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history and the “I”

Where Ideas Are a Reality
In Egypt, someone had told her about the Rimini Meeting, but she didn’t believe it–until she came to see it. A journalist from Cairo tells us of the events that have changed her life.

by Islam Azzam*

Who pays Mariana, a language student, to leave her studies and stay all week beside me, helping me to communicate in a new country? And what about the more than 4,000 people who leave their jobs and volunteer to help others whom they do not know? And why was that man in a wheelchair insisting upon helping me to gain access to an event I was trying to attend? The answers to all these questions seem vague and difficult to understand, especially for people who did not have the opportunity to attend the Rimini Meeting. Many years ago, my friend Wael told me about the CL Movement’s ideas, but I thought at the time that their application in practice was close to impossible. When my husband presented me with The Religious Sense to read, it affected me strongly and the bright words of Giussani changed some of my conceptual life. This was all part of the mental change processes that contribute to the formation of man in general. But it turned into absolute certainty after I attended the Rimini Meeting this year–a certainty that good, truth, and beauty are not just ideas that we carry inside us. Our will can turn these ideals into a real and great ability to influence the world around us. This is why Mariana and 4,000 volunteers provide free assistance to people whom they do not know and might not meet again. Now, this certainty has been transferred to me and convinces me that the world can be beautiful only if we so sincerely and earnestly seek this.
Today, I go back to Egypt and I am more determined to convince my friends that the world is full of goodness within us which may sometimes be hiding under the pressures of life, but it will reveal itself in powerful and stunning glimpses.

*Correspondent for the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram