Dear friends,
Greetings from Carapira!
It is with great joy that we share a record of our meeting. After some impasses we got together to schedule some activities for the group.
It was a fruitful encounter and we were very encouraged to continue to faithfully follow the Lord of the harvest. Love is stronger and it continues to win! Thank God!
A friendly hug,
From all of us!!
CLM Mozambique
March 12, 2018
Day 388 Remaining 712
Greetings to all, how are you? I hope well… this Christmas and New Year 2018 were a little strange, spent in the heat of the Central African Republic, wearing a summer T-shirt and eating Portuguese cod… 🙂
THE NIGHT OF DESIRES
It is NIGHT here! A deep NIGHT that envelops everything! A NIGHT that is not like all the other NIGHTS, because it is a perennial NIGHT! It is NIGHT even during the day! We live in this NIGHT, in an infinite present, we live as if there was not tomorrow!
Our schools would need to be restructured because the bricks are literally eaten up by the termites and, when it rains, they get flooded, and during the NIGHT they are inhabited by bats that make your stomach turn…
Our hospital have no medical supplies, there is no food for the patients, and those who need surgery must provide everything down to the last penny…
Our roads have potholes that look like craters because of the big trucks and the rain, and the average speed on the Bangui-Mongoumba road is around 30 km/h and the trip lasts 7/8 hours…
We would need a bridge on the River Lobaye or a new ferry because the big and heavy trucks of the foreign multinationals that transport our lumber from the forest have damaged it… We would need doctors, pediatricians, teachers, instructors, university professors to take care of the new generations, instead…
…more soldiers will come!
Perhaps I am the only one who does not understand how more soldiers may help us come out of this dark and deep NIGHT in which we live!!
The new year has brought us as a gift a new military base in our diocese of Mbaiki… the bulldozer arrived, it flattened an enormous area, it quickly dug a trench, it raised great dirt barriers and behold… a beautiful, new, secure UN military base… to protect us from whom? The Lobaye is the only peaceful area in the CAR!!!
Perhaps I am the only one who does not understand how more soldiers, more arms, more armored vehicles, more resources to keep them going, can help us get out of this dark and paralyzing NIGHT in which we live! Adding the risk that our NIGHT may become even more NIGHT. We are all like acrobats walking on the wire, risking to fall again in our fears, instead of finding the courage to get out of this NIGHT that seems to be eternal!
There is no money for the schools, for health care for salaries for our teachers, for the hospitals, for repairing our roads…
…but there is money for building a new military base and pay 900 soldiers…
Perhaps I do not understand!
Someone asked me what we would have DESIRED on Christmas NIGHT… and for 2018…
…a little bit of LIGHT…
The people who walked in DARKNESS have seen a great LIGHT…
…for those who lived in the shadow of death a LIGHT has shone… (Mt 4:16)
Greetings, a hug, a kiss, a prayer and THANK YOU…
Simone, CLM
From Brazil, they presented a small video of the work in the pastoral care of children and families in Ipê Amarelo.
CLM Brazil
Hi dear friends!
I hope you are doing well. I arrived in the CAR two months ago and still I have not put away my luggage but my heart is totally taken by Mongoumba.
Emotions here reach an intensity that is beyond us.
At the very moment when I think “I’m leaving” I feel that my life is growing roots here!
It is not easy to manage the unknown, it is not easy to accept what is different, it is not easy to control impotence, the difficulties… But it is in difficulties that we stop being blind, deaf, mute…
The process of adaptation is going “yeke, yeke” which is Sango for “a little bit at the time.” I have turned this expression into an “order” for my head.
On any one day my heart beats in different ways, it cries in the morning, it laughs in the afternoon and at night at times it does both.
I have already started my Sango classes. Simone says that Mr. Dominique, the professor, has already begun to speak Portuguese quite well. In spite of all this, I will let you into a secret I have: I am totally in love with five little Pygmies – Paul, Dimanche, Albert, Pauline and François. By coming to school they also have breakfast and lunch. They are my oxygen capsule where I feed my body and my soul. We play, we pray and we converse (truly, we converse). But you will say, how do we communicate? I have lots of fun when I am the object of their study. They investigate me in detail: hands, veins, the mark of an elastic band on my arm, they have regular sessions around my head and my hair is the topics of much discussion. On this las day Pauline discover a hole in my belly – my belly button. It was a great topic of conversation! (Ha, ha)
How not to fall in love with them?
I end by wishing all of you a Happy Easter.
May Lent be a time of deep reflection and conversion, but above all of “humanitarian” action and that this action may be the fruit of our prayers.
Kisses from all of us in the CAR.
May Jesus protect and enlighten us all, in particular the CAR children who are the true diamonds of Africa.
Cristina Sousa
CLM in the Republic of Central Africa
This road with the youth already has half a year and the truth is that every day we feel that it goes further. From the first days, their lives crossed with ours and from that moment, we decided that somehow we had to walk together.
The group was born and, although without a name, it has grown with the testimony of everyone’s life.
Now they take the helm. We plant a little of the seed that we bring inside and together we will see how it will bear fruit.
Paula and Neuza. CLM Arequipa
