My life has been one continuous apprenticeship. And my best teachers have been the poor and the young people of Andalusia and Latin America, especially those of Paraguay.

Right now my apprenticeship is in Bañado Sur de Asunción, a neighbourhood with 16,000 inhabitants. Every ten years or so this zone is flooded to a depth of four metres, so that for more than nine months we have to live in wooden shacks strung along the city’s avenues. When the waters of the Paraguay River finally recede and people return to their homes, they have to start all over again from scratch.

The Bañado Sur district is the frontier between humanity and inhumanity. Some 90% of its people live in poverty, and more than half live in absolute misery. What is most lacking is work, and I don’t mean dignified work, just work. There is a garbage dump where men, women, and children spend their lives for the sake of earning two dollars a day. The heat and the humidity of the place are suffocating, and the people have to work completely covered with clothes. Other people push little carts around the city centre collecting plastic items; they spend more than two hours going and another two returning.

In Bañado Sur there are no sewers, and waste waters flow through the streets. Drugs are rampant and hold the young people of the neighbourhood in their grip. Many robberies are committed every day for the sake of getting a ration of marijuana or crack. To top things off, there is frequently no water or electricity in the area. And the malnutrition is alarming.

Nevertheless, despite all this, I consider Bañado Sur to be Paraguay’s moral reservoir. If in the midst of these conditions the people still show a great desire to live and are so outstanding in their hospitality and solidarity, then there is no person and no force that will ever take those values away from them. And all of this in the midst of great joy and peace.

What have I learned? Well, that my Faith is lived out in struggling with them and beside them – on the board of advisors for all the social organizations of Bañado Sur and as the priest for three of the area’s chapels. I join with the “Thousand in Solidarity” in providing assistance so that 500 youths aged 14 to 18 can earn a living by studying and then go on to the university.

But the most important thing I have learned is that at the age of 81, I can still have a youthful heart. This is the greatest treasure the young people and the poor have given me. Perhaps at last I am beginning to be a little like them.