In Teror, Gran Canaria, there is a convent that this year celebrates a century and plans, at least, another hundred years of social justice. The Canary Dominicans, aware that what the world needs are no more institutions that live on their backs to social reality, have allied with Association includes of socio -labor insert to give work to migrants who arrive at the archipelago. “One does not know that this is on the island,” says Nieves Ramos, coordinator of the Sustainable Space of the Association, while going up The stairs to heaven (Scala Coelli), They give name to the convent.
It is normal for this space to be used for spiritual retreats because time here does not exist and only the noise that the wind makes with the branches of the trees and the branches that Suleymán, Jon and his companions are cleaning because “in a garden always There is work. ” When Jon is asked how he is, he always responds “firm as the jelly.” It will be that it came from one of the most cruel violence in Latin America, which left drug trafficking. His daughters are there, and he tells them how beautiful it is to work in this peaceful place, so far from any violence. “When I send them photos they tell me it is a place like a movie.” Jon speaks while doing a tutorial in the stems so that the roses grow straight and Suleymán observes him, today something melancholic, because tomorrow he leaves for Bilbao to continue working there. His intention was never staying in the Canary Islands, but it is the dangerous door that Europe offers young people like him, who came out as they could of Guinea Conakry.
All this is born from a dream of social justice, but did not start from a political discourse like the Luther King, but it occurred to Nieves Ramos, a native of Teror, “of a lifetime”, from which they prefer to see the Virgin of the stripped pine of the golds, “only the size.” One day he was walking along the path that separates the Osorio farm from the convent and although he had seen him a thousand times in his life a plan occurred to him: open it to the rest of the world and give an example.
“Then, I went to talk about the general superior in Madrid, Nieves Báez,” says Ramos. “She was responsible for the congregation worldwide, because the congregation has houses in Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cameroon and here, in the Canary Islands, and when I told her the project, she came to live in the Teror convent after finishing after his mandate for this to move forward. ”
The project is crossed by concepts such as social equity, feminism, economic justice and with a view of permanence over time. This wording wanted to know how it hunted all this with presumably conservative postulates of the idea that is usually of what a convent is. “The founder of the congregation, Mother Pilar, said that social change would come by women. In that we also agree. That is why I believe that there is a fundamental element, which is feminism as an equal platform. I always say that there are those who come to feminism from Marxism and others that come to feminism from the Gospel. ”
Precisely the axis of women will be one of the most important that the association wants to work in this centenary. “Both women here, as projects we are doing in Latin America and in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” where there is now a bestial war that nobody speaks. ”
Nieves Ramos refers to the hypocrisy in which the West incurs when alarming from the arrival of migrants, including minors who are not accompanied and supported by the people who speak their mother tongue, or with their mother, but they continue to plunder natural resources What has been interested in calling Third World. “Persons displaced as far as, fleeing from a war that, in addition, has all the interests around minerals and coltan, which is not spoken, because if you talk, it is known what is happening in Africa , we would like no one because it would be very shame to change computers, change mobile phones, or say how people come to take away the job, when we are using their minerals and natural resources. ”
Ramos does not know if in a hundred years he will be celebrating the 200 years of the convent (laughs), “But what we intend is that this is a project of permanence and that it has all these criteria to maintain. Most likely, as happened to the founder, Mother Pilar, times change. “Depending on how times changing, we will have to accommodate that new reality,” he sentences as a tree of very ripe and suspicion that was right that he thought that from a religious perspective every step of this step of this convent is a little closer ‘from heaven’.
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