Comboni Lay Missionaries

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Our journey in Carapira

by
LMC Mozambique

Dear all, it has been a while since we have talked and we are here to give you some news as so many of you keep requesting and we apologize for the delay. The days here are very dense and we do not hide the fact that they go by so fast, with such depth and fullness, that we do not even realize that July has begun and it has been a while since we have written :). We start by apologizing for this time, but towards the end of May, to our chagrin, we had problems with the phone plans…the company brutally cut the connection data, so that also did not allow us to give you much news, but thank God, a week ago, they changed everything again, putting a little more data, so we will be more operational and consistent. We hope in the future there won’t be any more cuts, in fact we hope there will be some increases in data, although a little bit we doubt it since there will be new elections in a few months. We have a lot of ideas in our heads, and if the phone plan does not change, we will unveil some ideas soon. This past month, we also received our “first African baptism,” or rather both of us were stricken with malaria. We were very surprised by this, but it allowed us to reflect a lot on what every day, each of them live with this disease, those who can afford to get treatment, and those who lose their lives because they don’t have the money to access to get tested and start treatment and the struggle to recover energy to start again. Because of this, with much sorrow, at the beginning of June, we had to say goodbye to the parish priest of Carapira parish, who had to return urgently, to his homeland, precisely because of continuous malaria. His suffering was so great both because of what he was experiencing because of malaria and because he had to leave this land that he loved so much. For us it was like a bolt out of the blue, because before being a good parish priest, he was a humble brother who was always at the service of everyone, he was just a beautiful witness to see and touch. Anyway, we are also very happy with the Comboni Fathers who are here with us, we are just living and breathing at this moment so much fullness and deep living with them. Every day, we find on both sides, like “a little excuse” to always find each other and build piece by piece a communion of fraternity and true witness. Here close to home, there are also nuns who are part of another religious institute than the Combonians, but even with them we have created just a beautiful relationship of harmony and complicity. This is certainly very important because it allows us to get to know each other and to feel like an extended family, but above all it makes us feel that we are in cordiality with our more lonely and abandoned brothers and sisters, and it allows us to help carry each other’s burdens.

We also received the grace in this time to experience the vigil and patronal feast, just of the parish of Carapira … we were more or less 200 people and it was exciting to live and breathe it together with them. Just think, the vigil lasted a good 4 hours, but it went by in the blink of an eye…there were many communities present who came from far and wide, with even a good number of young people present. Well what can we say about the Macua people…they amaze us more and more and we really feel at home among them and with them…I think this is the most appropriate and correct expression to use to make you understand what they make us experience in the true depth and essentiality of the human person. Every day we feel that we are smaller and smaller in their midst, precisely because we see that their presence is a great enrichment for us in our lives….in reality it is more they who form us than what we try to help them. You should see for yourselves with your own eyes and touch concretely with your own hands, how much beauty that is hidden here in their sores and suffering. Of course, all of this, makes us question a lot about various aspects of our lives, our relationships and how we unnecessarily waste energy and time on futile things. Here the beauty and essentiality is just the famous “being there” as we are and nothing more, which is always what we continue to understand and be stronger and more aware of within ourselves and along our path. In the end, what matters, is not what we do, the service in which we spend ourselves, or the accomplishment of something or ourselves, but the love with which we love these brothers and sisters. We know for a fact, that we will not be the ones to save anyone; on the contrary, they are the real protagonists who are saving us “Westerners.” How much joy it gives us to be among them, to try to say four words in their language, to hug them, to joke with them, to make them smile and to let God do the communion meeting with them. The other day we were reading this little phrase from Don Tonino Bello, which continues to resonate within us in this time: “I invite you to let yourselves be evangelized by the poor. So many times we think that we are the ones who bring the good news to the poor. But they live certain values better than others, such as trusting abandonment to Providence, solidarity in suffering.” Here we think this sentence can represent for good, what is written above! How many things we would like to tell you and try to make you more and more participants… how much we would like the love that touches our hearts, to reach you as well. How much we would like this grace to expand for them. But of one thing we are certain… that the Lord will know how to make our lives flourish along with yours with them. We are certain that the Lord of Life is already working in this. We will never cease to thank you for all the love you send our way, for the union and fellowship of this universal church that continues to expand and that each of us feels a part of. Thank you because your presence makes us feel like an extended family that home is not a place, but it is the people who live there and make you feel… and we feel this home is so big that it embraces our land, with this new land. For many of you, it will be a time of rest, we wish you from the bottom of our hearts that this time, makes you rediscover the essentiality of values and relationships. As we do every day, we remember you in our prayers before Jesus in the Eucharist and ask for your continued prayers for this people and a prayer for Father Jaider as well, that he may soon return to health and continue his ministry wherever the Lord will lead him. And as they say here….

Koxukhuru vanjene (thank you very much) With much gratitude and closeness Ilaria and Federica

During the Easter season in Mozambique.

by
La Palabra
La Palabra

Here we are, giving you some news after some time….

This period has been very rich in experience and beauty, made up of simple and unexpected encounters, but at the same time enriching our lives more and more.

In this past month, we participated in priestly ordinations, visited and shared moments with the brothers of the Comboni novitiate, participated in baptisms and communions in a community here near Carapira together with our Comboni fathers, had dinner at the home of a family here in the village, etc…I would say that we experienced the essentiality of sharing and of life itself

How much we would like to find a way to bring to you all the emotions and beauty, which the Macúa people sow every day in our hearts. Every day is always a good reason to smile, live with tenderness and find every excuse possible to meet and be together

How grateful we feel to life for this gift we have received and would like to give back to you. With each passing day, we feel as if we have been living here forever and are not in a foreign land, but feel at home.

We leave you with this image that is the Word, the essential source in our Life, to always direct our steps.

A big hug to each of you and thank you that you walk with us and are always by our side.

Happy Pentecost.

Ilaria, CLM

The True Easter Resurrection

by
LMC Mozambique

With joy and gratitude, we are writing to you news directly from Mozambique. Our first month passed very quickly, intensely and with great depth. Right from the start, we were welcomed with great enthusiasm, by the people of this land who are still suffering from injustice and have no hopeful outlook for the future. The Macua people, really have a big and generous heart, despite the suffering in their gaze.

In this first period, where we are still trying to figure out where we are, we had a great gift, that of sharing with them, the four most important days of the Easter season, from Holy Thursday to Easter. We left home early Thursday morning and until Easter Sunday afternoon, we lived in the village in close contact with the people. We took few things with us, the essentials to get through these days. Obviously in these communities, we were welcomed with open arms; and village living with them, meant no water, no light, sleeping on the ground with scorpions, bats etc… without all the comforts that we in the West now take for granted.

For us, it was four days of true essentiality, of pure love that allowed us to love their story even more and to question ourselves about the way we are close to each other, about the importance of the style with which to be on mission. How much richness we received, how much we learned from them once again, to live the essential in depth and richness that the Lord continues to give us every day! Right away, our lives are being shaped to a new form, the one that our brothers/sisters are teaching us every day. Our lives, are really experiencing an Easter Resurrection, thanks to them and thanks to what the Lord teaches us every day thanks to his Word which is Life and lifeblood to make a path in his Will (and not in what we instead seek to fulfill ourselves, to give answers to our sense of being here by only executing projects). For us, even before we came, it was very clear that the beauty of life and of being a mission is precisely to share our whole being with them, on the same plane with them. I think this point for us is fundamental and above all it is a way of life that each of us can feel inside, but it takes great courage to live it in simplicity and love of each other. We are strongly convinced, that the greatest witness we can give, is precisely the Christian way and attitude and not words… instead so many times we just go and get lost in this without a true witness of who we are, but especially of Who we love.

We feel that this presence of ours here is really accompanied by the presence of the Lord. We really missed re-embracing poverty, essentiality and total sharing with the most lonely and abandoned. It is a great gift to live the mission because it is Life, it is joy, it is courage, it is going out of oneself to give oneself totally to the Other.

For this richness that we are receiving in our lives, we want to thank all the people who are supporting us, who are accompanying us with prayer and with their becoming close, because this is also an outgoing Church, where the problem of a person, becomes the problem of a community. We believe very much in this dream of life, which the Lord has placed in our hearts, and we always trust in Him, who knows better than us the way and the ways to build a new different way of being in mission. And let us always remember that: “if I exist it is because the other makes me exist” and this should be a fundamental point on which to build bridges and not walls.

We embrace you with much esteem, gratitude, affection and we really hope that all our joy, may come to you to build something different together, where you also together with us are in communion in this journey of life. We continue to pray for all of you and carry you in every step we take always looking for the Face of God; we also rely on your prayers. See you for the next post…

With love Ilaria and Federica

GUARDIÕES: The fight for the land

by
LMC Brasil

“HELLO, WE ARE ANNA AND GABRIELE, AND THIS IS CIRANDA, THE PODCAST THAT TELLS OUR MISSION EXPERIENCE IN BRAZIL. IN WHICH WE TRY TO TAKE YOU INTO THE EVERYDAY LIFE CHOICES OF THOSE WHO LIVE IN THIS PART OF THE WORLD.”

Even today, after a morning of pouring sun, the rain visited us, half an hour of a powerful storm that dissolved in a few seconds, like the rapid passage of a plane. The rainy season has become this, a short cold shower, everyone wonders if it is a coincidence that it no longer rains for entire weeks as it happened in the past, but it is clear that climate change is screaming loudly here too.

You don’t reach these levels overnight, there is always a path and a story behind it, and the history of this land has very deep roots.

It all started a long time ago. In fact, from the time of the colonial invasion to today, Brazil has never implemented a popular agrarian reform. Consider that in a huge area like that of Brazil, only 1% of landowners own almost 50% of the total cultivable area in the country, and half of these large properties are totally unproductive and could therefore be expropriated for agrarian reform. Brazil is also the largest territory in the world in terms of possible arable land. It is for this reason that for decades the right to land has been conquered and not received by right, it is a fight against the system that has seen the birth of large movements such as that of the LANDLESS (MST), movements that fight to be able to live there where many, with roots in the land and fields, have always wanted and would like to continue to live.

Thus the idea of an occupation was born: hundreds of families reunited, organized themselves, occupying large plots of land to attract the attention of the federal government. Raimunda, waiting to receive this land, lived camped with her family for years, in tents made up of plastic sheets and 4 sticks, inside which there were pots and coal for cooking, clothes, hammocks to hook between a tree and the other, and then children born in the middle of the woods, raised far from life in the city. All in a true sense of community, of struggle, of life shared with little, waiting for the big day when we can finally receive a piece of land to build our own homes, surrounded by trees and fields to cultivate.

The inhabitants of the Francisco Romao Assentation have won the right to the land after 10 years of living in camp.

When they arrived in that territory they discovered that it was Government land, which had been occupied by a landowner illegally, the whole area had already been deforested to create an immense pasture of dairy cows, destroying the surrounding vegetation.

This phenomenon of illegitimate land appropriation is known as “Grillagem”, a practice of forced aging of false documents that are placed in a box with crickets, making them yellowed and gnawed, giving them an ancient and more credible appearance, a phenomenon of forgery to illegally take possession of vacant or third-party land. The families denounced this illegality to ask the government for the possibility of having part of that land and being able to cultivate and reforest it. After years of struggle and reclaiming the land, each family managed to have a property where they could do what they had always dreamed of: living off the land in a sustainable way. It’s an incredible story that of the assentamentos, places where life flows to the rhythm of the countryside.

You enter the settlement on dirt roads, a bright red earth, and you are immediately surrounded by houses and courtyards full of fruit trees and medicinal plants of all kinds, of which the families know every benefit and valorize them for purposes to the last sheet. When we go to visit them they tell us with great nostalgia about those times gone by: the times of precariousness, but also of union, happiness and sharing. The houses were initially made of mud and straw, people lived very little. Life in absence was a constant sharing of one’s possessions, the goal was for everyone to be able to live off that land and for issues to be resolved together, under the canopy in the center of the town, a space dedicated to community meetings. Together we decided what to grow (corn, beans, castanha), we decided where to build the school, together we fought to get tractors, we fought to have a public health building. These were the foundations for allowing a dignified life, and they were built together. A dignified life that allowed for at least 3 meals a day, with rice, beans and cassava, basic elements of Brazilian cuisine. Throughout this process, women were the true protagonists, taking care of the house, taking care of the children and helping the men in the fields, a true example of strength and leadership.

Community, solidarity and doing together, this is the common thread that has made it possible to win many battles and with which the assentamentos were built and still resist, places of life, struggle and defense of peasant life. Farming families have always had one great goal: to plant and harvest food, but also to reforest and protect native vegetation. This is why we called them Guardioes: the guardians. Guardians of nature, guardians of the well-being of the soil and of that piece of the Amazon that has been entrusted to them. Guardians of the community and of peasant life, of the fight against a system that wants to take away the life of the least and give strength to the powerful. Guardians of that land which has now been completely destroyed.

In the next episode you will know other stories of women who have chosen to fight in the face of all this. We wish you a good continuation and a happy and peaceful Easter and resurrection in the Lord.

Anna and Gabrielle, CLM in Brazil

Lay missionary experience of Ilaria Tinelli and Federica Rettondini in Modica

by
LMC Italia

“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” We wish to begin with this beautiful phrase, taken from The Little Prince, because it perfectly sums up what has affected us most in these months of life lived to the full here in Modica.

After spending a few weeks in Verona, attending the course at the Unitarian Center for Missionary Formation (CUM) and receiving the mandate from the Bishop, we returned to this land so rich in life and passion, which we missed so much. We spent a few days passing through the community of Avola, for testimonies in the parish and in some schools. Here, too, we touched with our own hands so much generosity, warm welcome and gracious kindness, but above all the “thirst” for a God who is fullness of life and truth, and also that great desire that each of us carries in our hearts to always be sister/brother, or “home,” to someone.

When we returned to Modica, as always, people welcomed us with open arms, and we became part of the various activities going on, such as the Italian school, in the morning, with the immigrant women and, in the afternoon, with the children at the “Crisci Ranni” educational worksite and the boys here at the Badia.

Well beyond the activities that take place, the beauty of this experience lies precisely in seeing and especially feeling that people are really generous and beautiful, always ready to dedicate themselves, with all the love and passion they possess, to assist others and create an extended community where everyone feels called to make common cause and feel like one family.

What struck us in a special way-and was felt by us as a “great gift”-were the young people we met in the schools, during catechism classes, especially in preparation for Confirmation. Amazing were the high school youth (in particular, those from the Liceo Classico and Ginnasio in Modica Bassa), capable of delivering us so much “beauty” made of values, hope and joy. In them we sensed a great desire to live a “big life,” to spend themselves in something great. But they need us adults to learn to listen to them, being close to them and accompanying them.

There were some moments in class when they “gave themselves up” in a profound way, and we understood how gently and carefully their lives need to be guarded. How often we adults, on the other hand, judge these young people, “labeling” them perhaps even just by the way they dress. Instead, they have their own world of expressing themselves, and they need to be helped to “bring out” what they have inside.

Here is a fact that struck us. One evening, we went for a little walk in Modica Alta, to see the view, to contemplate the beauty of creation. Arriving at the locality “Il Pizzo,” we saw a group of 20 to 30 boys laughing and joking. We approached them and slowly, very gently, greeted them and then chatted a little with them. Nothing special, mind you. But great was our surprise when they thanked us for the simple fact that we had had the courage to greet them, to stop, to share our lives with them, and also to listen to them. They told us, “Usually, if not almost always, we are ‘criticized’ and kept away.”

With this few lines, we wish to invite you to have the courage to “get our hands dirty,” to dare in our lives. Life is worthy if we spend it for the last! And when our path encounters obstacles, let us continue undaunted on our way, knowing that the Lord is always present and ready to guide us. The important thing is not to give in to any compromise of any kind, but to continue faithfully on “the way of the Lord.”

Thank you, guys. You are the “beauty of this life.” And we are certain that “beauty” and “created fullness” will always remain indelible in the heart of each of us.

Thank you, Modica, for making us experience six super-dense months of fullness. We will always carry you indelibly in our hearts!

With affection and deep gratitude,

Ilaria Tinelli and Federica Rettondini