“How beautiful and great is to know, love and serve God! It’s the only thing we have to do in the world. Everything else is wasted time”
– Andrea Varela and Sergio Vicente

We got up early to head to the border. Once we pass Spanish customs, an unknown world opens up before us.

Hundreds of people crowded around trying to move from side to side, to our right women walked bent over bearing heavy loads.

The weight they carry forces them to look at the ground, without looking up. The only landscape they see are their own feet, they do not even know that we are watching them, because they focus their energy on keeping walking fast and making the maximum possible crosses a day, earning 3 euros each time. For a moment we feel like we are intruding on a choreography perfectly rehearsed day by day to which no one has invited us, a daily reality that is hard, and that once again provokes the questions to invade us and the emotions which overflow.

To the left, but among the multitude of people, some climb over the heads of others and mount a row on top of another. Pushes, shouts and fights frame one of the most unequal borders in the world.

Only a few kilometers separates us from Nador. When we arrive, the chaos of the city catches us. Immediately we began to know the projects of the zone: some go to the Darheria, others give assistance in the mountains where the settlements of immigrants are, a third group goes to the camps to conduct activities and one last stays helping in the wardrobe of the church.

In the afternoon we continue to experience these realities while one of the groups moves to Alhucemas.

The days go by, the experiences are weighing and making a dent, but we are still willing to continue our journey wherever God wants to take us.
We are certain that He guides us and that you are many who through these daily lines accompany us and pray for us.

– Sister María Arrese

We arrived at 8:00 at the border between Melilla and Nador before the boat arrived with all the people who had made the crossing.

Only one line and we discover a different world: people lost between arid lands, desolate, unpaved, without vegetation, with lost looks but a heart anxious for a better future.

Suddenly women, men, children begin to pass, with a load on their shoulders that forced them to be fully stooped, parallel with the sand they were on, nothing more.

The weight they were carrying kept them away from a glance toward the horizon; the ground they walked on was the only landscape they saw. Their space was small, their cargo hard to carry but they were quick as if it were carry-on luggage.

Women, young people, children, elderly people on their crutches…. I was very impressed with the excitement of crossing the border into Nador.

How so much difference in such a short space of land?

God of humanity, God of human dignity, make us stand with them. Remember us that you said to us, “Lift up your head, your liberation is coming” (Lk 21:28-33). “Take some of the burdens of others and keep so the law of Christ ”

Make us today interpreters of your command: “because you charge men with burdens difficult to carry and you do not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers” (Amos 2:13)

We Vincentians are called to be at their side, to dignify their life, to be their voice as they have no voice, to be at their side to ease the burden of his life.

I can never forget this image, in the passage of the border, these bodies hunched, forced to look at the ground, with no other horizon in their life.
– Sister Trinidad González

From Nador: To know, to love and to serve God our Lord in his preferred ones the poor, our brothers.

To know God, to seek Him, to be alone with Him in order to hear His voice that speaks to our heart. Enjoy His presence, savor His gestures of tenderness towards your children.

To love the Lord with all our heart, from our guts, experiencing the love in our lives, sometimes loaded with wounds, of pain and suffering before the injustices that we can experience around us or in the daily life of our lives.

To serve with the whole heart, with the strength of our arms, sometimes from the silence, attentive listening, to look to our brothers and sisters who represent suffering Jesus, forgetting of ourselves, forgetting our “me”.

To know, love and serve the Lord, is our task, is the gift that is offered to us, because we have experienced that God loves us and wants us happy.

¡Abrazos! (Hugs!)

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