Comboni Lay Missionaries

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About the mission among the Gumuz

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Gumuz situation
Gumuz situation

When, in November 2020, I returned from Portugal, I never thought I would live the moments I have lived in these last months.

I live in Guilguel Beles, Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia, and in the mission we work essentially with the Gumuz people (we Comboni Lay Missionaries live with the Comboni religious in the same mission). We do not close our doors to anyone, but this is one of the most forgotten and abandoned people in Ethiopia and in the world.

Several people of other ethnic groups also live here, such as the Amara, Agaw and Chinacha. The soil is fertile and that makes it a desirable area. And therefore, many times, the Gumuz have lost land that belonged to them.

But even then, the people lived in peace, without major problems. In 2019, I was already in Ethiopia, a Gumuz village was attacked, people were killed, houses burned…. Our mission was a pioneer in providing aid to displaced people.

When I come back, in November 2020, Gumuz rebels started attacking some non-Gumuz. With great pain I learned of the death of many innocent people. Human life is precious.

However, I also witnessed the persecution of the Gumuz. People fled to the forest, houses were burned, dozens of young people were arrested without any justification.

I remember going with David, CLM, my mission colleague, to Debre Markos, in the Amara region, with two Gumuz because they were afraid of being killed. Several times we went to assist the detainees at the police station.

In the meantime, the government started to negotiate with the Gumuz rebels and for almost two months we managed to open schools, the clinic and the library.

However, the negotiations failed and the Gumuz rebels killed more people. It is not always easy to conclude negotiations when the proposals demanded are impossible to achieve.

In response, rebels from Amara and Agaw attacked villages, killed people and burned houses. The young men I share life with, the women in the group I followed, the children in the school and kindergarten had to flee into the forest: with no food, no clothes, nothing. People I knew were killed: innocent people!

Many people came to our mission to ask for food, money to buy food, medical assistance….

At first we prepared food for all the needy who came to us [“give them something to eat” (Mt 14:16)]; then, with the help of the Diocese, we offered pasta and every morning we offered a meal to more than 200 children. On Sundays we offer a meal after Mass.

David takes care of the meals every day and Sister Nives (a Comboni Sister) provides medical care to dozens of people each day.

I alternate between helping with the work with the children and going to Mandura, to the mission of the Comboni Sisters (who had to leave the mission, due to this guerrilla situation, living for now in our mission. But during the day they try to stay in the mission where they were, Mandura, to welcome the people who come) where I help in the domestic chores, like fetching water for the animals, for the house (as the sisters have no water at home), etc. and I welcome (me and the Comboni Sisters Vicenta and Cristiane) the people who come to greet or ask for help. Many of them risk coming to the mission, after walking three or four hours, to fetch the cereals they have stored in the sisters’ house or to ask for help.

It has been very hard to listen to so much suffering: people who are suffering, malnutrition, seriously ill children, people who have lost their relatives, who have lost their grain. How many times I find it hard to fall asleep thinking about this reality.

Gumuz situation

Mission consists of faces… and I see so many suffering faces. When I pray in Church and look at the cross of Jesus, I see many faces, I contemplate this suffering reality and I realize that Jesus is on that cross for us and that He continues to suffer daily for us. But at the same time I feel these words in my mind: do not be afraid, I am with you!

It is not easy to live these moments of suffering, but the experience of faith in Jesus, who spent His life doing good, who suffered, who was killed but was resurrected helps us to be witnesses of God’s Love among people.

Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the mission at different levels of prayer, friendship, affection and help. Without your participation we would not be able to help. Thank you very much from the bottom of our hearts!

There is no lack of tribulations, but be assured that your prayer sustains us. The mission is God’s and in Him we must put our trust.

Fraternal embrace,

Pedro Nascimento, LMC in Ethiopia

Maiata organizes an exhibition about the mission of volunteers in Africa

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Cristina Sousa

Cristina Sousa, 51, already has an enriching experience of two years of volunteering in the Central African Republic to show in her photos.

As a Comboni Lay Missionary, she did not want to stop recording in photos, as an amateur, a people that brought her closer to the best there is in the world. Now she is organizing, together with the Municipality of Maia, an exhibition of which we will soon have news.

Cristina Sousa

Cristina Sousa is from Gueifáes, Maia (henceforth maiata), and in January 2018 she went on mission as a volunteer to the Central African Republic, to the Mongoumba region, where she knew the Pygmy people. When she returned to Portugal two years later, she felt the need to share the audiovisual records she collected throughout this time to give more visibility to the daily life of this “wonderful people”.

Cristina Sousa is a Comboni Lay Missionary and, according to her, being a missionary is a vocation, something that accompanies us inside”. Cristina affirms that to become a missionary she had to spend three years of formation. “We prepare ourselves spiritually, we wait and then we are sent,” she explains. This sending is done by the team responsible for the Laity, but for Cristina “it is something interior, where we feel that it is God who sends us”.

The missionary has been on this path for about five years and, according to her, “we do not need to go abroad to be missionaries”. The need to go out to meet “our brother”, as Cristina explains, “is something that is born and boils within us” and if this need is not nourished “we do not feel well”.

The Pygmy people are “extraordinary”.

Her first and only mission up to date has been in Central Africa, “right in the heart of Africa”, where she has shared her life with the Pygmies. According to Cristina Sousa, the Pygmies are “extraordinary and very special”. They have a humility and simplicity that “I have only experienced there”. For this reason, she considers it a “privilege to live with these people, to be welcomed, conquered and to conquer them as well”.

The Pygmies live in “sparsely populated” camps scattered throughout the jungle, and the aim of the Comboni Lay Missionaries is to help with integration in the villages. “They are almost never welcome, because they live in the forest and are quite discriminate”, Cristina explains. “They are exploited and have no access to school or hospital.” Thus, the role of the laity is to serve as a “bridge in this integration”.

Currently, thanks to the work done by missionaries like her, there are many children in school and more access to health care, but discrimination is still quite visible among the population. Cristina says that one of her biggest concerns is the fact that there are no records of these people “as people, it is almost as if they did not exist”.

In the attempt to grant some identity to these people, Cristina Sousa encountered their reality, because “they are nomads, their houses are not protected from the rain and they have no way of keeping documents in their clothes”. Thus, the existence of personal identification documents is almost impossible.

According to this Comboni Lay Missionary “the process of inculturation requires a lot of care”, because “we go with our ideals and we have to understand that they have theirs. Our main charism is to Save Africa with Africa. That is to say, to help in the formation of the African so that they can walk on their own”. Thus, the role of the laity is “to be, to witness and to transmit the Good News”. The sharing of knowledge with the African people is, according to Cristina, “quite difficult, because then we leave and they may not even have understood very well what we wanted to transmit”.

Cristina Sousa returned from the Central African Republic just on the edge of the first confinement.

When Cristina Sousa returned to Portugal in February 2020, she says it was a matter of luck that she was not “caught at the airports” because, two weeks later, the country entered its first confinement. To receive news from Africa, Cristina tries to establish contact with “Portuguese compatriots who are in the capital, priests and brothers”.

The Covid-19 pandemic is “uncontrollable in the Central African Republic”. According to Cristina, due to the lack of economic resources and the “lack of suitable places, people do not have access to tests and, therefore, the true cause of death is never known”, but “because the average life expectancy is about 40 years, the number of elderly people is extremely small and, for this reason, I believe that there Covid-19 will not be so aggressive and resistant”.

As for prevention measures, “sometimes they send me photos or videos and you see people wearing masks”. Which for her “doesn’t make much sense, because at bedtime they are all together”.

For her, talking about the covirus in these scenarios is even more difficult, among other things because there are other more serious diseases that have been killing for several years, such as malaria, Ebola and leprosy, for example, in which thousands of people die every day. “This has been going on for a long time and there is still no vaccine,” she adds.

The inequalities between developed and developing countries “are still very present” and Cristina Sousa explains that she does not understand “the lack of demonstrations on the rights of African peoples”.

Cristina would like to see more fighting for the rights of Africans.

“I see a lot of demonstrations for human rights and animal rights, but what about these people? It’s important that we take to the streets to demonstrate inequality.”

However, Cristina reflects that it’s not all bad: “Maybe we have also unbalanced these people a little bit, because we went to show them a different reality than the one they know. They live off nature, and we cannot take nature away from them”. According to her, “there is a paradox here that requires reflection”.

The Comboni Lay Missionary also says that she has seen “children die from snake bites and other simple things”. If these things had happened in the West, they would not have caused death. It is difficult to manage emotions, because one always thinks that if these people had been born somewhere else, this would not happen to them.”

During her mission, Cristina Sousa used her camera to capture the moments she spent with the Pygmy people. In an amateur way, this maiata recorded the daily life of this sui generis people with the purpose of “spreading the message that the image conveys, that is, to make this wonderful people known”. Our duty as missionaries is to bring their reality here and somehow make people a little more aware of other realities”.

Currently, Cristina Sousa is negotiating with the Municipality of Maia so that her photographs can be exhibited and shared with her community of origin. Cristina Sousa hopes to be able to share the daily life of the pygmies with her compatriots, with place and date yet to be defined.

The missionary believes that “sharing what we have and what others can give us is what develops us as people”. The exchange of experiences of different realities is, in the end, what enriches us and makes us grow”.

Cristina Sousa
Cristina Sousa

Bogumiła and Andrzej – Comboni lay missionaries from Poland

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Bogusia i Andrzej

From a young age, we have been interested in the world and people, and during the meetings missionaries have always told us in an interesting way that people in Africa and the world need help, support, and getting to know God.

Bogusia i Andrzej

There has come a moment in our lives that we don’t have to go to work anymore, we don’t have to play with the children, the parents are gone, and we want to give something of ourselves – be useful to people. Why not join the missionaries? Why not go?

We started looking for how and who could prepare us for such a trip. There was an obstacle here – we are “too old”, preparations are for young people.

Meanwhile, Father Dawid Stelmach came to our parish as an auxiliary priest. It turned out that he was responsible for the missions in the Poznań diocese – and it went on…

Everything started to come together. Some time passed by, Fr. Dawid contacted Magda Plekan – a CLM from Poznań (for four years on missions in Ethiopia), who has not been discouraged by our age and would be happy to see us in Ethiopia, but we need to prepare. We were helped in this by the Comboni Lay Missionaries from Krakow – they are MISSIONARIES – who proclaim Christ, not only with words, but above all with their actions, attitudes, love for others, responsible performance of their duties, and in addition their domain is Africa.

We went to Ethiopia as volunteers to two centers run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity – one in Awassa and the other one in Dire Dawa. Both centers are clinics and care centers.

We didn’t feel like strangers there, we had the impression that we didn’t travel far.

The path for a missionary is full of surprises, it is not always as we would like it to be. Sometimes the unexpected can frustrate your plans and expectations.

It turned out to be a coronavirus pandemic. We know that God protects us – He stands behind each of us, supports us and expects us to see it, trust and submit to His will.

Today we are learning the Ukrainian language, because our plans include a trip to Ukraine to Kamieniec Podolski, where we contacted the Polish priest Marcin. In May, the priest will come to Poland and asked us to go with him to Kamieniec Podolski and find out on the spot how we could find ourselves there. We hope that it will happen – it is not only up to us.

The Ukrainian language is taught by the Deacon who is in Poznań on preparation before his ordination in May this year in the Cathedral in Kamieniec Podolski.

He introduced us to the current conditions and the situation in Ukraine, customs, people’s behavior, a bit of history.

This is not Africa but Europe. Ukraine is at war with Russia and this is a very difficult and socially delicate matter for a missionary. This puts the missionary in a special situation where, in a civilized Europe, states fight each other.

Nowadays it is difficult to understand that in Europe there may again be a threat to peace.

Bogumiła and Andrzej – Comboni lay missionaries from Poland

Easter Message

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Sepulcro vacío

I am the Resurrection and the Life

Sepulcro vacío
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The sisters sent this message to Jesus: “Lord, the man you love is ill.” Jesus said: “This sickness will end not in death but in God’s glory and through it the Son of God will be glorified”. “I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies, he will live…” Do you believe this? “Yes, Lord”, she said, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world” (Jn 11, 3.4.25-27).

The world is going through a very difficult period due to the Covid 19 which continues to cause much suffering with thousands of people falling ill and dying. There are various peoples who are suffering not only due to the Covid-19 but also because of wars, instability, being left homeless, dangerous migrations, problems provoked by climate change and economic circumstances. When we think of the pandemic, we remember the many confreres and sisters who have had this experience of death and resurrection and are now in the glory of the Risen Lord. In this sorrowful situation of suffering and death where the Christ of Good Friday is continuously crucified and dying in those who suffer the consequences of this pandemic, it is not an easy matter to find words of encouragement, of joy, of life or, in the final analysis, of resurrection.

However, it is precisely because we are Christians and missionary disciples of the Lord that we are invited this Easter to place our trust in Him who is the Lord of life and has gone through suffering, sorrow and humiliation even to dying on the Cross, and being raised from the dead by the Father. Consequently, the words He spoke to Martha on the death of her brother Lazarus are all the more appropriate for us and the whole of humanity at this moment: “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me, even though he dies he will live and whoever lives and believes in me will never die”.

Faith in the resurrection and the hope that He has brought us are the greatest and most precious gifts we can proclaim and offer to all people. Let us never tire, therefore, of repeating to each and every person: Christ is risen! Filled with this certainty, we bear this proclamation to every community, ever home and every family and to all those places where people suffer most. As Pope Francis affirms: “Let us try, if we can, to make the best use of this time: let us be generous; let us help those in need in our neighbourhood; let us look out for the loneliest people, perhaps by telephone or social networks; let us pray to the Lord for those who are in difficulty in Italy and in the world. Even if we are isolated, thought and spirit can go far with the creativity of love. This is what we need today: the creativity of love. This is what is needed today: the creativity of love” (Video message of Pope Francis for Holy Week 2020).

It is the mission of compassion that we, as missionaries, are called to proclaim, the closeness of God to His people, His tenderness and His love. Like Jesus, who cured many sick people, we are today His instruments to heal suffering, indifference, selfishness and the distancing that this disease generates. It is the mission of the encounter that makes room for acceptance and fraternity that generates life in abundance for all. We are therefore missionaries of hope and joy in the present context when we prophetically remind everyone that “We cannot go ahead, each one on their own, but only together” (Homily of Pope Francis, 27/03/2020). This is a new way of being in the world: not just a return to the past we know but a way of being involved in the world with creativity and wisdom.

It is only by confronting the cross that we can find the hope we need to live as risen people, as Daniel Comboni teaches us: Could a true apostle’s heart ever be downcast and fearful at all these obstacles and extraordinary difficulties? No, it is not possible, ever! Triumph is in the Cross alone. (W. 5646). This is the triumph of the Risen One. In the Risen Jesus, life has overcome death. This is the hope for better times, the hope that never leaves us disappointed.

With these sentiments of joy, we wish for you and all of us a Holy Easter of Resurrection!

Rome, 19 March 2021

The MCCJ General Council