us. From there, together, we can create a sense of cross-cultural community of faith.”

— CARMEN AGUINACO —