Commission on International Volunteers (CIV): Chio, Yuka, Loli
Yuka visiting the community in Layo
The Commission on International Volunteers
met from October 10 to 16 in Lima, Peru.
The purpose of the meeting was to have an overview of
the international volunteer activities in the whole Society
before the JPIC international meeting in the Philippines.
We, the Commission members -- Mª Dolores Molina rscj (ESP), Rocío Villanueva rscj (PER) and Yuka Arita rscj (MH-PHI) -- are very grateful to the provinces that generously responded to the questionnaire that we sent out. We carefully read and discussed all your inputs. We also exchanged experiences of sending and receiving international volunteers. We looked more closely at the objectives of existing international volunteer programs, their processes of formation, accompaniment, and evaluation. We considered possibilities of systematizing these volunteer efforts across the Society and collaborating with the Society's international website and the International Vocation Commission. We also hope to pursue themes of JPIC, and thus look forward to participating in the International JPIC meeting.
After the CIV meeting, I visited Eva Ibáñez, a long-term international volunteer sent by the Province of Spain's “Voluntariado Norte Sur.” She arrived in Peru in August this year and has been assigned to Layo, a remote village in the highland of Peru. She will be helping in the ministry with children and the youth until June 2019.
I was delighted to see her availability and competence in handling different activities and enriching the apostolic service of the community.
We thank the province of Peru for their warm hospitality. They not only provided us with a beautiful and conducive environment for our meeting, but also allowed us to get to know the communities and sisters. They also provided opportunities for us to visit some ministries that receive international volunteers and welcome young people for various forms of international service.
Yuka Arita rscj
Province: