Italo

Italo was a clown who helped kids living on the streets of Guatemala City.

The following is a tribute to Italo written by our dear friend Joel Van Dyke shortly after Italo's death:

Please allow us this week to submit a reflection that is longer that what we usually write. It is important to us because this past weekend in Guatemala City we lost a great friend and colleague who loved the unlovable of his city with reckless abandon and unbridled passion.

About 6 years ago my wife Marilyn and I met Italo Castro after some friends told us about a professional clown who had a ministry with street kids. Late one evening we left our children with a babysitter in the comfort of our home and went out with Italo to meet some other youth who called the streets their home. It was an experience that profoundly marked our lives.

We zigzagged throughout the city that night stopping at different "puntos" or points where the street youth of our city gathered to lick the wounds of the day. They would replenish their little bottles of "wipe" used as inhalants to mask their pain and cover their hunger before eventually falling asleep together in "bundles" for shared body heat. When we finally returned to our home at about 2:30am, we just lay in bed staring at the ceiling, haunted by the smell of paint thinner and the faces of the youth that we had left on the street when it started to rain. Neither of us slept that night.

As I recall that experience now, I'll never forget the way Italo lovingly moved back and forth between the youth gently slipping their hands (filled with rags drenched with mind numbing inhalants) down off of their faces saying to them, "Let me see the beautiful face that God has created. Dejame verte" (let me see you). He would also burst out in a chant over and over again yelling, "me siento bien, me siento bien" to which the kids would respond "me siento bien", "me siento bien." For all who had the privilege of spending time with Italo meeting the kids he so dearly loved, that chant became the unforgettable stamp in the passport of their journey to the streets.

He embodied the truth captured in the words of poet Galway Kinnell, "sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing it's loveliness." Italo lived to "re-teach loveliness" and "purpose" to children and teens who everyone else saw as ugly and useless. Through him, many of those kids, for the first time in their lives, experienced the love of a father, big brother and a friend and through Italo's life were embraced by the God who had sent him to them for far to brief a time.

On Sunday afternoon, February 20, Italo was swimming in Lake Atitlan with friends after spending a weekend with other clowns at a special event. He was caught in a strong current that dragged him further and further from the shore while his friends (several ex-street kids who were now living with him) looked on helplessly after realizing too late what was happening.
At the memorial service, when the street kids came into the church, they immediately surrounded the coffin and cried. The people in the front rows reverently made space for them so they could have the best seats in the house. Several local pastors spoke of their deep respect for Italo and how they had been touched by his infectious joy in or out of face paint. His brother Oscar, now a worship pastor, told how Italo was the inspiration behind his life of serving God through music.

At the funeral the next day, there was a parade of colorful clowns shouting "Me siento bien" and "Viva Chitin" ("Payaso Chitin" was Italo's clown name). At the gravesite, even as the bricklayers boarded up the crypt, clown after clown spoke of the incredible inspiration Italo had been in their lives. After almost everyone else had left, the street kids huddled close and held each other while taking a shower in one another's tears. They each took turns speaking of the love of God they knew in the man who taught them how to feel good in their souls and who could see them for who they really were ("dejame verte").

Italo's life and ministry represents the best of the grassroots leaders whom we have the privilege of serving alongside of and learning from in CTM networks throughout the world. With hundreds of street kids in Guatemala City, he lived fully into a sense of "kinship" which Father Gregory Boyle describes in his book Tattoos on the Heart,

"....Its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them."

Italo lived in kinship with the kids of the street in a manner that I can only describe as absolutely beautiful. He put flesh on the epiphany that Thomas Merton once had on a street corner in Lexington, Kentucky, "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs." Italo Castro (Payaso Chitin), lived his life overwhelmed daily by the "sudden realization" that he loved street kids in Guatemala City, that they were "his" and he was "theirs."

Like the friends of the paralytic in the New Testament, so Italo-the consummate friend of paralyzed children and youth from the streets-was ripping off the roof so that those outside could be let in. A month ago, CTM colleague Ron Ruthruff and I took students from a master's course we were teaching to be exposed to Italo and the kids he loved. Italo posted a video of that day with the caption, "If the church does not go, we make the church with them." You can see the video here with crazy Italo dancing in his clown gear!

Italo had dreams of starting a clown school with street kids and along with our friends at Athentikos and At Risk No More, funding was being secured for the project that would have given him everything he needed to fulfill many of the dreams he had had with the youth for so many years.

Today as I think of the contagious way Italo's life was the smile of God's grace to forgotten children and youth and consider the solid team of ex-street youth he discipled that are now committed to carry on where he left off, I repeat the words of my friend that became his life's chant, "Me siento bien!" Because of his friendship, life and legacy, I feel really, really good!!

Joel Van Dyke
Director, Estrategia de Transformación
CTM in Latin America