The following is a reflection from Monica Villar, who is a member of MISEVI Spain and also a member of the International Coordinating Team of MISEVI International. The VFCAP is a program of the Vincentian Family Collaboration Commission, in which Monica was a participant in 2016.  Father Manuel Bonet invited her to become a trainer in Seville and in other places during the following editions. The main goal is to train people on the different groups of Famvin as “serving agents” to carry out their Mission in collaboration, such as joining forces like people, money, etc., to get resources for the poor.

The first weekend of March, the Vincentian Marian Youth (JMV) of the international team awaited me with open arms under the Giralda of Seville, before sharing dinner and film with the rest of the Vincentian branches present in the Provincial House of Seville. The next day, we got to learn as a family, to get to know each other a little better, to work on our virtues to enhance our strengths, deepen ties and define lines of action that allow us to collaborate together in projects for the common good.

In collaboration workshops of this edition of the VFCAP (Collaboration Program for the Vincentian Family), Vincentian priests, Daughters of Charity, members of the Society of St. Vincent DePaul, AIC, AMM, JMV and MISEVI, we have rediscovered the greatness of our great family. A Family that amounts to more than 4 million members and collaborators around the world, divided into more than 150 branches that work together to eradicate material and spiritual poverty.

It is then, when Father Joseph Agostino turns our hope into joy by teaching us many people who are divided into different commissions and, following in the footsteps of our founders, believe in collaboration as the axis of our daily work. And hours later, our dreams and wishes came true at the Miguel Mañara Center, a center that demonstrates itself every day to be in service to the homeless, that collaboration between the different branches of the Vincentian Family is possible, and where we find that spending an afternoon in fraternal communion is possible.

That weekend, we returned home feeling like catalysts of a social change that has already begun. And we carry in our suitcase a certainty: a Vincentian, besides a servant, is a person who carries in his pupil the image of the poor and in his DNA the message of Jesus Christ engraved.