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"It hit me over the head with a hammer to wake up - you don't have it that bad."-- Matt Hasselbeck, after a missionary excursion
Source: Tribnet.com
A sense of values
Matt Hasselbeck: Some say the Seahawks' new quarterback is a born leader, others say he's a rare athlete - flying high with both feet on the ground
July 29, 2001
Mike Sando; The News Tribune
Matt Hasselbeck brought back more than hepatitis A from his improbable sojourn to the harshest slums of the Caribbean.
Five years have passed since Hasselbeck awoke in a hospital bed in Massachusetts, unsure exactly how he got there.
And while the Seattle Seahawks' new quarterback has recovered from the illness that robbed his angular frame of 27 precious pounds, he remains deeply affected by what he encountered in Jamaica as a missionary from Boston College.
"It was a life-changing experience," Hasselbeck said.
Riverton City is a wretched place by any measure, having arisen atop a landfill that absorbs more than half of Jamaica's garbage - some 1,300 tons daily. Shanties with tin roofs provide little refuge from the stench. Violence is part of daily life, and daily death.
For Hasselbeck, the most powerful memories of his time there remain disturbing enough to preclude casual discussion.
"It is a totally shocking experience, even for people who are used to such things," said Ted Dziak, the former Boston College chaplain who organized the mission. "It's a situation where people are living in dire, extreme poverty."
Hasselbeck applied to join Dziak's team, the Ignacio Volunteers, only after his athletic career began to founder.
But just as the BC football team doesn't let just anyone play quarterback, the Ignacio Volunteers don't take along just any Sally Struthers-wannabe on their annual missions to various impoverished nations.
For each of the 16 applicants accepted for the trip to Jamaica, six were rejected. Hasselbeck was the first football player to apply - against the wishes of some assistant coaches. Under those circumstances, he was thrilled to make the cut.
But the months spent researching their journey could not have prepared the missionaries for what they would encounter one morning while working in a schoolyard in Riverton City. Neither, certainly, could Hasselbeck's All-American upbringing in suburban Norfolk, Mass.
"A small child had fallen into what was basically a hole used as a toilet, and the child had literally drowned in excrement," Dziak recalled from Kingston, where he now serves as chief administrator of a high school. "The mother picked up the child and was screaming. Our volunteers tried to help, but the child was dead."
The ordeal was enough to make Hasselbeck vomit, witnesses recalled.
Richard Mackey, a professor in the BC department of social work, was with Hasselbeck at the time. He recalled a chaotic scene fraught with danger.
As the Ignacio Volunteers would later learn, a similar tragedy had touched off rioting several months earlier. This time, the government summoned troops to maintain order.
"We were looking down the muzzles of heavy machine guns," Mackey said. "The military vehicles came through the shanties going about 3 miles per hour. It was a scary and frightening scene.
"The community was just in an uproar. I think back on it now and I think, 'My God, we could have all been dead.'"
The incident represents but one memory from one morning in a week that changed the way Hasselbeck thought about the world and his place in it. He lived with an impoverished Jamaican family and worked in two additional dwellings not far from Riverton City.
At a home for elderly lepers, Hasselbeck was initially dumbfounded when a severely disfigured man was found thanking God for blessing his life. The man, George McVee, had lost his eyes, ears, nose and fingers to the disease.
"It hit me over the head with a hammer to wake up - you don't have it that bad," Hasselbeck said. "It just really changed me."
Those who accompanied Hasselbeck on the trip admit to having been somewhat skeptical upon learning that a football player would be joining their idealistic ranks. But Hasselbeck did not fit their frat-boy stereotypes.
"Matt proved he was a very warm person, very approachable and very easy to hang around," said Amy Schoeffield Telep, who also served in Jamaica and now works for Building With Books, an organization that builds schoolhouses in developing nations. "We needed that because we were preparing to depend on each other."
 
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