(ANS - San Benito Petén)- "Education is the only weapon  that can change things. I do not say this just because I am a Salesian, but because I see it every day. However, education and culture take a long time." So says Fr Giampiero de Nardi, an Italian missionary in Petén, Guatemala. Here is some of what he had to say recently:

I have just been to the capital for my retreat. It gave me a bit of time to pray and reflect on what I have experienced this past year. I must say that I reflected a lot on poverty, thinking about all the experiences I shared this year with the poor of Petén. First of all, I did a little self-examination and I said: "I have promised to be poor. I made a vow before God, but with the kind of poverty I live, I cannot call myself poor."

Here poverty hits you in the face every single day. The fact of being born in a particular part of the world is a great good fortune, which you do not realize until you see for yourself what poverty really means.

The poor have no rights here. They don’t even have the right to have rights. The poor are poor in everything. In Europe, we talk about "other forms of poverty" - poverty of emotions, values, and so on.  All this is true, but the poor here simply do not have anything.  They have no money, no emotions, no values. Maybe in an effort to ease our consciences a bit, we have created an image of the poor as people who live without many luxuries but are rich in values, affection, things that our society has lost because of consumerism. This is a big lie.

The poor here are those who have no family, nobody to care for them, nothing to eat, no dignity, no affection, just nothing. Poverty is an injustice, but we do an even greater injustice when we try to embellish it, to keep ourselves from feeling uncomfortable.

A friend of mine told me of a missionary who kept repeating the slogan, “do not give the poor man a fish but teach him to fish”. In reality, you have to give him a fish while you are teaching him to fish ... but here the poor don’t even have a river or lake where they can fish.

Finally, I thought of the words the new Rector Major said when he came to visit us for a couple of days. To a question on the situation in Petén, he responded that we absolutely should not abandon Petén or any of the marginalized areas where the poor are to be found.

This complete testimony and other missionary reports are available on Fr Giampiero de Nardi’s blog.

Published 09/12/2014