In Mexico quake camps, a bit of holiday cheer for youngsters
MEXICO CITY — Toys and other gifts from parents and aid workers brightened the Epiphany holiday Saturday for children living in dozens of makeshift tent camps more than three months after a deadly earthquake.
The Jan. 6 holiday is commonly known as “Day of the Magi” in Latin America, and it’s when children in Mexico traditionally receive gifts rather than on Christmas Day.
Uriel Martinez, an 8year-old whose family lost their home in the Sept. 19 quake, woke up Saturday to find a toy gun had been left for him overnight.
The camp where the family is sleeping in a southern neighborhood of Mexico City is a motley assortment of tents pitched on boards with tarps strung overhead to keep out the overnight chill.
Luz Maria Alvarez, who is also living in the camp with her husband, children and grandchildren, said the adults and teens are stressed because they still don’t know what will happen.
But “for the younger kids, living like this is still a kind of adventure and even more so on a day like today when we are all together,” Alvarez said.
The nonprofit “Ayudame hoy,” Spanish for “help me today,” said it distributed some 3,000 gifts in quake camps in Mexico City and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, at the Vatican, Pope Francis advised against making the pursuit of money, a career or success the basis for one’s whole life, urging in his Epiphany remarks to also resist “inclinations toward arrogance, the thirst for power and for riches.”
Many Christians observe Epiphany to recall the three wise men who followed a star to find the baby Jesus.
Rome’s Piazza Navona is famed for a holiday market with many toy stalls. Children believe the Befana witch on a broom brings the well-behaved toys, while those who haven’t behaved get charcoal.
In Poland, the head of the Catholic Church in Warsaw spoke in support of migrants during an Epiphany procession in the Polish capital. The procession was held under the motto “God is for everyone” and Warsaw Archbishop Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz said that means no one should be seen as an “alien.”
In Istanbul, the Greek Orthodox Christian community celebrated Epiphany with the traditional blessing of the waters. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians and the Archbishop of Constantinople, led the liturgy Saturday at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George for Epiphany, commemorating the baptism of Jesus.
In a show of solidarity with Egypt’s embattled Christians, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a Muslim, made a symbolic appearance at an Orthodox Christmas Mass in a new cathedral as tens of thousands of soldiers and police deployed outside churches across the country in anticipation of possible attacks by Islamic militants.
“We, with the grace of God, are offering a message of peace and love from here, not just to Egyptians or to the region, but to the entire world,” el-Sissi told a jubilant congregation while standing next to Pope Tawadros II, the Coptic pontiff.