Lia began collaborating with AMU when she was still in Paraguay, her home country. Then she was offered the chance to move to Italy to work in the headquarters and she accepted: “It wasn’t easy, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse. I was happy to experience the closeness with the work team in the office in Grottaferrata”. Living so far away, Lia gained a new perspective on Latin America: “Seeing Latin American reality from a distance is a different experience, from here that continent appears to me in all its complexity..
Percepisco più nettamente i valori che uniscono le comunità sudamericane: accoglienza, gentilezza, calore e un legame forte con la natur a. And I understood that there is a way to bridge these two universes, Europe and South America.” The bridge is certainly formed by the work that Lia does with AMU, the international cooperation projects that she follows from Italy and that often take her on missions to Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador. “My view of the world has changed because I have changed since I started this job. The development of communion is central to me: people and communities must walk together and in harmony with the environment. Having acquired this awareness is a great stimulus. It is not an easy commitment, it is more like a craft process: you have to continually look for new ways to put this way of seeing life into practice.
In Latin America one of the biggest problems is social inequality: to help create new processes it is necessary to support people who are looking for new development opportunities within their communities. Work is fundamental, everything starts from here”. And Lia’s dreams also start from here: “How do we get out of poverty, out of inequality? My dream is to increasingly support the potential of the most disadvantaged Latin American people, along with new spaces for self-awareness. We try to make the ground fertile where people’s dreams can germinate, we do it by creating very concrete things: training, opportunities and new projects”.
