We met with Fr. Gerard Leclerc in Vergennes, Vermont today. Fr. Leclerc was a priest in Bolivia for 20 years and said except for Haiti, Bolivia is, peerhpas, the poorest country in the world. His parish was on the Alti Plano, some 12,300 feet in elevation and where kids were hungry and barefoot, while their parents worked exceedingly long hours for excruciatingly low pay in the mines. And what’s more, the air in the mines is laced with toxic sulphuric and choleric acids. I told the Addison Independent newspaper here that if Americans, at almost any socio-economic level, would cut back some on heating, cooling (We actually used to live without air conditioning. Remember?), driving, junk food… what a tremendous pool of money, and other help, we could generate for the poor in Bolivia, and elsewhere. Note: We’ve been in I can’t tell ya’ how many towns in America, and today was a first. The backs of town city limits signs will frequently say things like: “Come Back Soon!”; or, “Thanks For Visiting!”; or… The back of Vergennes town limits sign simply says: “Farewell”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We met with Fr. Gerard Leclerc in Vergennes, Vermont today. Fr. Leclerc was a priest in Bolivia for 20 years and said except for Haiti, Bolivia is, peerhpas, the poorest country in the world. His parish was on the Alti …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}