A touch of compassion: Family influences help to shape student’s life-defining moment during mission trip to Africa

Claire Schaffner, a member of St. Pius X Parish in Indianapolis, holds a child named Angel during her time as a volunteer at a medical clinic in Uganda during the summer of 2010. (Submitted photo)

(Editor’s note: “Stewards Abroad” is an occasional series that reports on the efforts of Catholics from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis throughout the world.)

By John Shaughnessy

Most families have a set of standards and beliefs by which they live—a code, both spoken and unspoken, that become part of the essence of each person in the family.

Often, that distinct approach to life also flows through the generations of a family.

That reality is apparent in the story of Claire Schaffner, a college student from Indianapolis who traveled to a village in Africa and suddenly found herself in a life-defining moment with a dying man.

The moment occurred last summer when Schaffner lived for six weeks in Kyarusozi, Uganda, where she worked at a medical clinic run by the Sisters of Holy Cross.

The community surrounding the clinic was rural and extremely poor, with most families living in one-room houses that had no electricity. Still, for Schaffner—now a 21-year-old senior majoring in nursing at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind.—it was the place she had hoped to be because of the children there.

“We got to treat a lot of children at the clinic,” recalls Schaffner, a member of St. Pius X Parish in Indianapolis. “We really connected with the neighborhood kids who lived in a row of houses right next to us. We played with them every night. They’d be waiting for us. We really got close to them. That’s what I was really looking for when I came to Uganda. We were looking to make an impact on the kids. And they made an impact on us.”

Schaffner’s interest in the children of Uganda began when she was a student at Bishop Chatard High School in

Indianapolis and saw a documentary called Invisible Children. The documentary centered on the civil war in northern Uganda, and focused on how children are kidnapped by the rebel army and forced to become soldiers. The film moved Schaffner so much that she decided to become a nurse so she could help children in the future.

That seed of social concern has blossomed at Saint Mary’s College.

“That’s where I really got into Catholic social justice—Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Pope John Paul II,” says Schaffner, who is working on a minor in justice education. “The popes have a lot of great encyclicals about the dignity of the human person, which obviously applies to the unborn and children outside the womb. Going to Catholic schools has led me in this direction.”

In a way, it also led her to the dying man she met in Uganda last summer. Their paths crossed on a busy day at the clinic when Schaffner worried that there were so many patients and too little staff that the result would be too many people suffering.

“A man came in with cerebral malaria,” Schaffer wrote in recalling that meeting. “It’s the second one that I’ve seen, and it is the result of untreated malaria. The man was outside the gate in the morning, and we’re not sure how he got there. A neighbor or a friend dropped him off? He wandered there by himself? He was in no condition to tell us. He was completely incoherent and was rambling the entire time.

“We brought him in and got him a bed. I got his IV started while Bridgette [Balcerzak] was putting in a catheter. But right away, I could tell that he was dying.”

Schaffner believed the man was dying because his breathing reminded her of the breathing of her grandfather, Robert Alerding, on the day that he died just a few months earlier—April 1, 2010.

“My grandfather and my Catholicism are very tied together,” Schaffner says. “One of my best memories of him was when he lived at Marquette Manor. He was blind, but he knew his way down to the chapel. He said prayers for everyone in his family. Papa showed us how to live a good Catholic life—what the Church could do for him and what he could do for the Church.

“His death was a very spiritual moment for all of us. There were about 20, maybe 30, people at my Uncle Mike’s house. There was sunlight coming in the windows. I got to hold Papa’s hand. So did my sister, Beth, and my cousin, Ellen. He had been dying for about three days. We knew the end was coming. It was a wonderful moment. We all said we wanted to die that way—in a beautiful room, surrounded by family who loved us, knowing we had lived a good life and that God was well-pleased.”

And here she was less than three months later, in a crowded clinic in Africa where the room reeked of the smell of urine, blood and feces, helping a dying stranger into a bed.

“We had to get back to work, but I told Rebecca, the nurse on call, that I would stay with him,” Schaffner recalled in the note she sent to her parents, John and Mary Schaffner. “I held his hand and said Hail Marys with him. I was reminded of the last time I held a dying man’s hand. There were people sitting silently all around us, watching us. It was just about the quietest place I’ve ever been.”

Holding the stranger’s hand, Schaffner thought of her Papa and then turned her thoughts to the man in the bed.

“I didn’t know anything about that man or his life story,” she noted. “I do know he didn’t deserve to die like that. He was in so much pain. He was moaning. He did have medals around his neck, and they were nice ones. They were the kind of medals that someone gives to you, not the type that you buy for yourself. So someone must have loved him enough to give him those.

“Someone must have held this man in some kind of regard, maybe even similar to the kind of love and respect that we had for Papa. I tried to remember that as I sat there, and held his hand and prayed with him.”

Schaffner was still holding his hand an hour later when the man died.

“No one came to claim him, and we eventually called the morgue to come and pick him up,” Schaffner recalled in her note of June 29, 2010, to her parents. “A tractor came and picked him up, and buried him someplace. There was no funeral for him, no last rites. But it felt important to me that I got to be there with him. I hope I was able to give him some peace. It also felt important for me to share with you also. I wanted to write it down some place so that he could have a bit of a eulogy, you know?

“I’ll always remember the kids. They’re so adorable and I have so many pictures of them. But it seems important that someone remembers this man also. Hopefully, he’ll be remembered in some small way.”

In closing that note to her parents, Schaffner referred to that moment with the dying man as “my depressing story of the day.” Now, in the winter of 2011, she has a different perspective.

“I’m glad I got to be there,” she says. “I had the lucky opportunity to be with him when he died.”

Most families have a set of standards and beliefs by which they live—a code, both spoken and unspoken, that becomes part of the essence of each person in the family.

Often, that distinct approach to life also flows through the generations of a family.

That reality is apparent in the story of Schaffner. Her approach to life is rooted in the Schaffner and Alerding families. It was nurtured, she says, in her Catholic education at St. Pius X School and Bishop Chatard High School. And it has blossomed during her years at Saint Mary’s College.

Then, on a summer’s day in Africa, all the influences of her life led her to a defining moment—a moment when she gave comfort to a dying stranger and gave witness to the bonds of family that connect us all. †