AVSI

Tents 2009
Development  Has a Human Face
Every year, the Association for Volunteers in International Service (AVSI) collects funds in a Christmas Tents Campaign that mobilizes thousands of volunteers throughout the world. This year, the collection will be used to build schools and centers for humanitarian assistance. The method is the Christian method: to go wherever man is with his needs, “without the illusion that we are the ones bringing them happiness…”

by Stefano Zurlo

These are courageous projects; it’s not easy to put your hand where the flames of violence are burning bright. It’s not easy to build schools and clinics in a land of wars, hatred and violence, like in Palestine, with its eternal conflict between Arabs and Israelis, or in India, devastated by the persecution of the Christian minority. But AVSI is not discouraged; this year, too, the Christmas Tents describe the initiatives AVSI promotes in so many parts of the world. The well-tested method is the Christian method of sharing: to go wherever man is with his needs. There, we help him–this is what the Tents are for–as much as possible, but without cultivating “the illusion of being the ones bringing them happiness.” These are the words of Alberto Piatti, Secretary General of AVSI. In this way, with a mix of realism and humility, AVSI has gone into the favelas in Brazil and into the African slums; it has taken suffering children by the hand in Romania, and brought comfort to the poor in the remotest parts of Siberia. The association has tried to mark out the map of human miseries with the color of hope. Christmas, which comes for everyone, the poor countries as well as the rich, will be the occasion for collecting funds destined for four projects in these hot areas of the world.

1 PALESTINE
In the “Peace Schools”
The birthplace of our history and civilization is today the scene of war. Israel has had to defend itself from terrorism by building a wall; the Palestinians are divided into factions fighting among themselves. AVSI tries to integrate the children by playing a fundamental card: education. The project foresees help to the schools run by the Franciscans, who in 2009 will celebrate eight centuries of presence in this region. The focus of this aid will be twofold: the Terra Santa High School in East Jerusalem, founded in 1645, the oldest Christian institution in the city, and the over 150-year-old Terra Santa Girls’ High School in the Old City near the Jaffa Gate. In these schools of the Franciscan Custody, there is no place for hatred: the students are 65% Christian and 35% Muslim. And the togetherness and peace is not just a question of arithmetic. With the Christmas Tents, funds are collected for the poor, too–50 families–supported by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, and for handicapped people in Bethlehem, welcomed by the Sisters of the Incarnate Word. The numbers are always surprising: more than half the disabled are Muslims, and some have been the victims of terrible prejudices. R., for example, was born in Bethlehem with a deformation of the skull and a scoliosis that makes him unable to walk. The family rejected him and the mother was blamed by her sister for giving birth to a child with such serious problems. He was kept segregated at home for months; now, at last, he has begun to live again.

2 INDIA
The Fuel
of Progress
The news tells us every day of clouds of hatred and blood. India, with the horrors committed by Hindu fanatics against Christians in Orissa, is now among the countries where freedom is seriously threatened. Once more, AVSI gets to work, risking an intervention in a lacerated human and social fabric, but the risk is not important. The Tents will support a school run by the Missionary Brothers of St. Francis de Sales. It may seem paradoxical, but here in Pudukkotai, the southernmost point of the country, there are only 300 Christian students out of a total of 2,600. The others are Muslims or Hindus. That is why, without upsetting the delicate balances, a new school is needed for Christians, who are the majority and who lack education, the fuel of development. They are extremely poor; they have no money and are almost all dalit, untouchables, the most miserable in the caste system. There are many conversions amongst the lowest social caste. The commitment of Christians on behalf of the dalit is one cause of the recent wave of persecutions, with attacks on 300 villages. It requires some effort to imagine an India where these, the poorest of the poor, are no longer crushed. The school, from kindergarten to high school, is where a new civilization is molded.

3 uganda
Education is Our Chance
Sixty percent of the population is made up of young people and so it is not rhetoric to say that to invest in school benches and reading matter means to ensure the future of the country. AVSI is active at many levels and needs Tent funds to aid various projects: to guarantee 200 children the completion of secondary education (an extraordinary opportunity); to organize upgrading courses for 200 teachers; and, once again, to provide books for the libraries of three schools in the capital, Kampala. Finally, AVSI wants to buy 20 computers  for an information technology lab in a school in the city. All this is a challenge for a country devastated by civil wars, bearing all the frightening contradictions of an Africa where the patient work of reconstruction of civil life is easily brought to a halt by the winds of war. The Permanent Centre of Education in Kampala brings hope for peaceful coexistence, and once again the figures give more hope than any speculation: the Centre has already trained more than 5,000 people.

4 Paraguay
43 Beds for the Abandoned
It’s goal is to be a modern reducción. Whoever has seen the film Mission will remember the community of the Guarani Indios built by the Jesuit missionaries. The Parish of San Rafael in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, takes up that glorious tradition and offers a whole range of unique proposals for that South American country: there is the school, the literary café, the polyphonic choir, the pizzeria, the clinic, the Life Support Center, and a center for medical assistance and distribution of clothes and food. It is a striking and important center of aid for the inhabitants of the capital. Last month, its initiator and parish priest, Fr. Aldo Trento (see Traces, Vol. 10, Number 8 [September] 2008), was given the “Freedom of the City Award” in a ceremony that was noted even by CNN. And there is more: San Rafael boasts a small gem, inaugurated in 2004, which is the St. Riccardo Pampuri House of Divine Providence,  a hospice with 7 beds for the terminally ill, a place to die with dignity. Now AVSI is calling for the help of the Tents. The intention is to build a new, larger structure, 1,400 square meters, on three floors, with 43 beds–the only place for these terminally ill people, who are often abandoned on the street and whom other hospitals do not want to care for. Now they, too, will have a home.