26 Apr ÖDOS: A birthday and a renewal/SPAIN
On April 18th, the first families to arrive at the Project celebrated their third “birthday”. How exciting but what a challenge too! It has been a long journey, made up of lots of “steps” many of which were unnoticed but sure, thanks to the collaboration of so very many volunteers, individual people, institutions and organisations… all fruit of the “us” which drives us to humbly continue being involved and working together in a network, on behalf of the dignity of so many women and children, who arrived on Andalucian shores, with their desire to survive in Europe, often victims of trafficking, prostitution and exploitation in the workplace…
The Project is developed in two phases, firstly in La Muela, Montilla (Cordova), where our Sisters and members of the ACI Family of Cordova are present and ready to “do their bit” in accompanying and listening or by other supportive activities, which during the pandemic had to be “re-imagined”. The audit-evaluation that we carried out, confirmed the importance of this phase, during which we have attended to more than 85 women, with an average age of 28 have been, many of them from the Ivory Coast and Conakry Guinea … together with 95 children … They have become loved faces and their names are in our hearts.
While there has been a bit of everything, some in their search have followed our itineraries, used the resources at their disposition, and the processes in which the welcome and the understanding received are already “health”, “ödos”…Oxigen! While others, exercising their freedom, have taken advantage of other opportunities.
Those who begin the second phase receive a “welcome” from a network of other participating organisations and collaborators, in our Communities; some have already passed through our houses in BiIbao and Madrid, and at this precise moment they are part of the “large universal family” that they make up, together with our community in San Sebastian, where they are following their formation process, to learn to be autonomous and insert themelves into society… Mar, a lovely young women from Honduras and Ana, from Morocco, together with her son, Adou who is 11 years a old. We had the immense pleasure of receiving Amalia, from Ghana, among us with her twins Bonte and Julie who were not yet two. As Sr. Angeles Gutierrez told us in the last Newsletter…We are so happy!!
How good it is to feel our hearts jumping for joy! It opens us up to yet more love so that our dream for fraternity can come true in our littleness.
And how good also to feel motivated to renew our commitment to collaborate with this Project which continues to challenge us to keep on involving ourselves and complicating our lives. And so, in the morning of March 10th, our Provincial Superior, Ana Mª Sánchez and Doña Auxiliadora Fernández, General Director General of the Foundation EMET-Arcoiris, signed it, convinced that this collaboration is a link in the chain of active hope for the whole of the Spanish Province.
H. Mª José Tuñón aci
