Comboni Lay Missionaries

CLM Missionary sending in Nova Contagem, Minas Gerais, Ipê Amarelo.

Priscila…And God said, “Do not come near; take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” And so it is in the life story of Priscilla Garcia, certainly God saw shepherding the flock in Ipê Amarelo and saw it was time to go further, the bush was not consumed, as the heart of a missionary, always burns and never consumed!

Priscilla, as in Exodus 13 reading said: Yes I will go to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you… So this day February 28, 2016; with the blessing of God, the father provincial Alcides and missionary Childhood, Priscila Garcia assumes in front of the community of Our Lady of Aparecida its commitment for at least 2 years in African lands. Mozambique is waiting for her, where she will find a new culture in which God is now also waiting. Here in Brazil we will be praying for the mission in Africa.

Lourdes CLM Brazil

Africanize-me

Africa, a cry that resounds from childhood.
A silent scream … I hope for so long.
Africa that makes me dream! That makes my heart beat a rhythmically. Africa that fascinates me!
Fantasy and reality they meet now, utopia and concreteness are given and inspire me to Africanize-me.
That my feet touch you without invade.
That my hands greet you without hurting you.
Let my heart love you more than he already loves you and that you, O Africa, show me your love!
A love that does not constrict. Love that does not destroy.
Join our knowledge without mine drowning yours, without yours inhibit mine.
Africa… Africa… Africa…
Welcome me! Accept me! Teach me!
That the childhood dream of touching you, now matured and possible can be made at a meeting of souls, in a true encounter of ME with YOU. Let everything be done with love.


Priscila Garcia. CLM

100 days

100 dias100 days of the biggest environmental crime in the history of Brazil.

17 people dead, destroyed an entire community, toxic sludge that destroys Rio Doce, walking 600 km to the Atlantic Ocean and contaminate it.

100 days without any concrete plan for the recovery of Rio Doce.

100 days of absolute impunity.

100 days without anyone going to jail.

 

Day November 5, 2015 it seems to be a calm day in the community of Bento Rodrigues, a small town in the interior of Minas Gerais, with 600 inhabitants. That day, at 16:30 pm, the mobile phones of the people began to sound like screams coming from far away. Cries warned the dam failure containing the mud of Samarco mining. (Vale).

A river of mud at a terrific speed, which was directed towards the community, and in short time, hit another to enter Rio Doce and then into the ocean and contaminate it.

A toxic sludge with its 15 meters high of violence and destruction.

The violence destroyed forever the river, vegetation, wildlife, community, leaving red sludge making no longer possible to generate life.

100 days have passed and still remains immune, the news is set aside as if nothing had happened, something that does not matter anymore, to return to a superficial and false normality.

But normality is the one of injustice, normalcy is king in the profits of the multinational, Vale and company, not yet claimed responsibility for what occurred.

Faced with this serious situation, the state government did not treat this as an emergency, leaving the company the task of solving the problem with its own media, lawyer, operating engineers and scientists monitoring … at its benefit and interest.

In 2013, a commission denounced the irregularity of the dam due to increased erosion of the mountain that endangered the safety of it. A danger caused by the exploitation of the territory. At the time of the disaster, it was found that the company did not have an emergency plan and no security measures were taken.

In Minas Gerais, there are 754 dams containing waste sludge from mining companies and of these, 42 do not have security certification. Realising corruption, false balances, interest… We are talking about multinational companies that make billions.

In Minas, mining companies and politicians were always partners, like two old friends together in a system that creates benefits, earnings, but not for the common good, not for the people, not for our sacred land.

This environmental disaster involves all of us, because the damage is global, not just local, and always will be a large open wound in the history of this country.

Irrecoverable permanent damages, such as the death of people and an ecosystem that will never be the same.

Fraternity Campaign of the Catholic Church in Brazil this year, has the theme “Common home: Our responsibility”, «Scorra come acqua il diritto e la giustizia come un torrente perenne».

(Amos 5: 24). The Earth is our common home, so destroyed, abused and exploited house. We must work for an ecological culture that can defend, love and heal the world and where we are all responsible for this healing.

And to care for the earth, we must also challenge the capitalist system that explodes, kills and creates inequality by first placing the money and not the value of life.
minas

100 days spent, 100 days that have not been forgotten, and we must not forget, we can not build the future with this lame and sick, and should stop reporting.

The common house, our responsibility!

Mineral extraction by mining companies destroy the mountains of Minas Gerais, as well as in other countries.

During extraction work, highly dangerous chemicals that contaminate soil, water and create toxic sludge dams threaten the people and communities are used.

Emma Chiolini CLM(Fonte: artigo de Marcus V. Polignano, revista Manuelzão, UFMG)

Remembering the past…

Emma Brasil LMC

Five months have passed since my arrival in Brazil, I arrived on December 1, 2013 in Nova Contagem, on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais.

The first months were not easy, as all beginnings, because of the new culture, language, customs, way of doing things very different from mine, in a place that I did not know. You have to go to mission open to re-learn and be patient with yourself and others, give yourself time to enter, find, meet, hear, interact, listen and understand. You have to know how to create a culture of encounter with the other and their difference, their time, their thoughts that allow us to identify the coordinates where you and me can start a shared way. We should not just relate superficially but, we have to “touch-meet” and be “touch and meet”, being willing to change. It is not easy when we are adults, when we have our own formation, our own way of thinking, it is sometimes painful, difficult, but it is important and enriching. Re-learn to know how to accept, re-learn to wait, to know how to re-learn to grow and, above all, know how to love. On mission, you have to be with your head, feet and heart, otherwise you live a partial and limited experience. In these five months, I have learned to do this and I still do, every day, with the difficulties and the problems that this entails.

I realized that I am finding God in a different way; I am living in a different way. The depth of gestures, events, situations, places, creates a dialogue with Him, more intense and deep. Share the Word of God in a small brick house, simple and poor, has a completely different feel and a perspective completely different.

Here in Nova Contagem I got involved in prison ministry, visiting the prison. Prison is an environment, hard, difficult, with many challenges. The first are those bureaucratic and time it takes to get to the identification and review. Most of the time I relate to prisoners standing behind an iron gate in a small space where you have to reach out for a handshake, negotiating with the bars. Are important moments of encounter, listening times, to greet, to promote human rights (prison ministry also aims to denounce the inhuman and unjust situations) and share the Word of God. It is an “intense” moment to pray the Our Father, hand in hand, with all the difficulties of the bars and then conclude with a round of applause to thank everybody.

In addition to the prison ministry, I am starting to learn the APAC (Association for the Protection and Assistance to the Convicted) system. It is an alternative to the prison system, where there is respect for the person and dignity. No police in these structures, no humiliating reviews, volunteers and the prisoners themselves run everything. An innovative system that does not punish, but educate and are educated together. Living the two experiences: APAC and prison allow me to see the differences, see how in APAC people is recover and in the penal system do not, because on one hand there is the respect for the individual and the importance of the person in prison, on the other hand the imprisoned is considered a waste of society, worthless.

They are two completely different worlds.

In the community of Ipê Amarelo, where I live, I help in the pastoral care of children. Up to now, I am dealing with families visiting and invite then to weigh each month as a form of control to combat and prevent situations of malnutrition, undernutrition and obesity. Going into some of the houses, which opens to me a reality made of so much poverty and deprivation.

Finally, another important moment in my missionary experience is the family group of addicts (drugs and alcohol). People involved are simple people, often women, mothers or wives who share stories of hardship and pain (who lost a son because he killed, who have a child who is using drugs, a husband with alcohol problems). The instrument of this group is simply to share and listen, tell us how to make a change. And direct individuals seeking recovery by offering help and support. There are a lot of strength and a lot of faith in these people, it is a group that “transform me” every time I participate. Every Tuesday I am pleased to participate and return home converted.

Meaningful to me is life in community, planning a common path with others, accepting differences, reflection and the experience of Comboni spirituality, love for God and Life. It is a journey of growth and discovery of others and myself.

Very important are the times of prayer together, where through the Word of God, we share our own experience and missionary group, a moment of personal and community relief.

Here, up to now, my missionary walk part from these meetings, these moments, these roads. I have still much to discover, but I am on the way and, with courage and faith to follow this path, reminding me that mission is not a matter of doing great things, but little things that are valuable.

02.10.2016 Today…

It seems like yesterday I arrived in Brazil, but it was two years ago and I am in the third.

I feel a little tenderness to read these words of the first moments. I remember, still, the first insecure and timid steps. Today, looking back, I see the way I did and am still doing, a beautiful path, sometimes difficult, sometimes falls, but always walk and climb. The mission will change you if you allow it for changing. It is not true that we have no expectations when we went out of our country, we had it and they fall when we start to shed our mentality and try to get into the mindset of the other, dropping our barriers.

Community life teaches much about this. Coexistence is an ongoing mediation and auto-meditation, discover and auto-discovering, sometimes fighting, sometimes through difficult times, but always trying to find each other. Each of us has its personality, its temperament and its wounds we carry and the fights are not so much with others but with your own wounds.

We need witnesses, be word embodied in action right where we live and this place is, in first place the Community.

“Community, place of forgiveness and celebration,” a place for sharing and communion.

Today my feet are strong and safe, but always in a walk of discovery and learning … barefoot.

Emma Chiolini, Comboni Lay Missionary

“I was in prison and you came to visit me”

pastoral penitenciaria LMC Brasil
Prison ministry group with Father Adriano.

Among the various pastoral activities in the parish of Santo Domingo, led by the Comboni Missionaries in Nova Contagem, there is also the Prison Pastoral, carried forward by 15 volunteers, including Comboni Lay Missionaries, as part of the parish.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning, the group meets to visit the pavilions of the maximum security prison Nelson Hungría, located in Nova Contagem, with about 2,000 prisoners. The appointment is at 08:00 in the square next to the prison.

Prisons in Brazil, as elsewhere in the world, suffer high prison overcrowding due to a system with little attention to the recovery of the detainees.

Prisons of Minas Gerais, for example, can receive 32,000 prisoners, divided into 144 prisons, actually are 54,000 prisoners within the various units. This situation can only deteriorate the living conditions of prisoners, with a purpose of punishment more than re-education and re-socialization, with serious violations of human rights.

The action and commitment of the Prison Pastoral group, mostly made up of women, is to believe in the work of promoting human dignity, respect for human rights, and overcoming the limits of the current prison system in favor of a model that allows effective recovery and reintegration of the prisoner.

The most important of our pastoral action is the testimony of a God who does not discriminate any person in a place marked by contempt, prejudice and violence, making our own the words of the Gospel: “I was in prison and you came to visit me”. It is the teaching of Jesus, the method, the model, who heads the walk of this pastoral, recognizing the face of God in every person, even in prison.

There are many challenges and difficulties faced in our pastoral activities, such as excessive bureaucracy that often delays and complicates our work, controls, restrictions on visits, limited permissions; but this small group of volunteers face difficulties with courage. This also allowed in 2014, to create two groups of catechesis in prison and enabled some prisoners who had requested to receive the sacraments.

To this are fundamental the moments of ongoing formation we do each month, with a space dedicated for programming and training, allowing pastoral prison agent to know and learn the actions and information that will help improve visits to the prison and the relationship with prisoners. We also attend the training conducted by the diocese.

That’s the job of the prison ministry. A simple action, holding hands, meeting face to face, listening to the life stories of those who are on the other side of the bars in order to witness the justice and dignity of every human being, because as the Gospel says ” By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13, 35).

Emma Chiolini, Comboni Lay Missionary