“Tobe born again” is our motto and inspirational horizon for this school year 2024-2025. With this spirit and intention our Meeting of Management Teams was held from January 23 to 25. All the Educational Centers of the Vedruna Family in Venezuela participated: El Carmelo de Caracas, El Carmelo de Cagua, Guaicaipuro II, Teresita González-Quevedo and Our Lady of the Valley in Bella Vista.
Surrounded by a stupendous climate of mountains, mist and forest is the retreat house “La Consolación” in El Junquito, where we meet. The landscape is conducive to silence, an environment for patient listening, constructive dialogue, mutual understanding and relationship with God and our brothers and sisters.
In this environment, the management teams, with the organization of the National Team, lived moments of joy, prayer, reflection, formation, work and sharing of what we are doing in our schools and what is to come. We even had a festive moment of games, singing and laughter, which filled the hearts with enthusiasm and familiarity, with the certainty that another world is possible.
All the participants evaluated the space as opportune, necessary and enriching. It was a referential proposal, which clarifies and affirms our identity, mission and charism. All this illuminates our professional, pastoral, pedagogical and human path as Vedruna educators. The experience shared by each of the spokespersons of the institutions present encourages, nourishes and guides us to advance towards the achievement of the goals set. For all of us it has been good news that strengthens our competencies, sharpens our vision in the current context and helps us to appropriate the national and congregational lines that seek a quality education with unified criteria.
We feel that these formation-prayer meetings give us security in the projects that we are incarnating and, although we are experiencing, as they say, the pains of childbirth, in the end we will feel satisfied for making it possible for something new to be born, to grow, to continue renewing itself and to develop.
This moment has helped us to recognize ourselves, to continue consolidating ourselves as local and networked teams. We are grateful to the national team for the effort and to the Carmelite Sisters of Charity Vedruna for providing this space for us.
We have captured the approach of unity of criteria around the Vedruna Educational proposal, so that in all schools we are moving in the Vedruna style, methodology, mysticism and spirituality in a world that challenges us and calls us to give the best for those to whom we owe: our families, our children, young people, men and women to reach human and Christian depth, to be able to transform their environments and drive the country to have development, productive growth with solidarity and fraternity. This is our personal and social contribution as Vedruna educators: to educate, heal and liberate.
May the good Jesus, through the intercession of our Mother Mary of Mount Carmel and Saint Joaquina, help us in this task. Amen.
Professor Néstor Figueroa
