NEW MISSION TO EAST TIMOR

By Sr. Mae Janet MacDonell, SFM
Summer 2000

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Responding to an appeal made to the Church in Brazil by the Church in East Timor, Sr. Yolanda Cadavos and I volunteered to serve as missionaries in that country for a two-year period.

The people of this tiny island have been victims of one of the most violent abuses of human rights where one-third of their population has been massacred and their country devastated.

At a missioning service held on March 25 in Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Fortaleza, representatives of different pastoral sectors offered their gifts: a herbal plant, organically grown vegetables, a Bible, shinellas (flip flops), a fishing net, a book bag.

“We cannot go with you,” they said, “but in the name of the Church in Brazil, we offer to the people of East Timor, symbols that mark our struggle to bring about a life of dignity for all of us. We are both happy and sad to send you, but we believe in the mission of sharing our experience with the people of East Timor.”

Sr. Yolanda Cadavos

These have been days of leave-taking for Yolanda (Yoli), from a missionary team with whom she had accepted the challenges of accompanying farming and fishing communities to relocate after the State government evicted them unjustly in favour of an industrial complex. It also meant leaving dear friends in the Planalto of Pici as well:

“Brazil has been a home for a while,” says Yoli, “but mission is a journey, an ongoing pilgrimage of opening oneself to others. My sense of gratitude and of privilege is very great. Love I have received here and the blessing to go now to the people of East Timor.”

Sr. Mae Janet MacDonell

Making my rounds to some of the rural communities which I have accompanied for over 20 years was not easy. The community of Novas Vides, pioneers in the struggle for land rights, killed a steer and invited all in the surrounding area to a feast.

In his own prophetic way, Raimundo spoke for the community: “There are so few who journey with us in our struggle for our rights to life, and now there will be two less. Still, Jesus has said that we are not to give of what we have extra but, like the widow in the Gospel, to give of the little that we have. And so I know that God will bless us, and you, if we give you to those who have greater need.”

This seems to me to capture the very essence of mission. Our Lady’s Missionaries, a small congregation in itself, has generously assumed extra commitments in order to release Yoli and myself to East Timor. Yet, confirming Raimundo’s reflection, we believe that we will be blessed with the privilege of drinking from the wells of the faith of the most abandoned and never thirsting again for having given generously of the little we have.

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