On Jan. 29, the Bellarmine Campus welcomed Nate Radomski, the Executive Director of American Jesuits International, Alejandro Calderón, the country director of El Salvador from Fe y Alegria, and Fr. Marco Gómez, SJ, the country director of Panama for Fe y Alegria.
They sat with the community for a discussion about the organization of Fe Y Alegria and its impact on the communities it serves. While both Calderón and Gómez are country directors for Fe y Alegria, the group’s focus varies between the countries.
In El Salvador, Fe y Alegria provides job training and life planning to combat the underemployment, gang recruitment, and migration issues the country faces.
Panama, on the other hand, struggles with families attempting to cross the Darién Gap where there are treacherous jungles, lack of roads, armed groups, and dangerous rivers. To help, Fe y Alegría provides food and shelter, along with legal help and counseling to the migrants.
Their appearance happened to fall into the timing for many things, but especially during catholic schools week. They served as the introduction to the Justice summit which is titled “Footsteps of Faith:Walking WITH the Excluded.”
Director of Global Engagement, Mary Rink, spoke about how “the title of their talk is still walking with the excluded… so it totally fit in, not only to celebrate Catholic schools week, but also to serve as a soft launch for the Justice summit, to introduce what other Jesuit schools are doing to walk with the excluded.”
To begin the assembly, the school had the opportunity to be introduced to the speakers by two fellow students, juniors Abi Nguyen and Heidi Hallett.
Both met with the speakers after the assembly at a lunch and when asked about the benefit of the assembly Hallett stated that, “On our campus we talk a lot about serving others and walking with the excluded, and we do a great job of doing that on the local level but I think we also need to do it on the global level, and I think that by hearing from these people at Fe y Alegria, we were reminded that our work is not just relative to Bellarmine, but it’s relative to the entire world and all the Jesuits.”
Nguyen spoke about how “At Bellarmine we’re not exposed to… how the Jesuits work outside of just Washington, or like even the United States, but I feel like them being there opened us up to the global impacts that the Jesuits have.”
Both students called to light the fact that the Jesuit network extends larger than the Bellarmine campus and the importance of hearing from others about the work that they carry out to help schools, students, and communities around the world.
