The FPSC organized on September 25 the “International Meeting Álvaro del Portillo: 40 initiatives against poverty” in the auditorium of the ONCE Foundation, which was attended by the worldwide social initiatives directly driven or promoted by Blessed Alvaro del Portillo.
The President of the Foundation for the Social Promotion of Culture, Jumana Trad, sent from Iraq a welcome greeting to attendees. In her words she stressed that these meetings “could have been called 40 ways to change the world, because that is what has happened since each was launched. Each has changed the lives of many people, with names and surnames”.
On Thursday the persons responsible for these initiatives presented their work on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people, poor, young, immigrant women, from the Bronx in New York, to Nigeria, to Kenya or Guatemala.
The difficulties, the enthusiasm and challenges these projects faced in the beginning; the poverty in countries where they were developed, the initiatives in the field of health, the promotion of human rights, especially in the dignity of women, and education as a catalyst for change and development were the main topics at the meeting.
Kinal Education Centre was born near the city dump of Guatemala and serves 1,500 young people, most of them from poor families. In the words of its director Edgar Umana “it has some very good facilities that any very good school would envy, but the difference is that it is intended for children whose families could not afford it”.
Another initiative, the Niger Foundation Hospital, was born in 1991 with just three doctors and some beds as Álvaro del Portillo suggestion. In the words of its director, Ito Diejomaoh, today 20 doctors and specialists work in this centre and attend to 40,000 visits per year. The hospital is located in a poor area of Nigeria, patients consultation is free and medicines very cheap.
The Rosedale Center in the Bronx neighborhood of New York is an initiative of professionals and mothers of the neighborhood looking to remove girls from an environment of poverty, violence and crime and help them to learn a trade.
Frankie Gikandi is the director of Kimlea, a center located 30 kilometers from Nairobi that provides education, health care and support to women in rural areas of Kenya, at risk of falling prey to prostitution as the only way to bring up their families. Kimlea train them enabling them to improve their employment situation.
The figure of Álvaro del Portillo was instrumental in the origin of these initiatives.
In that sense, Pilar Lara, the President of the FPSC between1987 and 2013, said when talking about the beginnings of the Foundation:
“My arrival in the area (Middle East) was almost accidental; the European Union had granted the FPSC, which I chair since 1987, to develop several projects in the area, but we did not see it viable. I traveled to Lebanon for the first time to explain to those who were to be the recipients of aid that we would reject the project”.
“However, upon arrival I realize the situation of the country and the Christians after the civil war. I talked to Don Álvaro del Portillo, Prelate of Opus Dei then. Don Alvaro told me that the situation in the Middle East was one of the issues that mattered most to His Holiness John Paul II and asked me to go ahead.”
Closing video “International Meeting Álvaro del Portillo: 40 initiatives against poverty”
Cadena COPE. “La Tarde” with Ramón García: “Don Alvaro promoted the fight against poverty.” (Macarena Cotelo intervention, Project Director of the FPSC: 3.45 Min.)