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WELCOME TO ECUADOR!
Sunday, 19 December 2010


Welcome to Ecuador. A Polish priest was brutally murdered last week...

After an uneventful, eleven-hours flight from Vancouver, with a stop-over in Houston, I arrived in the capital city of Ecuador late in the evening of Friday, Dec. 10.  At the small Quito airport I was greeted by father Jan who asked me to call him by his Polish nickname Jasiu. The Catholic Church sent him as a missionary to Ecuador fourteen years ago. About five years ago he established The St. Joseph Freinademetz SVD – Fu Shen Fu Foundation with the aim of helping needy children. The foundation is the reason of my being here. I came here to volunteer for a month.

To pick me up, Jasiu came from a little place called Ventanas, where I will be spending the next month. Soon after we took our seats in the Toyota he broke the news: a Franciscan priest from Poland got murdered recently. He was buried at the day of my arrival, December 10. It was a very brutal, execution style murder. The murderers broke into his apartment and waited for him while he had a Mass at his church. He was tortured, his fingers were broken, he had many wounds all over his body and his throat was cut. The blood was all over the apartment... Everyone is left guessing about the reason for the murder.  He lived in the city of Santo Domingo, over 100km away from Quito, on the way to Ventanas.

From the airport Jasiu took me to the house of the Polish consul, Tomek, where I met several other countrymen, who just came back from the funeral...

Robbery is not a big news in Ecuador. It is a common daily occurrence. First two years of his mission Jasiu spent in Guayaquil, a seaport and the country's biggest city. Within that period of time he was mugged seven times there. The problem is so wildly spread that the police hardly ever even investigates such cases. Supposedly you don't even have a case for the police if you were robbed for an amount lower then $700. But the case in Santo Domingo wasn't a robbery – it was an execution...

It seems that there are some interesting times ahead of me...



Posted byJan Koncewicz
 

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