FROM THE ITINERACY OF RIVERS TO THE ITINERACY OF ACTIVITIES RELATED TO OUR EVANGELIZING MISSION

Hnasmdro
June 8, 2020
MDR Experiences
0
291

Our itinerant community, composed by four sisters and two Dominican monks, has the responsibility of encouraging the life of the missions Kirigueti and Timpia and their respective communities and just like other communities, we have been affected by the pandemic.

As every year before we start with our missionary work, we got ready to plan. We like that our planning states day, month, hour, activities and person in charge. Everything was perfectly set, and we were ready to start the year. We did not even think that the pandemic was going to knock our door and that the mission of going out to the communities and serving the boarding pupils would take a different direction.

When the government declared that school classes were not going to start on March 11^th and then the quarantine establishment, we had to change our plans. We called to the communities to prevent the 60 students of our boarding school to come to the mission. Call after call, by telephone and radio, we could manage the situation and only two students from “Montetoni” community came with the teacher, but he took them home.

As community we asked, what do we do now? in our plan, we have established to learn the language, cultural topics, Amazonia reality, the post-synodal apostolic exhortation “Querida Amazonia” and to adapt material for catechism. We thought that it would be fine to use this time to study “Querida Amazonia”, so we started our study and we are already noticing some results: let’s have a brave face in this time. In the community we now say that all our plans might have been too much and we do not know how much we could have really done.

We did not think that the government was going to launch the program “I learn from home,” which means we need to coordinate ourselves with communities’ chiefs, parents and students. The proposed program by the government is not within reach of everybody, because in many communities there is no light and television and in the few places you can find internet connection (wi-fi), it is very limited.

We see that the teachers are doing big efforts for helping their students to learn something. They are teaching coronavirus to the students and the preventive measures in their own language as well as Spanish. The educative level is very low, and I think that if we achieve that our students learn the four main math operations and that they know how to think, the rest will come about spontaneously.

And as one thing does not come alone, we also had the problem with the food that the students eat in the school. They were in the institution, but there was no authorization for delivering them to the students’ homes. When the authorization was taken, we received the order that it was only to be delivered to the parents, which meant that the students of our residence were left out. We arranged everything for receiving these food items and then send them to the community and that is what happened. It took a lot of time and money to do everything, but we were able to accomplish our commitment. When you love what you do there is neither fatigue nor time that prevented you from doing it. It is not in vain that we have as example a great woman who reminds us that “Is not enough to do right, it is necessary to do it right.” “You only do right to souls as long as you love them.”

Just like God gives each of us gifts for service, in our community we are not only developing the works we had planned, but we are also making facial masks, restoring images, fixing brickwork spaces, elaborating projects for facing this situation in the communities, having constant communication with the students, etc.

We are building community every day “Staying at home.”

Susana Fong Castellano.