(Article appears in the January/February 2012 issue of Maryknoll Magazine)

Mass ends at the Home of Compassion in Kigera village on Sunday morning and the congregation shuffles or is wheeled into the sunlight and greeted at the portal by Father Michael Bassano. Singing out the recessional hymn in African rhythms, the community of Tanzania's underclass—old women with swollen legs, impoverished children, survivors of trauma, the terminally ill and the mentally challenged—breaks into a joyful dance with the priest before turning to the daily routines.

For this Maryknoll priest from Binghamton, N.Y., the routine is changing the bedpans of elderly and disabled men.

"As we go from Eucharist to bedpan, we pray, but unless prayer is grounded in grassroots service of compassion then it is just prayer," Father Bassano says. "We have to live that compassion of God in a real concrete way."

At the Home of Compassion, on the shore of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania, the poor, sick and homeless find shelter. The 63-year-old missioner, who has lived here since 2008, is no stranger to human suffering, nor is he squeamish about bedpan ministry. Before coming to Tanzania, Father Bassano served for 10 years in Thailand, where he happily worked changing adult diapers on dying men while offering love, solace and understanding at an aids hospice in a Buddhist temple. Read more.....

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