Richard Cardillo escapes his problems by joining a Catholic mission in Peru, where he becomes a community health organizer.

Richard Cardillo is a 25 year resident of the Lower East Side been an educator for over three decades on two continents and in two languages. He's instructed on all levels from preschool to graduate programs, considering himself still more of a learner than a teacher....but always a storyteller! Rich is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and has also participated in three Moth GrandSLAMS . Rich is a passionate bread baker and, yes, has gone to that quirky (scary?) place of naming his 16-year-old sourdough starter. He tries to bake up a new story with every loaf that emerges from his tiny apartment oven.

This story originally aired October 13, 2017 in an episode titled “Invisibility.”

Story Transcript

It’s September of 1980 and it’s six in the morning. I’m in the monastery chapel, like I am every morning at six a.m., and it’s my turn to read the gospel meditation to my seventeen brother monks. I go up to the front, to the lectern, open the Bible and I begin reading, “And Jesus said, ‘In a little while and you will see me no more. And then in a little while you will see me again.’”

I close the Bible. I go back to my pew, kneeling, and have the most profound meditation and reflection. Damn, I want some of that magic trick. Invisibility, going rogue, disappear without anybody knowing where you are.

I have this crazy fantasy. You know, Maria Von Trapp, when she wanted to disappear from the convent, she’d go prancing through the Alps. I wanted to disappear from my monastery and I wanted to go cruising through the Ramble in Central Park, but I didn’t, and I wouldn’t.

I’m twenty-two years old and I've already been five years inside the monastery. It sounds like a prison sentence. “I’m givin’ ya a message from the inside.” But I joined at the tender young age of seventeen. I made this experiment in invisibility at the time. I knew, kind of knew that I was gay and I was so ashamed and so afraid of that I figured I could pray away the gay by joining a monastery. So that’s what I did.

I go through formation. This frustration was lasting a little bit longer than usual, but I wasn’t going to act on it. I was going to stay faithful. I had this pesky little idea that I could just turn things around. I even changed my name in the monastery. I’m Richard. My name is Richard. But beginning in my first year of the monastery and for fourteen years after that I became Brother Mark. That persona took on everything that I wanted to be but knew inside I wasn’t.

And I wasn’t going to act on any of those things. I told you, this pesky little idea which is my vow of celibacy. I made a promise and a vow that I would never ever have any relations with a human being ever for the rest of my life. So I went through with it.

It was hard. I kept channeling the words of Horton, not the saint, the elephant. “I meant what I said and I said what I meant, Brother Mark will be faithful one hundred percent.” And I kept up at it. I finally finished my formation. They sent me out teaching to an all boys’ Catholic high school in Harlem. I was going through the motions, but it just didn’t feel authentic at all and these crazy feelings wouldn’t go away. So I figured I had to petition my superiors to get something more difficult, more drastic because this self-imposed conversion therapy just wasn’t working.

So I told my superiors I needed something tougher. About a week after that, I got a knock on my cell door, not a prison cell, but it felt like that, knock on my cell door and he came in and he said, “Brother Mark, do you speak Spanish?”

I said, “High school Spanish.”

He said, “Well, I think you better start learning it because we’re transferring you to the missions in Peru.” All of a sudden, I became a missionary.

After some intense language study and some intense liberation theology, I was assigned to teach in this remote shanty town of a village, which was on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. This was a time when the country was just falling apart. They were in the hands and the grip of terrorist violence. There was no sanitation, health was horrible, the economy was in a collapse, there was hyperinflation and I was assigned there.

So I show up and all of a sudden I meet this community organizer who’s the same age as I am, I’m twenty-seven. Gonzala. And Gonzala wrangles me into starting an orphanage for all the kids who were coming to the capital city for a somewhat better life.

So I said, “Okay, we’ll give it a try, but I’m just not gonna be good at this.”

And she guided me through it. She guided me. She was a consummate person who let me know at any given time if my privilege was showing. For instance, I'll give you an idea.

She told me, “I see you every morning when you go out and these women that are carrying their babies and they're in the papooses. And you just go up and you're like a politician, ‘Hey, baby, how are you? What is the name of your baby? Can I hold your baby?’” She said, “Don’t pay attention to the baby and don’t ask for the baby’s name.”

I asked her, “Why not?”

She said, “Fifty percent of the babies die here before the age of one. The mothers don’t name that baby until they know that baby is going to flourish, so don’t ask for the name of the baby. They'll just call that baby Nene. Call it Nene.” So I learned.

She was also the consummate community builder in that orphanage. Obviously, we didn’t know the birthdates of any of the kids in that orphanage, but on every one of their saint’s days or their name days, Gonzala would make a very special cake for each boy or girl and she‘d decorate the top of it with something that symbolized their specific personality. If it was a shoeshine boy, she’d put a picture of a shoe on top of the cake. If it was somebody who was interested in music, she’d stencil in panpipes and a guitar. So she just really had these kids eating out of her hands but built up community like I couldn’t believe.

About six months after we started the orphanage, I was also asked to become the community health organizer for my village. There was no clinic, there was no hospital within hundreds of miles so I was in charge. I took this crash course in all things rural medicine. My bible was this book called Where There Is No Doctor.

I learned how to do very basic things, fix bumps and bruises, how to get somebody’s fever down. I could even learn how to give stitches to people. It was amazing. But the one thing I had no control over were all the diseases connected to poverty, these kids were coming down with dysentery, giardia, all different kinds of intestinal things, diarrhea, and I just could not get anywhere with that. It was frustrating.

Only about eight or nine months after I took over that job, I was hit with a really big piece of misfortune in my life. I contracted cholera. It probably was the most debilitating disease or incident that ever happened in my life. I knew that I was just wasting away.

It’s funny, I tell stories now all over the place, different slams and different shows, and I’m getting very used to that. There's usually the requisite poop story. Everybody has their one poop story that they got to tell. I guess this is my requisite poop story, but I just can’t tease out any humor from it.

But there I was and I felt my body just collapsing. I couldn’t leave the bathroom because it was incessant diarrhea of just liquid. I had lost fourteen pounds in two days. My skin was tightening, my eyes were turning yellow, I was literally disappearing.

The State Department kept good tabs on everybody who was in the country who was a gringo and they found out about me. They sent an ambulance right away to pick me up and put me right into a hospital, the best in the nation right in the capital of Lima. They automatically put the rehydration IV in me and I was fine after twelve hours. There was some bed rest and then, after five days, I was out of there and I was taken back to the village.

There was a sign there: “Bienvenidos Hermano Marcos.” I felt very, very good. There was a lot of fanfare for me. But within a short amount of time of going back and saying, “yes, I am cured,” I got the horrible news that in my five-day absence forty-five children had died of cholera.

I lost it. But I had to contain myself. I felt, for the sake of the people, I have to hold it together. And I talked to one of the elders. I said, “How could this happen? I got better and they didn’t.”

He said, “Oh, hermano, facil.” It’s easy to know why.

I said, “Well, why? Why did that happen?”

He said, “Porque tu eres lo que eres y nosotros somos lo que somos.” Because you are who you are and we are who we are, and that’s when I learned about privilege.

That’s when I felt really lousy. That’s when I knew that I had to start taking steps to turn things around. It was amazing. I knew that privilege was something in me not only for my health but the things that I could hide, and I was hiding my sexuality. It’s probably what got me into that country in the first place so I knew that I had to turn that around.

It’s kind of that day that I made the decision that I was going to spend the rest of my life advocating and being an ally for people who couldn’t be who they were because of their race, their gender, their gender expression, their sexuality, their sexual orientation, their religion. It didn’t matter. I wanted to be the advocate so people could be who they were. That was the lesson I learned in Peru.

There comes a time when you're a missionary. They teach you about this. There's a saying. When you're working with people from a different culture always go where you're really, really needed but not really wanted. And only stay until you're really, really wanted but not really needed. So I knew it was time for me to go to live with my true self.

I went back to the United States. I eventually left the monastery. I lived as a gay man, got into a partnership with my partner of eighteen years and I kind of never strayed from that idea of being this advocate for other people.

In 2015, at the behest of the Ministry of Education in Peru, I was invited to go down to help the Ministry of Education put together an anti-bullying program all around the country, and I was going to be there for ten days. It was my first time back in the country since I had left, and I said, “This is gonna be great.”

I found a different country. The roads were built, health was better, the economy was in good shape, still pockets of poverty but people were doing pretty good. I wanted to make it a point to look up Gonzala, and I found her. I knew I would.

So we spent a day together. She had married and had children of her own through the years and I just loved reminiscing with her about the orphans that we took care of. And I used that time to ask her and to come out.

I said, “Did you know at that time that I was gay?”

She says, “You know, I always thought that, but I wanted to respect your desire to be hidden. In fact, do you remember what I taught you about those women with their babies, that they don’t name their babies until that baby can flourish?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “Hermano Marcos wasn’t ready to flourish. Richard is ready to flourish.” And I was just so thankful.

I go back to my hotel room. The next morning I get this call from the front desk. Somebody left a parcel for you. I said, “This is great. Somebody left…” I thought it was a gift or something. I go down there and I see the box and I knew what it was right away. I looked at that box and it was Gonzala’s cake boxes.

So I said, “She made me a cake.” I open up the cake box and I look at that cake and indeed it was a cake from Gonzala decorated on the top with a rainbow flag.

Forty-five years earlier, I had said those words from the gospel, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then in a little while you will see me again.” I felt that I had come full circle and I could finally go about the business of being seen again. Thank you.