The Joy of Giving to Those Who Cannot Give Back
August, 27, 2009
In Social Initiatives of the Opus Dei website
While summer is synonymous with TV reruns and midnight burritos for many high school students, fourteen girls from around the US gathered in Boston this summer to spend part of their vacation in service. Service in the City is a program for high school women that engages them in community service opportunities around the city, and teaches that true citizenship starts in everyday life among family and friends.
This year the girls spent many hours every day volunteering at different charitable organizations: playing with children at the Salvation Army day care; performing a talent show at the Vernon Hall nursing home in Cambridge; compiling clothing packages at Cradles to Crayons, an organization in North Quincy dedicated to providing children with the necessary items they need to flourish. After a full day around Boston, the high school girls returned to the residence in Back Bay for workshops on topics like human dignity, moral personality, identity and freedom.
When asked for the themes they thought inspired Service in the City, the participants volunteered: Love. Friendship. Perseverance. Service. Dignity. Respect. As one explained, “Service is not only work, but also the way you interact with the people you are working for.”
Service in the City is sponsored by Bayridge Residence, a student residence for young women in Boston’s Back Bay and a corporate apostolate of Opus Dei. Bayridge residents Emily Austin, a doctoral student at Boston University, and Helen Keefe, an undergraduate at Harvard, organized and led this year’s program.
“The goal is that these girls go back home with a greater sense of love and responsibility for those around them, manifested in little deeds of service,” said Emily, director of Service in the City. “I know we’re succeeding when one girl tells me that after her experience washing dishes at Rosie’s Place, a resource center for homeless women in Roxbury, she wants to work on not complaining at home when it’s her turn to do the dishes.”
I was a young girl educated by the women of the OPUS DEI at BESANA, MADRID, SPAIN.
ReplyDeleteI am a certificated teacher in Florida, without a job; nothing will give me more pleasure that to be a catholic school teacher like all my teachers in my convent of EL AMOR MISERICORDIOSO or BESANA, my OPUS DEI school.
I went several times to GUATEMALA as a medical missioner and nothing in this life give me more pleasure that to help the native Indians, the poorest of the poor in THE AMERICAS.
I will love to see all the young catholic girls and boys doing SOCIAL WORK for the poorest of the poor around the glove.
My life in Spain as a young catholic girl was beautiful and full of lovely memories.
I will give thanks to GOD for being born by a catholic family in a catholic country.
My life in the USA have no being as good as my life in SPAIN, since it is a complete different culture where DOG GOES TO EAT OTHER DOG.
The GOLDEN COW has the place of Jesus in the majority of the AMERICANS.
The Image of Lady Liberty has the place of the IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.
The USA is not a nation under God, it is a nation under the mighty dollar.
I pray and pray with my students at the public schools for the freedom of WORSHIP AS NUMBER ONE BILL OF RIGHTS.
The spaniords and the Puritans brought CHRISTIANITY and now our government want to STOP US from pray and force us to separate our faith from our thirst of knowledge.
Knowledge is in GOD, the God that this nation was founded.
As a catholic, Amor Misericordioso and Opus Dei
alumna I can not be silance to the BRUTALITY OF THIS NATION by wanting to take from us CHRISTIANS our right to pray.
My beloved Christian young girls and boys
Thanks for your COMMUNITY SERVICE and bringing the LOVE OF JESUS to the streets.
Your sister in Christ
Rosa Maria Jimenez Herrero Caballero de La Iglesia