Comboni Lay Missionaries

GEC from Curitiba meets to plan the year’s activities.

LMC Brasil

The Comboni Spirituality Group of Curitiba, present in Santa Amelia Parish, met on the first day of March. Present were Jussara, Fátima, Fr Lionel, Leonel, Darlene, Fr Rafael, seminarians Antônio and Tiago, Cleia, Pedro, Cristina and Luzia.

It was an important moment for us to pray together, to welcome the two seminarians who are starting the Propaedeutic Course, which is the first stage of formation in the journey of Comboni priests and brothers.

We also made a plan for our monthly meetings and drew up some guidelines for our work in the communities.

May Saint Daniel Comboni, in this twentieth year of his canonization, continue to inspire us with his boldness and missionary zeal!

Cristina Paulek – CLM Brazil in Curitiba

Christmas sharing

LMC Brasil

On December 24, Christmas Eve, a group of leaders from the Nossa Senhora Aparecida community in Ipê Amarelo, São Domingos de Gusmão Parish, in Contagem/Minas Gerais, met at the Santa Teresinha mission house, where the CLM live, to share a moment of community prayer, followed by a shared lunch, with the participation of everybody.

During the prayer, we reflected on the Gospel of the 4th Sunday of Advent and each person could write the meaning of Christmas on a small star and share it with the others. The stars were then pasted on a mural that made up the living space.

It was an important and participatory moment, which helped to strengthen bonds and encourage people to continue the community’s journey next year.

Ipê Amarelo CLM Community (Brazil)

CFR: school of resistance

LMC Brasil

Today is Monday, one of the busiest days, another week begins again at Casa Familiar Rural, the agricultural school where I am helping out. Off we go: 7:30 a.m. me and Nete, the school’s cook, start doing the week’s shopping for the 30 first-year students, 8:15 a.m. shopping done. 8.30 am I call the driver of the two buses to confirm transportation for the students, some come from very far: they leave home at 6 am, only after 3 hours by bus they arrive in town.

In the square in front of the market everyone gathers, they come from various parts of the region, and at 10 a.m. a bus picks up the boys and goes to the school.

The Rural Family House is located in the middle of a mixture of “countryside and forest.” To get there you’ll have to pass through the working-class Jardim de Aulidia neighborhood, a cluster of houses all looking the same scrolling across the hilly horizon, a sardine quarter just outside Açailandia. After passing it you will find yourself in front of a mud house, as we would say, built with biomaterials, finally surrounded by greenery.

Now you continue along the long unpaved road, on either side flow pastures as far as the eye can see in an up and down between the hills of the valley. Halfway along the road the landscape changes, on the left there is cultivation in Agroflorestry System while on the right there is an area of living forest, still intact, until, at last, in front of you is the Casa Familiar Rural.

Don’t imagine a big school like the ones we are used to; a maximum of 35 to 40 students a week study here. It’s a friendly environment, very rustic, it’s a “schoolhouse,” with dormitory spaces, two classrooms, the large dining hall with wooden tables, the library, the computer room and the lab. And then all around green spaces managed in various ways: vegetable garden, fruit garden, bee house, medicinal plants, chicken house and pigsty. All in function of study and learning.

The students in the house are young people between the ages of 15 and 19 who are doing “ensino medio,” which lasts three years and is the equivalent of our high school with an agricultural focus. These young people come from the countryside, from farming families where they are labor force as well as children, which is why the school uses what is called the Pedagogy of Alternation, since during the year they constantly alternate a week in school and a week at home, so as not to take away an important support from the work in the fields, but also because through these years of study the goal is for the boys and girls to take home new techniques and improve the family agriculture by developing it from an Agroecological perspective.

A special feature is that there are 10 hours of lessons each day: basic subject and technical subjects: from mathematics to animal husbandry, from bovine-culture to history. An intense program between practice and theory, a school that becomes family because of all the time spent together, and becomes home because everyone has responsibilities to keep this place clean by doing their part.

But this is not just a school like any other: it is a school that symbolizes RESISTANCE. In fact, here it is necessary to resist in order to survive what is called AGRONEGOTIUM, that is, those big producers of Soja and Eucalyptus, who with their monocultures invade, devastate and undermine the preservation of the environment, incentivizing deforestation and the use of agrotoxics through aerial dispersion. A tool that is killing in small doses communities still trying to live off the countryside and family farming.

Those who choose to come to this school choose to give a different future not only to their family but also to their community. The goal is to train these boys and girls to care for their land through innovative agricultural methodologies capable of adapting to the environment without destroying it.

Anna and Gabriele, CLM in Brazil

Essa Luta is Nossa (This is Our Fight)

LMC Brasil

PODCAST 2 – BEGINNING WITH SONG “Essa Luta è Nossa Essa Luta è do pouvo…”

Hi, we are Anna and Gabriel, and this is Ciranda, the podcast about our mission experience in Brazil. In which we try to bring you into the everyday life experiences and choices of those who live in this part of the world.

Edvar Dantas Cardeal lives in a small village, on the outskirts of Açailândia, in the hinterland of Maranhão. Unfortunately, he still does not own his history, because he lives where no one would want to live. When he arrived in Piquiá, he really liked the name of the place, an homage to one of the region’s largest trees with delicious fruit, The Piqui.

The community of Piquiá de Baixo (so called because it is located in the area lower than the next neighborhood) was created in the 1970s, when this part of the region was still called “the gates of the amazonia,” rich in vegetation. People planted and fished from the river that kissed the banks of the community. It was a little paradise in the memories of the inhabitants.

Then in the 1980s, the “development” came, which even changed the name of the village to “Pequiá,” an acronym for “PetroQuímico Açailândia.” Açailândia itself, or “Açaí City,” another tasty fruit typical of the region, has lost the meaning of its name, where progress and respect for life cannot coexist.

Next to Edvar’s house were installed 14 steel furnaces, a thermal power plant, and, to top it off, a steel mill. The people of Piquiá did not even know what a steel plant was and what this would mean for their health, their lives, and that they would become little more than gears in this industrial machine. Companies came with manifestos of jobs, jobs for all, but the intent was always and only to settle there making the most at the least possible price, deceiving the community and destroying the way of life of those families.

It is 2005, Edvar heads to the small house of the Piquiá di Baixo inhabitants’ association of which he is a member, it might seem like just another day but perhaps he does not know that from that day began the real struggle and resistance of his community! He was tired of seeing iron dust fall from the sky and settle on every surface he finds. He sees friends and relatives increasingly starting to get sick, strong respiratory complications, skin infections, constant headaches, intestinal problems, exhaustion…his much-loved village was falling apart more and more.

Edvar waited 60 days before he was able to pick up a pen and a blank sheet of paper, he does not know how to start writing this letter, how to use the best words to tell about his community, but he knows for sure to whom it will be directed: To President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva!

Soon after time, the response arrived, with directions pointing to routes and public bodies that the community should seek out. The people of Piquiá soon realized that alone, though many, they would not be able to fight against a boulder the size of a steel mill, so little by little they managed to weave around them a strong network of allies, who took the community’s grievances and demands to international institutions, such as the UN. Thus the struggle that was started by Edvar became everyone’s, the community of Comboni Fathers and the associations that over time joined in this great resistance.

Of all the mobilizations carried out by the community over the years, some were very notable, such as the one that took place in December 2011, when hundreds of residents marched and blocked the super road that connects Açailândia to São Luís. The blockade lasted longer than 4 hours in a prolonged protest with burning tires. Another noteworthy protest was the one that forced the Steel mills to pay for expropriation, when residents made a real cooperative effort and, divided into shifts, closed the entrance and exit gates of the industries for 30 hours.

“We must do the possible in the impossible” was what Edvar repeated to his people in Piquiá, and this struggle, of all people, paid off. Through all this mobilization, the approval of the urban project for the new neighborhood was obtained on December 31, 2015. Due to bureaucracy, which is one of the tools of oppression of the poor, the resources to start the work were not made available until November 2018, when work began on a new Neighborhood: “PIQUIA DA CONQUISTA!

Edvar Dantas Cardeal died on January 23, 2020, a victim of the same disease he was fighting. His lungs were contaminated with iron dust, and his struggle ended after more than a month in the intensive care unit, due to respiratory failure and other complications.

Edvar Dantas, who started this struggle, will never see its end, but his ideas and hope live on in the new people of Piquiá da Comquista!

BATE PAPO

The struggle, therefore, is still ongoing and its outcome is open to debate.

The community’s achievements have been significant, especially considering the disproportion in scale between the local community and the national/global industry. Perhaps this is why the claims of the Piquiá de Baixo Community transcend the local struggle and become a larger banner that exposes the other side of development agendas. At the same time that it reaches international levels (such as the UN), this struggle takes place on the ground of the community, in direct human relations, as so well expressed in the letter that Mr. Edvard wrote to his nephew Moisés: The beauty of this battle is that we do not get tired, and when there is a defeat we react with more enthusiasm and conviction: it is very clear that we are victims, there is an obvious injustice! The law cannot be wrong: we will be compensated! Sometimes even grandparents delude themselves and dream like an inexperienced young person…. After all, it is hope that sustains us. But I learned, Moses, that hope is a child who needs two older sisters: patience and wisdom.

“ONE DAY, YOU NEW GENERATIONS, WILL TELL THIS STORY IN THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD: PIQUIA DA CONQUISTA!”

This is the ciranda song; it is danced in a circle, each member hugging his or her neighbors and moving to the rhythm by stamping their feet loudly. This song is a dance related to the Brazilian folk tradition.

YOURS EDVAR DANTAS, PRESENT!

Anna and Gabrielle, CLM in Brazil

How it all began

LMC Piquia

PODCAST 1 – Beginning with ciranda song.

This is the ciranda song, you dance in a circle, each member hugging his or her neighbors and moving in rhythm by banging their feet loudly. This song is a dance related to Brazilian folk tradition.

Hi, we are Anna and Gabriel, and this is Ciranda, the podcast about our mission experience in Brazil. In which we try to take you into the everyday life choices of people living in this part of the world.

We start with a question that we have been asked on several occasions over the past year: what does it mean to leave with the Comboni Lay Missionaries? Who are they? And why specifically in Brazil?

We got to know the reality of the Comboni Lay Missionaries (CLM) after some word of mouth until we met this reality in the Venegono area. The LMCs were created following the charism of Saint Daniele Comboni. A priest, from the first half of the 1800s, who dedicated his life to the mission in ways that were new for the time and probably also for today, with the goal, as he said, of “saving Africa with Africa.”

Comboni Lay Missionaries carry on this spirit in the various missions around the world by accompanying the presence of Combonians on the ground.

To better understand this new way of doing and being mission, which is different from what we had known in the past, we did a 2-year journey of getting to know the CLM, at the end of which, together with our reference group, we were proposed to do a period of experience in an international reality. We had proposed ourselves for the mission areas of Latin America, and at the same time in the mission in Brazil the urgency had arisen to find a couple of volunteers who could carry on the presence of the Laity, already inserted for several years in the reality of Piquià. So, in May 2022, we left, leaving our little house in Cuneo in the direction of Brazil, in the state of Maranhão, municipality of Acailândia, specifically in the small neighborhood of Piquià. This 3-month experience allowed us to touch the Combonian way of life, to learn Portuguese, and to observe the reality of the various projects in which the Comboni family is involved. These are mainly 3 realities: the casa familiar rural (a school for children from rural areas), the reality of Piquià de Baixo (a community affected by pollution from steel industries), and the interior families living in the countryside, isolated and affected by the world of agribusiness (i.e., deforestation and monoculture of soy and eucalyptus).

The time spent in Piquià was a short time but enough to make us realize that this would be our home for the next 3 years.

The uniqueness of this experience is also the choice to do common life with the Combonis, who live in the house next to ours. Therefore, not only are we included in the parish and engaged in the various pastoral activities but we share with them prayer times, dinners and other moments of daily life, making choices in common. This is the Comboni family, where lay people and Comboni fathers do mission together.

Dialogue

WHAT IT MEANS TO SAVE AFRICA WITH AFRICA …

WHAT STRUCK US ABOUT THIS STYLE…

WHY THREE YEARS?…

Anna and Gabrielle, CLM in Brazil