The ARCORES Volunteer Team, the Augustinian Recollect International Solidarity Network, has organized a training and solidarity pre-volunteering in which ten young people have participated as a previous experience and mutual knowledge for a possible international volunteering.
ARCORES Spain, in collaboration with the Atarfe School of Solidarity Foundation (Granada), has organized a training and solidarity meeting from June 24 to July 6, in which ten young people who had previously shown interest in carrying out international volunteering with ARCORES in the future have participated.
The ten had in common their close relationship with the ministries of the Augustinian Recollects in Spain: thus, they came from the Romareda schools in Zaragoza, Saint Augustine, Valladolid, Agustiniano in Madrid, or Saint Thomas of Villanueva in Granada; from the Parish of Saint Rita in Madrid; and from the training house for Recollect religious of the Province of Our Lady of la Candelaria, in the Madrid, neighborhood of Canillejas.
The objective was for the ten ARCORES volunteers to integrate, help and live together in the School of Solidarity Foundation, whose beneficiaries are homeless people and migrants without work or residence permits, in a situation of special vulnerability and social inequality.
During those days, 154 people, including volunteers and beneficiaries, lived at the Foundation in an environment that promotes the richness of interculturality and in which reality surprises and provokes reflection and questioning, eliminating prejudices through contrast and personal and mutual knowledge.
Ignacio, the Foundation’s mentor, has been dedicated to the most vulnerable for 40 years and explained to the ARCORES volunteers his fundamental motivation to continue forward: the message of love of Jesus Christ and his “follow me,” which he accepted radically even against his family’s will.
The people at the Foundation commit themselves in writing to work for the maintenance and to comply with basic standards of coexistence. From the community they receive comprehensive attention for their basic and social needs, social integration and support to rebuild their lives.
One of the ARCORES Spain volunteers described his encounter with this reality as follows:
“We have been here for three days and we have already realised that life flows on another level. Things that seemed essential to us here are not; other unimaginable things are experienced with complete naturalness; the precarious becomes communal and fraternal.”
Although each day brought its own novelties, a generic day for the ARCORES volunteers at the Foundation began with a community breakfast at 8:30; followed by the morning work distribution meeting; lunch at 14:30; and an afternoon of socialising and activities with the beneficiaries. Dinner was the group’s own and the day ended with games and relaxed chat in the Atarfe square.
Among the workshops and activities in which the ARCORES volunteers participated were the centre’s kitchen, maintenance actions (cleaning or painting), nursery, school support, management of the clothing warehouses, care of the vegetable garden and the bakery…
They also collaborated in the activities that raise funds for the maintenance of the Foundation: making prints and jams, carpentry and sewing workshops, and attending to the two shops of the Foundation (Casa Kuna and La Cartuja).
As training reinforcement, the ten volunteers participated in one-hour discussions on the food emergency, the participation of children in wars, social integration and interculturality or the presentation of the countries and communities of origin of the beneficiaries.
Stories of all kinds were told: who we are, what we do, how we feel, what dreams we have for the future… The testimony of a volunteer who had just arrived from Palestine was especially vibrant.
Another ARCORES volunteer recounts his experience:
“We didn’t know each other before, but our shared generosity and desire to help made us friends. The kindness of the people at the Foundation and its beneficiaries made us feel part of that community. We will always carry them in our hearts.”
ARCORES Spain volunteers will now be better able to face any type of international volunteering experience. It was not necessary to go far away to learn to live with the basics, to integrate without prejudice with those who are different, to open their minds to new cuisines and traditions…
The stories about how the beneficiaries arrived in small boats or trunks, how they suffered abandonment or lost their documentation, gave them a different perspective by meeting face to face those who in the blink of an eye had to change their world, their life situation…
The experience has also served to build a community with other young people with the same concerns, some closer or easier (like the group of ten ARCORES volunteers), others more distant and unpredictable, such as the presence those days coinciding with Italian, Latvian, Romanian or American volunteers from the Erasmus+ or Global Works programs.
Finally, the experience also had an important Augustinian aspect, in a personal way by having to make the community and the “we” prevail over the “I” and personal desires; and presenting everyone in the Foundation with the Augustinian Recollect charism, with an emphasis on friendship as a value through the Augustinian phrase “Where there is goodness, there is friendship,” chosen by everyone.
