{"id":306206,"date":"2018-06-03T23:10:13","date_gmt":"2018-06-03T21:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/extraordinary-guests\/"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:37:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T18:37:19","slug":"extraordinary-guests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/extraordinary-guests\/","title":{"rendered":"Extraordinary guests"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cThe influx of immigrants at the border is growing by the hour. The economic crisis that is bringing the country to its knees brings pain both to those who stay and those who decide to flee.\u201d The words of Silvano Roggero, a Venezuelan and son of Italian immigrants, show the drama that an entire people is living through. For the last three years he\u2019s been living in the Focolare center in Lima<\/a>, Peru. \u201cDespite enormous difficulties caused by the sudden and unexpected entry of hundreds of thousands of people, the neighboring countries, with the usual generosity of these lands, are attempting to take them in. I have personally witnessed one of the many dramas that today\u2019s \u2018humanity at the periphery\u2019 is living through. \u201cJust yesterday the director of a school in the peninsula of Paraguan\u00e1, in the north of Venezuela, wrote to me. Something different is happening in the office there: a number of parents have come to withdraw their children. They have been forced to leave.\u201d It\u2019s an exodus of biblical proportions, caused by an extremely serious economic and social crisis, one that is overturning the makeup of an entire country. Inflation has skyrocketed, and food, medicine and raw materials are running out. \u201cIn December 2017<\/strong>, Ofelia and Armando from the Focolare community in Valencia (the third-largest city of Venezuela), moved to Lima. At first they managed an early childhood center. \"\"\u201cThen Ofelia had a dream: find somewhere to offer a preliminary welcome to the swarms of people arriving after travelling seven days over land. We\u2019re talking about close to 300,000 Venezuelans arriving in Peru over the last year and a half! \u201cOfelia and others,\u201d continues Silvano, \u201corganized a welcome dinner in the Focolare for a small group of Venezuelans. Some already had heard of the movement, but there were some who did not know anything about our group. Our guests came from different parts of the city, some as far as an hour or two away. They find it difficult to get around in this metropolis of almost 10 million inhabitants.\u201d It seemed like a drop in the ocean, but what motivated them was to welcome these people as if they were Jesus in person who turned up at the door. \u201cAs you can imagine, faced with their difficult situations, we did not have preconceived solutions. We had no idea where to begin even, although what we could do was offer them a hot meal and listen<\/strong>. Chiara Favotti<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The social and humanitarian crisis that is occurring in Venezuela is forcing hundreds of thousands to flee toward bordering countries, searching for shelter, medicine and work. Here is an experience of welcoming people from the Focolare community in Lima, Peru.<\/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-306206","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\/306206","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=306206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}