Africa A Ray of Light by Renato Farina The Movement of Communion and Liberation in Cameroon is a gentle force fighting witchcraft and fear. It is another Africa within Africa. The Movement has been there for ten years, a small group of peasant farmers, almost all of them very poor, growing potatoes (as cassava doesn’t grow here) and some beans: a new life. Some of their children, though there are no missionaries there, have set up GS in their school. Fr Joseph follows them. Two unmarried catechists have joined the St Joseph Fraternity. Those who have lived there, or have heard missionaries talking of it, know that the mentality is dominated by fear. What dominates life is the evil presence of ancestral spirits (at least in the areas not yet invaded by Islam). Mireille told us her story. Her father was a catechist in Yaoundé. He forced her to go to Church, and then to join the choir. It was unbearable. Then, ten years ago, she met Fr Maurizio and Fr Mario of the Milan Missionary Fathers. The choir was transformed. There was a new life, a new friendship; love was pulsating there. She was invited to School of Community and Caritativa (charitable work). She trusted them and went along. An old abandoned man touched her; he has been living with a grave handicap, alone on his bed full of excrement. She washed him and looked after him. “ A ray of light,” he said in that moment. She is a well brought-up girl, a bit squeamish, young, and pretty. “I was cleaning his wounds and his dirt. Christ was doing this with me. I saw His charity. I am rooted in CL." She works at the Edimar Hostel in Yaoundé, where street children are welcomed, those who run away from their home villages to the mythical capital that then transforms them into tramps, murderers, and prostitutes. Apart from this is the “ray of light.” Here is a clean place; no food is given away, just a chance to look at someone who loves you. It’s the same experience for Pascal, a teacher. Where are the evil spirits? They appear in the story of Mireille and CL after her marriage. Her first child was a long time in coming. Her mother, a Catholic, is convinced that there is something of the occult involved. She torments her daughter and herself, until she convinces her to go back to her home village. They call an old woman, a kind of priestess specializing in “magical” practices. She starts to tremble and says, “You must, you must, you must.” The family wants to force her to undergo these pagan rites. The old woman falls into a trance, to everyone’s terror. Mireille is quite calm and says, “It is God the Father who gives life through Christ, it’s not potions and formulas that create people.” Her relatives around her are trembling, they are afraid of that old woman’s anger. In the meantime, the old woman was taking out the innards from a hen and, in a voice resembling that of a man, was calling on the spirits. They were all telling her, “Do as you’re told, or they’ll kill you.” Mireille replied, “Let them kill me if they can. I’m not afraid. I’ve treated hundreds of children, and I know who is the Lord of life.” Now it’s the old woman who is afraid. “Sorry, child, I see you are powerful. I only wanted to help you.” She left her with a kind farewell, asking her not to put fear into people any more. “Christ is greater than tradition; He transforms it.” He is a fact more powerful than the cultures that reduce people to nothing. In the same way, in the Northwest, Fr Joseph, a Capuchin priest from Lecco, was called to Kumbo in 1993. He would play with the children with Fr Francis. He go to say Mass in the surrounding villages. “I was just living normally,” he says. One day, four catechists came to talk to him. “We have seen how you and Fr Francis play with the children,” they said. “Why are you so happy?” “I answered by inviting them to the School of Community. Then news spread. Now, there are some peasant farmers who travel 60 miles over awful roads to meet once a month.”