Terang priest set to return to live and work amongst Peru's poor communities

A deadly gunfight outside his home that left an eight-year-old child dead, and coming across a murder victim while he was going to get bread one morning, were some of the confronting things Father Michael McKinnon has come across during his time in Chile and Peru.

But despite that, he is keen to return to the country that still runs the 12 food kitchens - called The Shared Table - that he set up to feed malnourished children over a decade ago.

Those kitchens, which are funded by donations from Australia, have become even more vital during the pandemic with parents and grandparents also now lining up for food.

When he returns to work in Sicuani - high in the mountains not far from Peru's tourist icon Machu Picchu - he be will living in what at the moment is the country's worst-hit COVID-19 hotspot.

"Everybody that keeps in contact with me would have a family member or extended family or neighbour that's died because of the pandemic. It's been very sad and traumatic for them over there," he said.

The pandemic put Father Michael McKinnon's plans to go there on hold for a year, but as soon as he is vaccinated and given the OK he will trade the comfort of the Terang presbytery for six years living in an area even poorer than the capital Lima where he was before.

The 64-year-old grew up on a farm in Ecklin as the seventh of 12 children during an era where going to mass on Sunday at St Thomas' church in Terang "was a big part of life".

"My parents were quite amazing people. My mother was only 47 when she died, so the second half of us were at home finishing off school with my father looking after us," he said.

"My commitment to ministry certainly came out of a deeply spiritual, personal relationship with God. Priesthood for me was a very important means of serving people, not just Catholics. I suppose that's why I've loved working overseas in South America."

For the past decade, Father McKinnon has been working in Mildura, but before that he spent six years living on the edge of Peru's capital Lima as well as six years working in the poorest parts of Chile's capital Santiago.

He was set to travel to Peru last year when the pandemic halted the plans, so in the meantime he has returned to where it all started, Terang. "It's great to be back and have a few beers in the pub with blokes that you knew," he said.

Father McKinnon said being back in Australia could be "a little frustrating at times" because the priest's role was very much placed into a niche where you do mass, baptisms, weddings and are connected to schools.

In South America, he said, it was more about providing social support with the church filling a void that governments there didn't. But that doesn't mean he didn't do weddings, baptisms and hold church services in South America, it's just that often they would be on the side of a dusty road.

It was back in the early 90s when Father McKinnon first put his hand up to work in the poor areas of Santiago, Chile, where drugs and alcohol were a big problem among young people. "It was tough," he said.

So getting projects off the ground, such as soccer competitions for the football loving youth, were life-changing for some. "I gained so much more from those people than what I was able to give. It enriched my life enormously," he said.

Father McKinnon arrived in Chile knowing little Spanish, apart from what he had picked up during his six months learning the language in Bolivia.

"One of the first things I learnt in Santiago was swear words," he said. "There'd be kids on the corner smoking or drinking and they'd yell out at you because you stood out like anything as a gringo.

"But I learnt their swear words and I used to fire them back at them and then I was accepted. They were good kids, but they were victims of their circumstance."

Violence was common where Father McKinnon lived. "I remember going to get the bread one morning and came across a bloke stabbed to death around the corner," he said.

"The house I was in got robbed about three times. You were always vulnerable but at the same time there was strong Catholic culture there too. As the gringo priest you were held in some sort of regard."

While his home in Chile was pretty basic, the "raw poverty" of Lima was even more confronting. "We lived with the people," he said.

"For the first six months I reckon I was basically depressed because you would go out every morning and you'd look around and it was just dirty and dusty and so much poverty. You'd just think 'what am I doing here? There's nothing I can do'.

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"Poverty is such a shocking thing. When you see little children living in poverty, that's really confronting. Infant mortality was quite high. A lot of sadness.

"We'd do funerals and just the fact that people would go from the bed into the box into the ground. People couldn't get put on ice or anything. Life and death and all those sorts of things were so much rawer."

Father McKinnon said much of Lima's population explosion was due to "invasions" where groups of people would organise themselves over a couple of months and then pick a day and time and just arrive and set up camp with straw mats.

"They come in as squatters. So when you go to Lima now it's just chaos built on top of chaos," he said.

"Where I was living, nothing is finished," he said. His house was the same as there, a simple brick house that was like living in a garage with no insulation. Later I moved up to where the invasions were and lived in a little wooden shack." The wooden houses were usually made out of pallets with a dirt floor. "But I did have a concrete floor and a cold shower. You got used to it," he said.

New arrivals would ask for a chapel, but Father McKinnon directed them instead to set up community centres with medical facilities and soccer pitches.

"They were wonderfully generous people with the little they had. Really decent people just fighting for their existence but realising that solidarity and community was of absolute importance for them to survive," he said. "I'd get them to put aside more land and we'd take possession of the title of the land as a church but it's their property. If you didn't have some claim on it then the land traffickers would pinch it and you'd be in fights with them. I had lots of fights with them."

During his last four months in Lima the "invasions" got bigger and more politically tense, he said.

"There were riots and fights and one night I found myself where I was in my little house there were two conflicting groups fighting," he said.

"My house was out in the middle of a rocky stony field on the edge of where our parish was. They were shooting flares at one another and chucking rocks and there were guns going off. I couldn't get out.

"When I finally could get out and calm some of them down there were two people shot dead. One of them was a young kid about eight.

"The family had gone out to watch and see what was going on and of course there were bullets flying around." Father McKinnon said things have calmed down since then.

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