Animating in São Paulo, Brazil

Brazil may be hosting the olympics this summer, but Animate partners Jo and Joette have travelled to São Paulo on a very different mission. They’ll be facilitating forty nuns for three weeks whilst staying in one of the city’s favelas. Here they reflect on their experiences coordinating a group that speaks four languages but that is not afraid to speak from the heart.

We are in São Paulo a city of 24 million people. We drove 1.5 hours from the airport, through a landscape of high rises, favelas and artistic graffiti, on a quiet Sunday morning, to the retreat centre where we are staying, which is a gated compound in a favela. The people feel stigmatised by the word favela preferring it to be known as a community. The trees in the garden are festooned with kites, which the local children make from plastic bags and bin liners. The retreat centre is run by the Cabrini Sisters; their foundress Madre Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants and greeted new arrivals as they landed at the docks in New York in the early part of the twentieth century.

We are facilitating a Chapter for a international congregation of 40 nuns, a few brothers, and a handful of partners and associates. The Chapter takes place every 6 years. It reviews progress over the last 6 years, analyses the current context, sets the direction for the future and elects a leadership team with a 6-year mandate.

It’s Day 3 of 21. One of the things we are noticing is how quickly they can get to the heart of things, because they put their whole hearts in. They make more of themselves available to the work. For example, when we ask them to present back an experience creatively rather than through a PowerPoint, nobody groans, and all of them get involved. The result is a variety show, which gets us thinking as well as laughing. Because they present the issues back in a way, which engages them at every level, we continue to work with them at every level. We move beyond words very quickly.

This is important because we are working in four languages, and words are limiting. We need to work more slowly which has the advantage of giving us time to listen and reflect. We need to check back to make sure we truly understand. It makes us all really aware of the complexity of communication and the need to pay attention to both listening and making ourselves understood.

They welcome us in our role as facilitators, and expect us to use all of who we are and what we can do. It is very comforting and at the same time, it pushes us to the edge of our comfort zone.

There is a lot of love in the room, which is no surprise. But there is anxiety and fear too. Fear for the future and how it will impact on them both individually and collectively. We are used to working with anxiety and fear, but we are noticing just how important it is that it is counter balanced by the expression of love. Without that we are only bringing half of ourselves in.