I don’t want to finish August without writting about the year at Portiño. We ended course 2008-2009 activities in July, with the traditional excursion to the aquatic park in Cerceda, and the volunteers are already talking about the next course in our mailing list.
I think this year was the best we live since I began as volunteer. The team we were last year growed progressively with a very interesting group of new volunteers. In February we split the team in two so we went to work two days in a week. The parties were more fun with the new ideas that veterans and newbies contributed. And all along the course we made more trips than ever. All this work was evident in the academic results and behaviour of the children. And as I desired, in the end of the course, we weren’t volunteers that help children in risk of exclusion to progress.In fact, we were a family.
But every wonderful things in the life are not eternal and, if it’s time to enjoy the sucess, it’s time for me to be a bit sad too. Some volunteers finished their university studies, and it’s probably they won’t continue because it. Even my personal boundings can force me to leave the group. So in the next months we’ll be working in the necessary transition. Laura ‘Laby’ Pérez will be the new coordinator of the group. She is fun and sweet with the children, she has two years of experience in the project, and she has energy like a RedBull cans truck 
Now I’ll pray for the spirit of these two years go on…
It happened in an afternoon ten years ago. My best friend Quico called me by phone. The new was incredible: Gabriel had dead knocked down by a truck.
Father Gabriel Vázquez Seijas was our spiritual director. He was is the spiritual director of a several generations of Catholic social activists. He had left his confortable life to become a priest when he got aware the material and spiritual poverty of Canido neighborhood in the city of Ferrol. He studied with the Society in Comillas University, and it was a very important detail because he was not only a social worker, he was an intelectual warrior too.
Besides of his important action in Ferrol, where he had important confrontation with the authorities defending workers and and handing out dangerous books in the street, he had a mission in the HOAC (Catholic Action Labour Brotherhood) in the years of dictatorship in Spain and he met there with Guillermo Rovirosa.
I met Gabriel in Cáritas the year I finished my pre-university studies thanks to Quico. I had the target in work in cooperation when I had finished my degree, but he showed me I (we, everybody) can do an important work around. So now I’m a social volunteer.
Ten years ago my friends and me became spiritual orphans. We and another lot of people, that were helped in any moment of our lives by Gabriel, cryed his death. Now we have his life as testimony. Ten years after, I pray for being a worthy disciple someday.
“Attention to the poor must be considered only if you react to him as anyone”
–Father Gabriel Vázquez Seijas
“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood“
Yukio Mishima. Runaway horses, 1969
From the classic Greek epi-phanos, “light that reveals”. It’s Christ’s light coming to the world revealing love in our hearts that we try to bury.
(Nothing to do with the wild shopping to forget what unhappy we are)
The kernel of Christian religion is love. But you usually plug in it some non-free modules that get more functions to overcome the dayly dificulties. It can happen because you have need it to survive, but usually it happens because you’re lazy to fight the ambient surrounding you.
These modules taint your free kernel. Even when you don’t have a free alternative, it is an unethical action.
Reverse-engineer your hardware around if you need it. Hack your life. Purify your love. Be free.
I open a new tag with a video.
Most important things in the life are so easy…