2024 marks the 50th Jubilee of the Permanent Diaconate here in the Archdiocese of Denver. Through preaching, service, worship and prayer, deacons serve the people of God in uniquely special ways through their various ministries and lives. This article is one of a series of articles the Denver Catholic will publish in 2024 which will feature local deacons and/or a diaconal ministry. There are many Deacon Saints who were martyred for their faith. In this year of Jubilee, the deacons of the Archdiocese of Denver are asking for prayers through the intercession of Saint Deacon Martyr Euplius of Cantania. Learn more of this Deacon Saint here.
It was 61 years ago, on a remote road in Africa, that Deacon Hugh Downey’s life changed forever.
“I didn’t ask to get into this,” Deacon Downey said. “God played a trick on me. He suckered me in. It was 1963, and I was driving on a road in Africa and saw a priest walking down the road, or who I thought was a priest. So I stopped and offered him a ride. He took me to his village, and that was the day that my whole life changed.”
Lalmba
That rather unremarkable moment marked the beginning of what has been quite a remarkable life of ministry and service for Deacon Downey, who serves at Joan of Arc Catholic Church when he’s not in Africa. This chance meeting would be the genesis for Lalmba, a ministry started by Deacon Downey and his wife Marty that is still going strong today. Lalmba serves the poor orphans and widows in Africa who are often ravaged by disease and war.
“Lalmba is Tigrinya word which means high mountain, literally translated,” Deacon Downey explained. “But it was a mountain that was known as a place of peace. During war time, people would flee to the mountain and live there as refugees until things settled down, then they’d go back. We started out in education because we saw education as their way out. If they’re not educated, they’re not going anywhere.”
Lalmba was founded in the 1960s in Eritrea, a small and poor country on the eastern Horn of Africa near Somalia. Eritrea is certainly an impoverished country by the world’s standards, but “poor” is a relative term, as Deacon Downey explains.
“We call them poor, but they don’t consider themselves poor, because everybody’s poor,” he said. “If everybody’s poor, then we’re all the same, right? So I wound up being the rich guy in the village, and there was need of a school. So I thought, I’m no engineer, but I can build a school.”
“It seemed like a simple thing to do to build a school,” he continued. “But when that was done, oh, there’s another village that doesn’t have a school. So we wound up building nine schools in nine different villages.”
Lalmba remained in Eritrea until 1970s. It was then that the Eritrean War of Independence broke out, forcing Lalmba to relocate its operations to nearby Sudan. They began to serve refugees who crossed the border to flee from the war. The need for medical care also became more apparent, so they used what resources they had to start building and operating clinics and hospitals in the area.
“When you take the poorest people you can imagine, and you take everything away from them that they have, and they’re living as refugees 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 refugee 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 experience. 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.”
Road to the diaconate
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 medicine and became an RN. 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 understand 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 Africans. And we did that successfully.”
His Work
In 2013, Deacon Downey and Marty officially retired from Lalmba, but their ministry to the African people wasn’t over yet. They shifted their focus from the poor, orphans and widows to another sorely underserved group of people in Africa: priests. Along with Monsignor Ken Leone, who served as pastor of Spirit of Christ at the time, he and his wife discerned starting yet another ministry that the Lord had placed on their hearts.
“The three of us sat down and said, where is this going? What’s God doing to us?” Deacon Downey said. “We needed to empower the African people. So what we decided to do was find people that you can trust and empower them with either knowledge or money to improve the lives of the people they serve. We started a foundation called His Work, because it’s not our work, it’s his work.”
Right now, they work with 44 different priests in Africa doing development work. They help to build churches, schools and roads, dig wells, and provide grants to priests to help them acquire various supplies to help them carry out their ministry. Deacon Downey recalled one priest who approached His Work for money to buy a horse and a pack saddle to he could ride into the rainforest and share the Gospel with the tribes living there.
“That’s exactly what we’re about,” Deacon Downey said.
“There’s a striking parallel between the lives of the people in Africa and the people who lived during the time of Jesus,” Deacon Downey explained.
“When I read scripture, I try to put myself in the lives of the people that are being spoken about,” he said. “Whether Jesus is calling a guy to climb a tree, or whether he’s multiplying loaves of bread, I try to have a feeling that what we’re doing is exactly what he wants us to do. That’s why we call ourselves His Work, because it’s got to be his, or it never would have succeeded.”
So what keeps Deacon Downey and Marty going back to Africa after all these years? It’s not the beauty of the land, the majesty of the wildlife or the thrill of living in a foreign country. It goes much, much deeper than all of that.
“Africa is a beautiful place with beautiful people and wonders. The first time I ever saw a herd of elephants in the wild, it took my breath away. But that’s not what Africa’s about. Africa’s about the people,” he concluded. “The people there are different than we are. They look different. They dress different. They smell different. But what they have is something that we don’t have.
“They’ve been good teachers. When you go to the university to study, It all fits in your mind. When you go to live in Africa, it all fits in your heart.”