Bissau: Forgive your enemies? Can you?

I was parish priest at the Farim Mission, in Guinea Bissau, a city to the north of the capital, Bissau, on the border with Senegal. I would go to a village for catechism classes, preparing for Baptism. What was being taught was important, but I personally had the impression that it was all too theoretical. In past years, during my stay in Fonjumetaw, Cameroon, I had seen how the Word of Life helped in the work of evangelization. And so I began to take the monthly Word of Life and, following a brief explanation, I would invite everyone to put it into practice in order to then share with each other the fruits of doing so in the coming weeks.

To make it easier, I handed everyone a piece of paper on which I had written the Gospel sentence and I invited them to hang it by their bed and read it in the morning when they rose from their beds, and at night, when they went to sleep. If they didn’t know how to read, I suggested that they ask their children to help them. Over the next few weeks, more and more people had something to say.

One afternoon, in the village of Sandjal, some twenty km from Farim, when the time came to share experiences, a man told what happened to him during the previous week. The Word of Life was “Love your enemies” (Mt. 5:44).

“One night the my neighbour’s cows entered into my bean plantation and destroyed it. This wasn’t the first time. This is why we hadn’t spoken to each other for months. But this time I was determined to make him pay. It was high time for him to see the damage he was doing. Me, my wife and children each took up a big piece of wood and set out for our neighbor’s house. But after taking only a few short steps i recalled the the Word of Life and said: ‘Stop! We can’t go. Last week I received a small paper which said to forgive our enemies, and in a few days I have to go back to the catechism class. What will I tell them if I go now to punish my neighbour? But then he will carry on doing as he has always done!’ Let’s go home and sit down. Letting it go as if nothing had happened didn’t seem correct. We decided to go to the man, not with a threatening air, but to dialogue. We explained to our enemy what had happened and we asked him to pay more attention to his cows. Our neighbour was speechless. He fell at my feet and asked me to forgive him over and over again. From that moment we began to greet each other, and I would say that we have become friends. It was months that we hadn’t spoken! And a new joy has entered my home.”

In another village, Sarioba, 5 km from Farim, the same scene, a student stands up and says:

“Every Monday we have to go on foot to Farim for school. There’s a seller who lives in a village not far away, who also goes to Farim with his truck. Normally, he doesn’t carry anything on the truck. Only that this time, after we had already travelled a distance of almost one kilometre, he stopped. He was having mechanical problems with the truck and he wasn’t able to move. When we reached him, we asked him if he needed a push to get the truck running. My friends said to me: ‘Let it go, let him take care of it himself. He never helped us.’ I was thinking the same thing, but then I remembered the Word of Life. And so we decided to give hi a hand to get the truck started. The engine started and the gentleman invited us to jump on, but we told him there was no need, and we continued on foot.”

Fr.  Celso Corbioli,  OMI