Let us introduce ourselves: we are a group of five young people from the provinces of Salerno and Taranto, together with Simonetta, a Xaverian Missionary Sister. Here we are in Cagliari, at the house of the Xaverian Missionaries, taking part in the International Camp organized by Caritas, together with more than 100 young people from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, including Palestine and Lebanon.

Before being a city on the map, Salerno is, for us, a “home”: the home that the Xaverian Missionaries and the Xaverian Missionary Sisters opened to us, allowing us to share life closely with them, especially through our various experiences of community life. It is thanks to this encounter and to this “journey” shared over the years that our own experience has gradually taken shape.

If we have made our way to Cagliari, special thanks go to Sister Antonella, who invited us to take part in this experience and who has played an important role in the coordinating team of our journey in Salerno, which also involves young people and teenagers from Cava de’ Tirreni, Positano, Caserta, Taranto, and Potenza. The Xaverian Missionary Sisters and Xaverian Missionaries who accompany us are an essential witness for all of us: they guide our steps and encourage us to embrace experiences of “going forth,” embodying that spirit of dedication and openness that we have breathed in throughout these years. It is this very spirit that has bound us deeply to the house in Salerno and to every place where we are able to rediscover it or bring it to life once again.

Our group is not simply a circle of friends who happened to meet by chance; we are a group rooted in this charism, in that spirit of welcome, listening, and sharing that we experience every time we cross those thresholds.

Being part of this journey means learning each day that mission is not simply something we do “for” others; rather, it is a way of being in the world: making room for others, believing in the beauty of diversity, caring for relationships, and looking beyond the boundaries of our own familiar world.

This International Camp has been the perfect opportunity for us to bring with us a little of the spirit that inspires us: the desire to get involved, to listen to stories of peace and migration, to allow ourselves to be enriched by different cultures, and to build “bridges.”

We are grateful to have shared these days together and to have discovered that, although we come from such different places, somehow we all move to the same “heartbeat” when it comes to welcome and fraternity: that “tum-tum” of our hearts, perhaps slightly “out of time.”

Thank you!