Displaying items by tag: outskirts

I lived for six years in a beautiful forest of Karnataka, where I helped to found a school for children of different age and religion, in partnership with families and teachers. The lush, the coconut trees laden with fruit, the voices and the colours of many different birds, the dance of the peacocks when they open the tail, the buzz of the bees and the scent of honey, the Red Sun in the morning and the Golden Moon in the evening everything was a hymn to the Creator and all creation was in place.

In this delightful setting arrived at around 9 am, 9 coach loads of kids and teenagers, collected from remote villages in the forest, and the whole day was with them, our joy was watching them grow, learn and play, until in the evening everyone left and we would return to the voices of the forest.

Now here at Chembur life is different, and the air is not so good. We opened a small community on the outskirts of Mumbai, where pollution has grown in recent years (chemical industries, heavy traffic, proximity of the landfill). Residents have tried to solicit government environmental clean-up measures, so far without success. With the rise of the pollution the wealthy have fled to the neighborhood, but the fall in rents has attracted many new inhabitants, so much so that between a skyscraper and the other under a corrugated sheet, metal, plastic brick are people evicted from more expensive neighborhoods, displaced from the countryside, immigrants from other states, fleeing from famine and violence. The plurality of ethnic groups, religions and languages makes it difficult to communicate even among neighbors.

The great urgency is the instruction and integration. Here the Christian minority is yeast rich in life and a Catholic school, Nursery to secondary, populated by students from each language, ethnicity and religion, is a seedbed of a new generation. In the classrooms, in the hallways, in the great lawn, hundreds of school children and their teachers learn to talk to each other and to interact with joy and mutual respect, and also education for environmental stewardship is part of school curricula, are the hope of Chembur.

One cannot understand and love from a distance. So our new place of mission, chaotic and multiform, I get no less splendid Karnataka forest. In traffic and in multitudes moving during the day, and around every light that shines at night like a crib, I know there are creatures maybe not that aesthetically beautiful as those of the forest, but infinitely loved by God; and now that I'm here I'm happy to share the daily life and therefore also the hardships and risks of pollution. "Missionaries always and everywhere," said Luigia Tincani: one more time, I experience the truth of these words.