CL in the world

Almaty: Young People at the Center

Two days of festivities, with meetings, meals, songs, and floods of tea, to inaugurate the Youth Center where training courses, debates, and even soccer games can be held. All this in Almaty, Kazakhstan

October 26 and 27, 2002… a date to remember. In Almaty, Kazakhstan, something important happened. This was the date of the inauguration of the Youth Center: a place created for the young, but also the not-so-young, as an attempt to respond to the manifold needs of the country. The Center offers a wide range of activities, from cultural evenings–the first was a showing of slides of Giotto’s Arena Chapel–to soccer games. Italian language courses began in December. Very soon, thanks to the “Kazakhstan” project of the AVSI tents, the Center will also be the site of vocational training courses for skilled workers.

The presentation was thus a great celebration, which went on for two days because, according to the best Kazakh traditions, a real celebration cannot last just one day! It started Saturday morning with a soccer mini-tournament and ended Sunday afternoon with a concert in which the CL community and friends played and sang. In the middle were meetings, debates on work, singing, dancing, lunches, dinners, afternoon snacks, and floods of tea! Numerous authorities were present at the presentation of the three associations that will work in the Center: the Alpha and Omega Cultural Association, which will manage the Center, the Kazakh NGO called MASP, and AVSI; the latter two will work on the projects. The Italian Ambassador, Diego Lorenzo Longo, who was with us on both days, in his opening greetings highlighted the way in which the richness of Church tradition touches on all aspects of life and is capable of responding fully to man’s needs. The Apostolic Nuncio, through his secretary, Msgr Giorgio Chezza, sent us his best wishes as well, through his secretary, reminding us that the Center is a concrete response to making all of society responsibly aware of the problem of unemployment. During Mass, which was followed by the blessing of the Center, Bishop of Almaty, HE Msgr Henry Hovanez, expressed his hopes that the Center may become a meeting place for young people to get to know and appreciate each other, despite their cultural, ethnic, and religious differences.

The opening of the Center also provided the opportunity to meet local authorities, from the mayor of the raion (neighborhood) to the mayor of Almaty and his entourage. The President of the Consortium uniting the Kazakh TV networks, who received a mandate from the President of Kazakhstan to deal with problems concerning youth, in the days after the inauguration told us that he might offer the Center as an example of a serious and positive effort at the next symposium to be held in Astanà on this very topic of the situation of youth in Kazakhstan.

Many members of the community, at the end of these very intense two days, said that they felt this place to be a bit like their own home. And just as in their own homes, their attention and care was meticulous, particularly during the preparations. Each one made his contribution, no matter how small, like Olga who got up early in the morning to go to the market to buy the vegetables, or Maria and her son Kostia, who helped with the cleaning and preparation.

As Luca said, “It was a great celebration of a people, a strange people made up of Italians and Kazakhs, youth and adults, Catholics and non-Catholics. A people held together by the person of Jesus Christ.”
The friends from Kazakhstan

Interview with Fr Eugenio Nembrini

Why build a youth center in Almaty?
Because history always indicates precisely and intelligently the steps to be taken. Building in Almaty happened because it is the city where I have been working for four years, and where the preceding Apostolic Nuncio and Bishop Henry have supported and encouraged the birth of this work. We built a youth center because we were taking into consideration the country’s needs. The young people, with all their desire for good, their search for a positive for their lives, and their problem of insertion into the work world, are the great challenge for the future of Kazakhstan. To have a nice, decorous place, conceived for them and for the development of vocational training courses, seems to us to be a serious and exciting way of responding to man’s need right now.

How did this idea come to you and your friends?
The most beautiful thing is precisely this: it was not a predefined project, but on the contrary it was the sharing with the young people we met, living in a university environment. It was the growth (also in terms of numbers) of a friendship and companionship, that led us to desire a place for training, a nice place, where it would be possible to embrace and share our humanity by embracing all of life and the needs that reality placed in front of us. The interest aroused in everyone seeing a beautiful structure, conceived not as a business but at the service of the people, is an immediate testimony that the value of every human activity, if it wants to be truly an act of solidarity, is immediately the recognition of the person as a person, with a dignity and richness that goes beyond any project and any economic “bottom line.”

What is your hope with regard to the Center’s future?
I have three great hopes. The first is that it may be truly the place of beauty for everyone–for us who work there, for our kids, for all those whom we are going to meet. Clearly, this will not depend merely on the structure. It can help, but it will depend above all on the consciousness of being the instrument of Beauty in history, the face through which the Face of the Mystery is made evident. My second hope is that all this may happen inside the normality of life, inside the drama of daily experience–not a theoretical discourse, not an analysis of the situation, but a real engagement with the heart of each person. And the third is that it may soon become self-reliant, from the financial point of view and that of experience, an experience of a people capable of sustaining and responding to man’s hopes.

If you had to synthesize it, what of the inauguration has stayed with you most?
Surely the faces of my friends and the unity I lived with them, a gesture made by everybody within the gladness and freedom of each one. It is a bit like the image I have of life: with you, totally with you, with all of myself, with my character, my capabilities, my limitations. We are together, but as the outcome of so many “I’s” free to belong and to follow. In this way, it is a paradise.