{"id":305508,"date":"2017-09-26T00:10:51","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T22:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/focolare-movement-on-the-move\/"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:35:23","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T18:35:23","slug":"focolare-movement-on-the-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/focolare-movement-on-the-move\/","title":{"rendered":"Focolare Movement on the move"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vietnam\"<\/a>Small groups comprised of young people and adults from different callings in the Focolare Movement spend brief periods in temporary communities<\/strong> known in Italian as \u201cfocolares\u201d or \u201chearths,\u201d far from their homes, visiting far-away and sometimes isolated communities around the globe. This year, there were forty such hearths from Sri Lanka to the Azores, from Vietnam to Santo Domingo, from Brazil to Tanzania.<\/strong> They were self-financed with lots of personal sacrifice. Each community has a different story, but they all share one common denominator: the presence of a temporary hearth that helps bring new life. Idalina and Toni are a family from <\/strong>Portugal<\/a>. They and seven other people, including some young people, left in August for Saurimo, <\/strong>Angola<\/a>. \u201cWe stayed at the Bishop\u2019s house, and shared our meals and many other moments of the day with him.\u201d During their two-week stay they formed many friendships with the children and adults of the local community: \u201cAt the end of the fourteen days, they asked us when we would come back again.\u201d Chiara Lubich<\/a>\u2019s art of loving turned out to be a great discovery for them.\u201d \"Canada_03\"<\/a><\/strong>At Yellowknife, the main city of the region and Seat of the Diocese, we were welcomed by the Emeritus Bishop who has spent his life among the Native American populations of the north. Coming back from a month among Native Americans in <\/strong>Canada<\/a>\u2019s North West Territories, <\/strong>Father Harry Clark, a priest from British Columbia, Marilena and Mike Murray, a husband and wife from the state of Maryland, in USA, Maria Santana from Montreal and Ljubica Dekic from Toronto write: \u201cFrom there, we took off for Wha Ti, one of four villages of the Tlicho Tribe, 40 minutes by plane. We were guests of the parish rectory. The villagers were simple folk and very reserved. One of the problems in the tribe is the communication gap between the elderly, who are rooted in Native American culture and the younger generations, who no longer use the tribe\u2019s native language. We presented the spirituality of communion, and then focused our attention on the activities of the small Catholic community for children and adults. We also met some Lutherans and a couple of Mennonite missionaries, a very nice collaboration was begun. We went by canoe along the river and took part in some tribal events with the annual assembly of villages that happened to be taking place during that time.\u201d \"Angola_02\"<\/a>In Bambio, 300 kilometres from Bangui, in the<\/strong> Central African Republic<\/a>, one temporary \u201cfocolare\u201d met a group of Pygmies that has been living the ideal of unity for twenty years.<\/strong> Fidelia writes: \u201cThe Pygmies possess so many beautiful values: loyalty, monogamy, purity a sense of the sacred. They told us their experiences in living the art of loving and the <\/strong>Word of Life<\/a>.<\/strong> Each village meets once a week, from six o\u2019clock in the morning until eight o\u2019clock, before the day begins. The told us: \u201cThe focolare taught us to live, to love, to make ourselves one with others. There is no longer \u2018you\u2019 and \u2018us\u2019 \u2013 we\u2019re all \u2018us\u2019. The Pygmies don\u2019t mix with others, because they look down on us. But the focolare looked at us as equals and came to live with us, to share our sorrows and joys.\u00a0<\/strong>They didn\u2019t ask us to become Catholics, but they taught us love.\u201d Someone else said: \u201cWe Pygmies have many traditional practices. But ever since we\u2019ve been we\u2019ve been part of the focolare, we\u2019ve dropped a few of them. For example, when my son got sick, I didn\u2019t turn to the witch doctor has I had done before, but took him to hospital. As soon as the focolarinies heard, they came to help me until he was well again.\u201d The gratitude and enrichment was mutual, as the awareness that we\u2019re one family is growing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Small groups of adults and young people spend brief periods in remote and often frontier regions of the world, to help keep communities of people that live the ideal of unity to be more united.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}