Comboni Lay Missionaries

Manos Unidas’ 2021 Campaign

Manos Unidas LMC Sevilla

During this weekend, Manos Unidas (NGO of the Spanish Church) celebrates one more year the Campaign against Hunger. And despite the difficulties they do not back down and reinvent themselves so that Solidarity is contagious and spreads to all of us.

Manos Unidas LMC Sevilla

This Saturday morning we were fortunate to participate in a round table in Seville, the starting signal for the campaign in our province. We are always excited to hear the testimony of missionaries who have spent more than 30 years on the front line, sharing their lives with the most forgotten peoples, and how, thanks to the generosity of so many anonymous people, the construction of so many dreams, so many schools, health centers… can become a reality.

In addition to our missionary experience, we were asked to present experiences of collaboration with Manos Unidas. In this sense we talked about a small project where we collaborated during our time in Mozambique and also the project that currently support in Brazil to our community in Piquiá. It was also an opportunity to raise awareness about a current reality of the mission.

Manos Unidas LMC Sevilla

During the weekend of the campaign we also shared our experience in Mozambique with the parish of San José Obrero, in San Juan de Aznalfarache (a small town near Seville), we told them about a very small project with which Manos Unidas had collaborated with the parish of Our Lady of Peace in Namapa, where we CLM worked for four years.

It was the construction of a multipurpose room, four walls very well used, full of life and hope. And we told them how that space served as a library, where they could sit at a table and chair to write, versus the option of doing it on the floor, on a mat, inside a small hut by candlelight. Where secondary school students could find a few books where they could consult chemistry, mathematics, … in a region where not even the teachers had textbooks, and all their support material were the notebooks that they kept as a treasure from when they had done their training and that they tried to transmit to their students by slate and learn by heart.

And we would talk to them about the work of promoting women that was done there. Thanks also to anonymous generosity, sewing machines had arrived (yes, those pedal ones, to be used where there is no light), and they were taught a trade, giving them the opportunity to earn a living, in addition to creating circles of support, in which to work with them on self-esteem and empowerment in a society where equality between men and women is a utopia.

And we told them about the joy and life that was transmitted in the rehearsals of the parish choir, in that group of young people with whom we worked those values of fellowship, listening, teamwork, trying to accompany them in their growth processes as active members of their society, in their specific historical moment.

And we explained to them how once every two months, the catechists of the 86 communities that made up the parish, came for a weekend to receive Christian formation to take and share with their communities. Many came walking from long distances, eager to meet and deepen their knowledge and experience of this Jesus of Nazareth who was changing their lives. And during those days the hall became the place of meeting and welcome, dormitory and dining room. Shared bread and shared life.

And I remember those quiet afternoons, sitting on those stone benches at the entrance of the hall, from where you could see the simple people passing by, on their way to the market, on their way home, …. enjoying those beautiful African sunsets, and thanking the Father for all that shared LIFE.

Maricarmen Tomás and Alberto de la Portilla, CLM Spain

“Conversations with Ethiopia”: a missionary testimony

LMC

Last January 31 we transmitted live from the Facebook page of the Comboni Lay Missionaries of Portugal: “Missionary Conversations with Ethiopia”. In this conversation between the three CLM, David Aguilera – CLM from Spain – and Pedro Nascimento – CLM from Portugal – shared about the life that sprouts in the mission where they live as a community since 2019 in Ethiopia. They answered questions regarding the response to the call to the missionary vocation, the preparation for their departure to the mission and the experiences and difficulties in the mission.

“For me it was a very nice and intense exchange, also with a special meaning for me, since I also lived that mission for some time and I follow it with my heart and with all the people I met in Ethiopia and in all the way that led me to this mission as a CLM. It is very good to feel that my fellow missionary mates make a beautiful and difficult path, but with the willingness to serve and to let themselves be led by the hands of God”, says Carolina Fiúza, Portuguese CLM who interviews the two CLM, and who was also with them on mission in 2019.

Thus, in the midst of the time of confinement that we live today, to stimulate the ritual of staying at home but with love, we share a missionary testimony that certainly touched many.

CLM Portugal.

Rural Family House of Açailândia: a history of struggles

CFR Brasil

By Zé Luís Costa. From the MST website. (Edited by Fernanda Alcântara)

CFR Brasil

The Rural Family House [Casa Familiar Rural (CFR)] of Açailândia, in the state of Maranhão, was constituted as an association in 2001 after a small group of social activists met and began to discuss ways to improve the issue of rural education for the local reality.

From the beginning, the entities that started the proposal of the family house entered the debate of this political and social project, such as the MST, which had just settled in the city, the institute of the Comboni Missionaries, the Center for the Defense of Life and Human Rights and the Union of Workers and Rural Workers of the city.

The experience of this type of school is already old in the world and in the state of Maranhão they are present in several different cities. In other parts of the world this type of school is known as “Family Agricultural School”.

From the first discussions, the interested organizations held several meetings, even in cities on the outskirts, as Xoan Carlos (CLM) reminds us. “We held a series of meetings in the communities. There were another 60 meetings in the municipalities of Açailândia, São Francisco do Brejão, Itinga, Bom Jesus das Selvas. And finally the association was formed”.

He continues: “From there we obtained a piece of land, given by the Catholic Church. But we could not afford to build the building or pay the employees. So it was a few more years of struggle and articulation in the search for projects, and where we got some international support”.

CFR Brasil

Later, in 2003, the organizations involved in the idea managed to start what they dreamed of for the city and its surroundings, in view of the large number of settlements and rural communities they had in the vicinity of the city, now with 110,000 inhabitants. It was a dream for the distant future.

The pioneers of the idea achieved, with much struggle, agreements with the city council, as Xoan Carlos states. “In 2005 we started the first activities of the CFR. We started with an elementary school course, we had managed to structure several productive units in agriculture, beekeeping, cattle raising, pigs… Governor Jackson Lago had the intention of doing a high school course integrated to professional education, and a new moment started for the CFR”, he concludes.

With these articulations, in 2006 the high school course started, which was better adapted to the needs of the youth in the countryside. Mainly because, in 2001, many communities only had young people with the fourth grade at most. This was the need they have: a school with different characteristics from the conventional ones, for the countryside.

Jarbe Firmino was a student in the first class of the Açailândia Rural Family House, and later entered the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA). He graduated in Education in countryside and returned to CFR, now as a monitor/teacher, and then took a position in the institution as general coordinator.

He tells about his experience criticizing the position of the public power: “This experience, to which I refer, of coordinator, as well as in other moments, was of great difficulty in terms of support from the public power. These were periods in which contracts were not honored by the State, which weakened the movement of which the CFR is a part,” he concludes.

After all this struggle, came the recognition and the conquests. The main one was the training of young people as agricultural technicians to work in the settlements with their families and in some state agencies. The Regional Council of Engineering and Agronomy, CREA, recognized them so that they could work officially providing technical assistance to the projects.

However, the desire of the coordination and the group that organizes the association and the CFR is that the students, trained, work with their families developing what they have learned, in family farms, as most of the settlements of the agrarian reform.

CFR Brasil

The CFR is managed by an association, and the president is currently Xoan Carlos. The coordination is chosen by the association and has ten teachers who are hired by the Maranhão State Education Secretariat.

History of the rural family houses

The Rural Family Houses originated in France in 1935, in a situation of strong rural exodus, when a group of families, with the support of the Catholic Church, met to rethink this situation. They called it “House” to differentiate it from the conventional school and because it began in the home of a family; “Family” because it was an organization of families and not of the government; and “Rural” because the object of the experience was in the rural environment as a whole: technical, human, cultural, etc.

Today, in France, there are 450 CFRs. Since the 1960s, the experience has spread to Spain and Italy under the name “Family Farm School”. There are about 1,000 CFRs in the five continents, in thirty countries.

In Brazil, the CFRs began to appear at the end of the 1960s, and today there are about 150 rural educational centers that operate with the “Pedagogy of Alternance”. In Maranhão there are approximately 27 schools with these formative principles. The pedagogy of alternation developed within the methods of Paulo Freire, in a construction of technical training, is united with training for life, in the case of Açailândia, expanded with the commitment to the struggles for a differentiated model of agriculture.

CFR Brasil

Mission in Ethiopia

CLM Ethiopia

To discover the mission and take care of it is also to look at small faces and images that capture the immense joy of being a mission, in this case, among the GUMUZ. The Gumuz (inhabitants of the Benishangul-Gumuz region) are the people that God has destined to our CLM friends in Ethiopia as a place of mission and sharing. They went there to find love and today, in this video, we see a little (just a little…) of what missionary work is. The rest of what can be shared (and which is a lot) remains for a good conversation and listening to the testimony of these missionaries.

Ethiopian CLM

Two young lay missionaries at the time of coronavirus

Etiopia
Etiopia

Among the novelties brought about by this sadly famous Covid-19 pandemic is that it does not give much room for charitable action or heroism in favour of others. In old times of plague, whoever chose to do so could dedicate himself totally to the plague-stricken even at the risk of his life. This was done by people who were later declared saints, such as Louis Gonzaga, King Louis of France or Daniel Comboni. But that’s now forbidden. We are in a super-organized society that acts according to scientific hygiene criteria, and what we are told is that the best way to help others is to stay at home to reduce the risks of contagion. However, there is always room for generosity, even in times of coronavirus.

I say all this from a corner of Africa where, thank God, the coronavirus has not “yet” arrived and where government measures of isolation are not as draconian as they have been in Europe. But we are still conditioned in many ways by the virus, which is like a sword of Damocles that hangs menacingly over our heads.

I live in the mission of Gilgel Beles, in Ethiopia, with two young Comboni lay missionaries, one Spanish and the other Portuguese, who arrived here a year ago. Nothing was known about the coronavirus at that time, and they came full of enthusiasm to do many things for others. They gave themselves without measure in services such as teaching everything they were capable of teaching, visiting the villages, taking the sick who fell in their path to the health center… They worked hard to make the most of the brief two-year period of their stay.

Then, unexpectedly, in the middle of the work, so to speak, came the coronavirus. Many organizations called on their members to return to the nation of origin. They too were called. If they stayed, it was their responsibility. And they did not hesitate in their choice: they remained “on their own responsibility”, even when the mother of one of them is awaiting a delicate cancer operation and even when they themselves are afflicted by continuous attacks of typhus and typhoid fever, which weaken both of them…

And here they are. As I said, it’s not that the containment measures are particularly harsh. The range of movement is still quite wide, at least as long as the first contagions don’t show up in our area.

However, the whole rhyme of the activities has suffered. With academic life totally paralyzed and meetings banned, they can no longer teach groups and the library that they had opened no longer has any customers.

Despite all these limitations, they try to resist to the limit. They have become attached to these people and, although they cannot do many things “for them”, they can be “with them”. And they feel that the simple presence in these moments of tribulation is a value that in itself justifies both coming and staying as long as possible.

LMC Etiopia

Fr. Juan González Núñez

From Gumuz, Ethiopia