#OPLAStories - ‘We are here for you, you are not alone’: when community involvement leads to unexpected outcomes
by Tainã Santana from the OPLA Team
It's a cold Sunday morning in Skopje, Macedonia. Christmas is approaching, and just like every year, the Focolare community of Skopje, together with a local organisation, is preparing to distribute sweets to the city's homeless people. The day before, some people from the community got together to prepare them, thinking: ‘We don't have much to give, but we'll do what we can’.
Dejan, a young lad who received support from the EoC last year to go to school, has been invited to help prepare the sweets, but he is puzzled: ‘I don't know how to do these things, I don't think I can really help’. In the end, however, the desire to be able to give something convinces him and he joins in to help with joy. Towards the end of the day he is very happy, and even says to himself, ‘who knows, maybe when I grow up I will be a pastry chef!’ By the evening everything is ready, 290 packages have been prepared, to be distributed the following morning.
It is Sunday morning, and the community gathers at the meeting point, where together with the other organisation they begin to receive the people who are arriving. They stop and stay with them for a while, and from this time spent together many shared life stories emerge. Ana, an OPLA operator who participates in the action, writes,
‘What a thrill. So many life stories. A Jewish grandmother who came with her granddaughter for a hot meal, joyful and grateful, told me that a few years ago she wanted to take her own life but the sisters of Mother Teresa saved her. Then a man approached me whom we are planning to help paying his electricity bill. He is a decent person and he hopes that the time will come for him to have a better life. Then another man who had come to collect his lunch approaches with something in his hand and hands it over: it's a candy that he wants to give as a token of his gratitude. Finally a lady comes up to me, I give her the little parcel, and she asks me if by any chance we have any gloves, because it's very cold: her hands are frozen. I take my gloves out of my pocket and give them to her. What happiness!’.
In the end Matea, a little girl who was there to help, took one of the little packages and wrote on it: ‘We are here for you, you are not alone.’ It was very moving. On that occasion, Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims worked together, something that is not at all taken for granted in a reality of great division. It was a real and actual community experience, involving different generations, people from different churches and situations. It is communion - and the desire to realise it - that gives us the opportunity to come together to walk alongside those in need.
What does the experience of Dejan, Ana and Matea teach us? That when we work together to look at the situations of need around us, some rather unexpected things can happen. We all have something to give, even if sometimes we don’t think so.
Would you also like to experience something similar? What are you waiting for? Look around you, activate your community, and set out on a journey together! We at OPLA are here for you too, you are not alone!
