{"id":328118,"date":"2016-03-28T03:00:58","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T01:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/after-grand-bassam-a-testimony-from-the-ivory-coast\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T15:03:31","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:03:31","slug":"after-grand-bassam-a-testimony-from-the-ivory-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/after-grand-bassam-a-testimony-from-the-ivory-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"After Grand-Bassam, a testimony from the Ivory Coast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20160329-01\"<\/a>\u201cLast March 13, the Ivory Coast and the entire world learned <\/strong>to their surprise that the seaside city of Grand-Bassam had been hard struck by unknown assailants and that it was difficult to know the number of victims,\u201d write Jeanne Kabanga and Damase Djato from the Focolare in Abidjan. \u201cOne can imagine the slaughter with all the people that go there every week to rest on the shore in front of the hotel they call the star of the south. It is a place visited mostly by tourists of every provenance. Grand-Bassam had been the first capital of the Ivory Coasts and is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Sight.\u201d

\"Msgr

Msgr Joseph Spiteri<\/p><\/div> On the same day, 180 people were together in Abidjan to underscore the timeliness <\/strong>of the message of Chiara Lubich<\/a> who had been awarded the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 196, and had died on March 18, 2008. Amongst the guests were the Apostolic Nunzio in the Ivory Coast,\u00a0 Archbishop Joseph Spiteri and Imam Diaria. Every year, at his invitation, the Focolare community takes part in the celebration of the Maouloud ( birthday of the Prophet). \u201cFrom their words \u2013 and proceeding from the Chiara\u2019s invitation to the political deciders to live the art of loving as a true therapy for out times \u2013 we rediscovered our common duty to exert ourselves with fidelity to love without distinction, to not get lost in fundamentalism, but to cultivate hope and mercy.\u201d \u201cOur tendency, instead,\u201d the Nunzio pointed out, \u201cis to put judgement before mercy,\u201d whereas \u201cif Muslim and Christians love one another,\u201d the Imam insisted, \u201cthe world would be saved.\u201d Young people at the event told of their efforts to collect signatures for peace: <\/strong>After they had carefully prepared quotes from Ghandi, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Chiara Lubich and the Dalai Lama, they distributed them on the streets. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy to approach the adults and present our project,\u201d What moved everyone the most, were the testimonies of the little children because they were so concrete and showed their commitment in being \u201cmessengers of peace\u201d in their own environments. \u201cOne day, at home,\u201d Marie Lucie recounted, \u201cmy youngest sister hadn\u2019t washed the dishes. So, at lunchtime we couldn\u2019t eat. I had told her to do them, but she didn\u2019t want to. I said to myself, if I washed them I would be doing an action of peace. That\u2019s what I did, and we ate.\u201d \u201cAt school,\u201d Prince reported, \u201csome of my friends were making fun of another boy who seemed weaker, insulting and beating. Another boy and I decided to intervene, speaking to them, telling them about the ideals of peace that we believe in and asking them to let him be.\u201d They stopped and are now friends.\u201d \"160220_Abidjan_06_rid\"<\/a><\/strong>Within such a context, the presentation of the Economy of Communion which, in the Ivory Coast <\/a>has already made some moves and turned out to be a possible antidote to the poverty and misery: small actions like Firmin\u2019s teaching activity a quarter of Abidjan. And the signature campaign for peace brought out the personal commitment of each person. \u201cIt was only when we got home,\u201d Jeanne and Damase continue, \u201cthat we learned <\/strong>from the television news about the attack in Grand-Bassam. After a day of listening to talk about peace and experiencing peace, we feel a clear call to be workers of peace, putting into practice what we learned and, above all, living peace within and amongst ourselves in order to give it to the people around us. It seems to us that this is the only way we will be able to give our contribution to defuse terrorism and every sort of hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The terrorist attack of March 13 that left 18 dead has brought instability to the entire region, and there are on-going threats in several key locations. The small Focolare community works at building peace in daily life and never surrenders to violence. Words from the Nuzio and the Imam.<\/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-328118","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\/328118","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=328118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}