Denver Catholic

42 APR-MAY 2024 | DENVER CATHOLIC "When you take the poorest people you can imagine, and you take everything away from them that they have, and they're living as refu- gees in a refugee camp in a country where they didn't want to go to, that's not just hunger, that's starvation," Deacon Downey said. "That really affects us. So we operated medical clinics during the great African famine of 1984-85. We've recruited and sent to Africa 48 doctors and nurses from here to work in these three ref- ugee camps that we worked in. So that began a process of developing, which wound up not just operating medical programs, but we built two hospitals and staffed them and equipped them." With the war came many challenges for Deacon Downey and Lalmba: Lack of food, water, supplies, medical equipment and so much more. Eventually, Lalbma had to uproot its headquarters again and move to Kenya to avoid the dangerous conditions. Relying on God's providence, however, Lalmba was a beacon of hope amid a war-torn country, and they helped to save countless lives. It may seem mad to willingly stake out in a warzone and live at such great risk with very little reward, but the Gospel makes people do radical things sometimes, and for Deacon Downey, Lalmba served a purpose greater than himself. "Living in a war zone was quite the experi- ence. I can't count the number of good friends we lost in the war. We're kind of the antithesis of war," Deacon Downey said. "We represent the exact opposite. What could the opposite of war be? It's summed up in one word: Love. In John's account of Last Supper, Jesus turns to his apostles and says, I have a new commandment for you. I can imagine the anxiety they had. 'Oh, we've already got 10. What's 11 going to be?' He says the new commandment is to love one another. That's all. That was the end of it. And that's the way Marty and I live our lives." R OA D TO T H E D I ACO N AT E Little did Deacon Downey know that God would also be sowing the seeds through his work with Lalmba to lead him to his vocation as a deacon. Deacon Downey celebrates the 40th anniversary of his ordination in June of this year. "I was a deacon before I was a deacon," he said. "The first deacons were called by the early church to serve widows and orphans and to feed the hungry, and that's what I do. So on one of our return trips from Africa, Marty was a teacher, and she came back to study medi- cine and became a [registered nurse]. I went to the seminary to study to be a deacon. We took three years out of our lives to get ourselves reappointed, and that was when I realized what the ministry of a deacon really was. And so I applied, they accepted me, and darn if they didn't ordain me, too." As often happens when following the Lord's will, Lalmba eventually grew to become much bigger than Deacon Downey and Marty could have ever imagined. The ministry currently has two locations in Kenya and Ethiopia, and the good work that started unsuspectingly in 1961 continues to bear much fruit. However, Deacon Downey knew that he would eventually need to hand over the reins of the ministry to whom it rightfully belonged: the African people. "One day, Marty and I were sitting on a rock outside. No furniture. And we came to under- stand that we were getting in over our heads," he recalled. "This is getting bigger than us. And so we had what we called a 10-year plan, and the 10-year plan was to transfer everything that we had known to other people, especially Afri- cans. And we did that successfully."

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