More than 50 years ago, Claire Aucoin answered a call to help struggling people in Colombia. Now 90, Aucoin is still caring for the elderly in the city of Cartago and has no plans to slow down.
“I’ll keep going as long as I can,” Aucoin said during an interview at Aucoin Farm in Henniker. “When I can’t walk anymore, when I can’t do anything, then I’ll think about it.”
Aucoin is back in New Hampshire for about a month to catch up with her siblings – she’s the fourth oldest of 14 – to see longtime friends and gather things to bring back to the mission in Cartago that she has helped build since first arriving in the mid-1960s. She spends about 11 months each year at the mission.
This weekend, St. Theresa’s Parish Hall in Henniker will host a mission sale to support Aucoin’s work. The sale – open Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. – is held every year when Aucoin returns to her hometown.
“Everything they make helps out,” she said of the donated proceeds.
The area in Cartago that serves as the mission currently has 12 houses. Volunteers care for some 300 elderly residents, providing medication, food, beds, clothes and some medical care. Aucoin said people who live around the city
support the mission by donating food, clothes and money, but there is always a need for more. For example, Aucoin said the mission has fallen behind on its utility bills.
In past years, the city covered these expenses for the mission, but Aucoin said that support eventually came to an end and now the bills are stacking up. Aucoin’s faith has her confident the mission will find a way to pay the debt and continue.
“God has never left me without anything,” she said. “He’s always there, every time.”
Aucoin grew up in Henniker and went to high school there before she dropped out. She developed a passion for helping people and wanted to begin training as a nurse at Notre Dame Hospital in Manchester. The head nurse there told her to finish school first, so Aucoin returned to Henniker and graduated as salutatorian.
Aucoin worked at Notre Dame for 11 years, bouncing between departments and developing a wide breadth of skills. She says she enjoyed the work and planned to stay, but an advertisement in the Union Leader caught her eye one day.
The Manchester Diocese was seeking volunteers for a mission visit to Mexico City.
“I just thought, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for,’ ” Aucoin said.
She was accepted into the program and spent three months in Mexico where she began to learn Spanish. It wasn’t long after she returned that Aucoin signed up for a longer mission, a three-year stay in Colombia. The Diocese of Manchester had established a mission there, called The Parish of our Lady of Perpetual Help, about four years earlier in 1962.
The conditions she found in the city of Cartago struck a nerve.
“The poverty was horrible,” Aucoin said. “Many of the children were very, very sick. They all were either very emaciated or they were very swollen.”
The mission opened a nutrition center, mainly focused on providing healthy food to children. Aucoin said it was common for local hospitals to send sick children home if they were poor and tell their parents to simply feed them.
“But the more you fed them, the worse they’d be, because they were filled with parasites,” she said.
The mission began to provide medication to combat these parasites. And as time went on, it opened its doors to shelter abandoned children.
As more and more children and families sought the mission’s help, Aucoin’s connection to the local community deepened. She smiled as she remembered how the kids taught her Spanish.
“The children, they were very nice to me,” she said. “I’d try to say things I knew, and they’d say ‘No, that’s not how you say it,’ and then they’d say it. They’re the ones, the children, who taught me the Spanish language.”
When her first three years were up, she had no intention of leaving.
“I just couldn’t leave them,” Aucoin said. “I felt that we were doing something worthwhile.”
As the years passed, the impact of Aucoin and the mission was becoming clear. They added more buildings and expanded the space to accommodate more people. The children they took in grew older, with some staying to work and help others.
Eventually, the mission’s focus gradually shifted to helping the elderly. Aucoin says it started when a local priest came to her with an elderly man and woman. The man was blind and suffering from cancer and the woman, his sister, had Alzheimer’s, Aucoin said.
“They didn’t have any lights in their house, they didn’t have any water,” Aucoin said. “So we took them in, this couple, and then another one came along, and another.”
Aucoin has made Cartago her home for the last 53 years, but she still has very strong roots in Henniker. She looks forward to her annual trip to New Hampshire, and her siblings are proud of the work she has stayed so committed to through the decades.
One of her sisters, Lorraine, recalled visiting Cartago in the 1990s and meeting the people Claire was helping.
“It’s amazing how much people need her there,” Lorraine said.
Aucoin is heading back to Colombia in August. She has no plans to retire. She says she believes that as long as she is healthy, Cartago is where she needs to be.
“The good Lord keeps me a little healthy so that I can do something, and I still feel that I can do it,” she said. “I’m still trying to do what I can to help them out. When I can’t do it anymore, then I’ll stop.”