Eight young ARYs have strengthened their community experience, have learned to be more supportive and empathetic, have promoted attitudes and skills that make them happier and better people, and have gained in their closeness to God with this 2024 mission.
The Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy) community of the Augustinian-Recollect Youth (ARY) of Chihuahua City, Mexico, has organized a missionary volunteer program during the month of July, collaborating with the Integral Development Accompaniment and Recovery Center (CARDI), a socio-health project of the Augustinian Recollects in Mexico.
Taking advantage of the school holidays and the opportunity offered by having a social project within the same religious Family, the eight members of the youth movement of the Augustinian Recollects prepared themselves in advance with special training and participated in a ceremony of sending and receiving the missionary cross presided over by the Augustinian Recollect Manuel Antonio Flores, parish priest of the Parish of Christ the High Priest in the capital of Chihuahua.
Missions and volunteering are part of the comprehensive formation and the experience of the Augustinian Recollect values promoted in the ARY. It is about making young people grow in values such as solidarity, empathy, the desire for social justice, reaching out to the most vulnerable and the implementation of the Kingdom of God, understood as a space of happiness, dignity, justice and well-being for every person, image and likeness of God.
CARDI is a center that offers its services to patients and the relatives of patients in the large public health centers of Mexico City. With the centralization of specialties and the most complex care in the country, thousands of people from all over the Republic come to the Hospitals neighborhood of the City México every year, either because they are sick or because they accompany their patients.
CARDI offers a variety of services ranging from human care (therapies, counseling, advice, proactive listening) to care for primary needs (food, hygiene) through to the offer of therapies and therapeutic and pharmacological elements at cost price.
At CARDI there is a dispensary, a rest area, another area for dialogue and support, a laundry and personal hygiene area, breakfasts and distribution of meal vouchers in establishments… But above all at CARDI the relatives of the sick find empathy, affection, welcome and support in the middle of a big city of which they know nothing and in which they have no support, with a dehumanized pace of life.
In their summer mission, the Chihuahua ARYs collaborated in all these services. They took on their tasks after a learning process, both the more mechanical ones (classifying and arranging medicines, serving meals and breakfasts, cleaning personal hygiene areas) and the most important, human tasks: welcoming, listening, dialoguing, encouraging, understanding and giving encouragement and hope to those who face a situation of special vulnerability.
For the young ARYs, the most important thing is not what they have given to others, but what they have received: they have improved their community experience as a group in a new environment and in a service that was also previously unexplored; they have learned the need to be supportive and empathetic; they have fostered in themselves attitudes and skills that make them better people; and they have gained in spirituality and closeness to God by managing to get close to the vulnerable and impoverished.
Congratulations to all.
