At school we grow

“It is not enough for the poor to know you, and call you by name. It is important that you know them, and know their history, know their name” (Dom Helder Camara)

History in recent years seems to be going backwards. But even in this time, in which its prospects are more uncertain than ever, we remain protagonists. The challenge is always to build a future for people who are excluded from it. Once again, meeting and acting around the urgent needs of the poor is going beyond, renewing time. Giving hope to life stories is giving a little hope to History, a little Peace…

This is the case of school support which this year too, thanks to many friends, will be offered to children and young people in Vietnam. Over many years - a good twenty - the project has allowed well over a hundred of them to complete a full school cycle; some have even completed university. Without this meeting it would not have even been imaginable.

The country's economy continues to grow, even if it has not yet returned to pre-Covid levels. But, as in many realities, becoming a medium-level economy requires transforming the "informal economy" - a good 2/3 of employment in the country - without any social protection, into stable work and with some protection.
Families do what they can to take care of their children. The problem is not so much their unity, but subsistence: the work is very unstable and precarious, paid
poorly, made up of a lot of physical effort, which excludes those, already poorly educated, suffer from illnesses or the consequences of accidents.
Help is therefore essential to give a little serenity to very painful situations, helping the little ones to build a future, acquiring skills and abilities: to do, to choose, to be. The poor, everywhere, know what solidarity is among themselves; the only resource they can count on to resist the emergencies that follow one another. But only external help can generate the conditions for an important change, of which school is the key.
The children who have benefited from it are also the very real image of how everything is possible, working hard and day by day. To do something new, despite everything.

Our dear Sr. Elena Miravalle fma, enthusiastic missionary with whom this project was born in 2001, passed away a few months ago, at the age of 93. But she made it live in her community, ensuring its continuity. In the fma communities of Southeast Asia many others join her: in the scholastic and educational field, always for the benefit of sons and daughters of poor families.

For 2025 we will also remain in Cambodia, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh to support an oratory for children in the neighborhood in Teuk Thia. Children of parents who come from the interior of the country looking for any job, in construction, in factories, just to earn a penny to support their family. In this time, however, many factories are closing. A group of children is welcomed whose number varies between 80 and more than a hundred on holidays. We offer them education, games, lunch and, sometimes, even a little food to take home for the family.
Here too, feeling welcomed is a new beginning, to try to overcome everything.


Mauro Palombo
NP April 2025


Associazione Sermig Re.Te. for Development
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