Angel Creek: Where the River Meets the Sea, A Memoir by Gail Porter Mandell (review)

Gail Porter Mandell’s memoir, Angel Creek: Where the River Meets the Sea, focuses on her life in 1962 as a volunteer in the Papal Volunteers to Latin America (PAVLA) program in British Honduras (now Belize). This book is one lay woman’s reflection on faith-based service and mission, which she started the same year as the opening session of the Second Vatican Council.

This text is a move away from Mandell’s previous book-length publications in the areas of art, literature, and history. In this memoir, Mandell turns her attention inward, successfully and gracefully balancing the intimate and personal details of her life with the broader questions, concerns, and challenges of the global context of the mid-60’s. Mandell weaves together excerpts from her letters home, journal entries, and the memories stirred by more recent conversations with fellow volunteers. In doing so, she offers a work that is a rich integration of reflection on her lived experience, questions about human nature, and social analysis – all done in a captivating poetic voice.

The book begins with Mandell (referred to as Abby within the memoir) and her fellow PAVLA volunteers “Kate” and “Molly” and friend “Fr. Charlie Bosque” vowing that they would return to their mountain in the future. In the next twenty-five chapters, Mandell chronicles the volunteers’ experiences as young women serving as schoolteachers in a community rebuilding itself after the devastating effects of Hurricane Hattie. Together, the women enter into the racially and culturally diverse community of Angel Creek, which includes Garifuna, Creole, Latino, Amerindian, Asian, European, North American, and American populations. They experience the reality of culture shock, the struggles and opportunities that intentional community living presents, the experience of living the values of solidarity and social justice, the challenge of navigating romantic relationships while on mission, the license to observe a broken system as an outsider, and the joys and hospitality encountered by the community they are privileged to enter for a short while. Each story has a deeper meaning, which Mandell subtly addresses. This range of challenging topics includes bigotry and racism, the observed entitlement of Europeans and Americans living in the area, the attempt to reconcile feminism with Catholicism, and clericalism. From encounters with the schoolchildren that range from delightful to heartbreaking to cultural misunderstandings and adventures, Mandell crafts her writing with ease and invites readers to reflect on the deeper cultural significance and humanity of each vignette. One example of cultural misunderstanding and introspection appears in the book’s tenth chapter, The Jesus Tree. The women purchased candles at a store only to be told by one of the locals that they were the kind that the “witch women” used to cast hexes and curses. One of the priests offered to talk to the shop owner since Abby and her friends were worried that they had caused scandal in the town. This led to a conversation and explanation of the black magic beliefs and superstitions (voodoo and obeah) that were part of the culture and folk tales that accompanied the practices. Mandell closes the chapter by sharing a story told by their neighbor, Therese, about a legendary tree that “bleeds” on Good Friday, called the Jesus Tree. She writes, “Do we all, I wondered, need a Jesus tree on occasion – some object or image that gives us a glimpse of supernatural influence and sometimes terrible beauty, which we appropriate for ourselves and use as the spirit moves us, to comfort, console, create or destroy?” (128).

In the chapter Priests and Virgins, she recounts experiences and conversations that articulate the healthy struggle between lived experience and church teaching. Within the same chapter, she also explains that because her program included collaboration between religious and lay people, doors were opened that would have remained closed to a lay woman working there on her own. Her experience as a lay person working...