Chile. The Seed Put down Roots

The challenge of building a school out of nothing. Now it has 1,300 students. Caritativa, the birth of the Company of Works, and a professional training program in collaboration with AVSI. In that encounter, everything was already there.

by AGUAYO BOLIVAR

The friends through whom I encountered the Movement would often repeat to me a saying that I did not understand: “In the encounter, everything is already there.” It is something that always was a provocation for me.

1) I encountered the Movement when I was 23. I was vice president of the Young Christian Democrats. My friends and I wanted to evangelize politics, but the only thing we managed to do was to talk about plans. In this situation, I met Fr Ricci and Fr Danzi. Fr Giussani came to Chile in 1983. We told him then that life is a struggle against those in power, and he answered that it was a matter of a struggle against every form of power: the power of structures, of society, but also my power. He said once, “It is out of faithfulness to a presence that a history is generated.” Another time he said, “We are power’s antibiotics,” and this was an upheaval in my way of reasoning.

2) The birth in Chile of the Movement schools was like a joke. I was helping some friends who had set up a school with 300 students on the outskirts of Santiago. One day they said to me, “This school is in crisis; you have to be the director.” In the beginning, I felt practically like I was in exile. During that year, however, I discovered that the school in general was failing, indeed, had failed. Once again, all my schemes were turned upside down: I had set out to put in order a school that instead had collapsed. Even the Bishop, who had left the building to the students, had evicted them and taken the school back, leaving us in the street with 300 pupils.

For two months, my friends and I went to talk with everybody, and we negotiated to buy a piece of land and build a school. It was an impossible undertaking, because Chile has the disease of legalism, as Neruda said. In Chile, before the blood runs, the ink runs. In a peripheral area of the San Bernardo quarter, we found a place to build the school. It was an impressive thing to respond personally to everything–it is one thing to see to being the director of a school and another to deal with the cost of the land and of building materials, talk with the lawyers, etc. At any rate, today the San Bernardo school has 1,300 students, from the first grade through the last year of high school. Alex, one of our friends, wanted to create another school, which today numbers about 600 pupils and is completely private. Another friend of ours asked us for help in starting a school in a working class neighborhood of Santiago to answer to the needs of children with handicaps, who are not taken seriously, do not learn to speak properly, and thus fall behind in their learning, with minimal chances of employment.

3) The birth of the Company of Works in Chile, which today brings together more or less a hundred businesses, from the poorest (peasants who are trying to eat because they have no job or they work three months a year) to an express mail business present in all parts of the country. There are ten of us leading the Company of Works–four economists, four engineers, and two friends who have come from Italy.

We have seen evidence of many, many needs, and, faced with them, the Company of Works was born as the desire to band together, obeying what happened among us. One of the most educative things for us was the Monte caritativa (charitable work) in a completely agrarian peasant class neighborhood 25 miles from Santiago, where Antonio, one of our priests, had gone for years and, celebrating Mass and baptizing, had met a group of peasants who later helped us in the flood emergency and in other things.

It was very interesting to see how people gave us a hand from Italy. I’ll give three examples. First: Given the necessity of professional training more focused on the young people’s needs (in Chile there are 15 million inhabitants and about 70 universities, therefore too many university graduates who don’t know what to do), AVSI started a professional training program. Second: Co-Export, thanks to our friend Giovanni who works in Italy, has become a concrete possibility for providing a market that promotes the value of what the friends produce. Third: Marco, a Team Service responsible in Italy, who came here to work and has extensive business experience, gave us a hand in learning skills.

In the encounter, everything is already there. It is like the germination of a seed that sustains you. In this belonging, I discover more and more, faced with the needs of others, that, mysteriously, even the needs which I cannot answer become my own.