I am Federico, from the Province of Verona. I am 31 and am here in the Philippines for a missionary experience together with the Xaverian Fathers. I think that in my journey of personal growth, also in my faith, this experience came at the right moment. As when you are climbing a mountain, every challenge pushes you to reach higher and higher. Even though in your journey still the most intense part to go through remains. And for me, this is what really happened.
This three-week experience, combined with the holiday-break of all works also in our parish and started toward the end of July, worked like a blender mixing together many elements and somehow brings the best out of you. This was my first experience of this kind, so far away, even though at the end local distances are reduced as the time goes by. This project born from the diocese but really open to all, gave us the opportunity to go through by stages starting from the departure for the journey and going through dialogue and sharing during the coming year.
To begin with, I must say that at the beginning I didn’t know what to expect out of it. Immediately there was this kind of natural conversion to daily sharing with the people, lived within the atmosphere of a parish very active and with persons very committed to work within it. This gratuity toward neighbor people was the first step of this adventure with the effort to work with people, to visit the sick, or simply spending time talking to children.
I like to remember with some photos all the faces of the people I have met during these days joining the work of the fathers, visiting the families, sharing in the activities of the people whole they shared their stories and their faith experience. Just in their welcoming us I understood that the charisma of change is possible.
I think that when you arrive in a place very different from yours, though with some similarities, the first thing you have to do in to listen, to pay attention without asking many questions, because the answers will arrive with the passing of days. It is really true that you can come to know better the persons of a place through their everyday life, in our case, within their parish in their life as a church community. For sure there are other challenges to face when you go to a new place, where there are habits and behaviors demanding commitment and perseverance. I noticed some contradictions but I think more time is needed to understand them better. The important thing is to enter these experiences with mind and heart ready and, if you are not accustomed, you have to overcome some taboos. All that in order to see what an experience has to tell and teach you.
I had left with the idea of looking for something good for myself. I like to think that every chapter of these days managed to renew our capacity to understand better some situations, our relationships and, why not, to revise our faith. I believe that the gift of being able to give yourself, in the missionary spirit that characterizes it, was very important. I rethink of the relationships born as the synthesis of this joy.
If in my suitcase I had taken with me all my fears, my fixed ideas, my desires, now I go back with the awareness of this gift, of this renewal also in my spirit. I go back with a new mission, which for now will be in my daily life and I know will have to be further improved. As my help, there will be all the stories seen with my own eyes, the faces of many women, the wonderful horizons that though seen with other eyes, different from my own, had the same intense color. It wasn’t any more question of role or status.
