ABSTRACT

Ms. Lazo seems too good to be true. In fact, she is as close to a modernday saint as most of us are ever likely to meet. Whether she is working with her colleagues at INSSBI, the Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security and Welfare; with representatives from international relief organizations; with the campesino children in the rural day care centers that she has established; with the destitute : Miskitu Indians whose repatriation she is assisting under U.N. auspices; or with the victims of the October 1988 Hurricane Joan which leveled the Atlantic coastal town of Bluefields; Ms. Lazo stands out as an authentic, strong, practical Christian idealist.

Ms. Lazo lives in a tiny, simple, crowded home with her husband and three daughters, two of whom she adopted after they had been abandoned by their natural parents. She works relentlessly and compassionately on behalf of the poor, undaunted by the near-total lack of resources she faces, bureaucratic red tape, and general institutional temporizing.

Eschewing the language of ideology for that of the parables, which is immediately accessible to the campesino experience, Ms. Lazo clearly identifies the kingdom of God with the social justice promised by the revolution, and she works tirelessly to realize that promise. She may be a saint, but she is no mystic.