25 years after finishing their secondary and pre-university education, today’s adults build society from the values they learned at the school: growing in fraternity, betting on the goodness of the community and establishing spaces of interiority and human and spiritual growth.
The Association of Former Students of the Saint Augustine High School of the Augustinian Recollects in Valladolid, ALARVA, organized the silver anniversary party for Saturday, September 14, of the completion of studies of the group that left the college at the end of the 1998-1999 academic year.
Returning to the same classrooms 25 years later lends itself to bringing to light countless memories, anecdotes and characters that had remained in memory, sometimes very vividly, other times in a much more diffuse way but recovering the details when they are shared.
All this leaves a feeling of nostalgia mixed with the illusion of images lived in childhood and adolescence that now appear before the lives of adults who have taken their different paths and decisions, lives today separated but that quickly create bonds of brotherhood again.
A total of 40 former students who were celebrating their silver anniversary of graduation got together. Several of them had belonged to the group “Chispas” (‘Sparks’), a kind of youth group that promoted the values of the School through music, volunteering and the organization of recreational and cultural activities of all kinds.
This generation has been described as intrepid and multifaceted, with degrees of audacity and great concern that was shown not only intellectually, but also physically, with the infinite number of adventures in which they were involved, many of which they remembered.
The festive meeting included a visit to the facilities of the School, 25 years later much more full of technology and new and unknown educational spaces those years ago. This guided tour was followed by a fellowship meal.
During the visit and the meal, many were able to vividly remember several of the religious and teachers who accompanied them during their education. The School, in turn, demonstrated that it continues to be a space of comprehensive care that combines formal education with new technologies, attachment to science and the promotion of values of the Augustinian Recollect charism.
Precisely within this promotion are these activities organized by ALARVA. Once they have completed their formal studies, the students of the Saint Agustine High School carry with them a pending subject throughout their lives: to grow in fraternity, to commit to the goodness of the community, to establish spaces of interiority and human and spiritual growth so that the society in which they live today and to which they contribute today is increasingly a little better, more human, kinder, happier.
