‘Light of faith’ buoys clergyman in Bolivia

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2020 (2033 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stranded far from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, a former Winnipegger now serving Anglican churches in eastern Quebec dusted off his childhood Spanish this week to deliver a Sunday sermon to an impromptu congregation in Bolivia.

Rev. Joshua Paetkau of New Carlisle, Que., led prayers, songs and preached to 30 children and their caregivers quarantined at the orphanage/daycare centre Stansberry Children’s Home in Santa Cruz.

“My message was about the light of faith, the light that shines in the darkness and sees a way forward where there seems to be no way,” Paetkau, 33, wrote in an email exchange about the March 22 service.

Accompanied by his wife and two children, Paetkau was visiting Bolivia (along with 13 extended family members from Winnipeg and Alberta) when COVID-19 travel restrictions cancelled some of their connecting flights back to Moncton, N.B.

With no way to get home, the family of four returned to the children’s home where Paetkau’s parents volunteered when he was a child. His parents, siblings and nieces and nephews returned to Canada safely.

For the last two years, Paetkau has served as a full-time priest to the five tiny churches in the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay on the Gaspé Peninsula. Before his ordination to the priesthood in 2018, Paetkau lived in Winnipeg for nearly a dozen years, graduating from Canadian Mennonite University in 2009.

Paetkau said panic about COVID-19 started to build toward the end of their 19-day trip. Bolivians recently endured a three-week transportation strike and are finding parallels to the new restrictions now imposed on them.

“From what I am able to observe, which is not very much, the sense of anxiety is not as high as what I hear coming from Canada,” he wrote this week. “However, the number of people who live a day-to-day existence in this country will surely make suspension of employment difficult to deal with.”

Paetkau has contacted the Canadian Embassy about his situation, and continues to search for ways to get home. However, he is resigned to an indefinite stay in the country he had last visited 14 years ago. It is the first trip to Bolivia for his wife, Bethany, and their children, Solomon, 11, and Rose, 8.

The Paetkaus may get a little help from higher up, suggested Bishop Bruce Myers of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec, who contacted his local MP, Jean-Yves Duclos, also president of the Treasury Board, for help in flying the family back to Canada. Another priest in Myer’s diocese is stuck in France after a vacation.

“I asked Mr. Duclos to see if France and Bolivia might be on the list of countries to be repatriated,” Myers said in a telephone call from his home in Quebec City.

All public services have been suspended since March 13 for the 4,000 Anglicans in 65 parishes within Diocese of Quebec, marking the first time its churches have been closed since the 1918 influenza epidemic. Myers now leads his flock in private prayers from his living room through online platforms.

“We’ve been here before and we came through the other side of that, and we expect we’ll come out of the other side of this, as well,” Myers said of the current pandemic.

For the foreseeable future, Paetkau plans to keep up the Spanish-language worship at Stansberry Children’s Home, as well as communicating regularly in English with his parishioners in Quebec.

Paetkau said his message to them is the same in both languages: people of faith around the world should love each other and to continue to live in hope.

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