Gianni Nicolì from Maison de Paix – May 13, 2022
Friday, May 13 at Maison de Paix
Salongo rhymes with Congo.
Salongo means to clean, to tidy up, to put in order.
In these parts, one day a week is dedicated to tidying up every area of social, economic, and commercial life.
Thus, at the Maison de Paix mission in Ndunga, having completed the majority of the major planned works, we set to work on tidying, cleaning, and maintenance together with our group of bold young people from the Focolare Movement.
It was truly needed.
When working on complex installations like ours, which has brought latest-generation technologies to the Congo, many different specific materials are used that require high expertise to manage.
Honor to our special technical volunteers who, out of love, dedicated themselves to the multiplication of kilowatts, following the example of the good Jesus who limited himself to loaves and fishes.
Love is powerful; it transforms a place of suffering into a livable reality.
The community of the Franciscan Angelic Sisters, with their wonderful postulants, had been lacking water and electricity for six months, surviving by a thread on a mazut generator (read: diesel, a legacy of the colonial name given by the Belgians).
Now the place is livable and prayer flows more smoothly.
In fact, everything is a gift from God that comes from heaven: both the sunlight that charges the batteries with electric current and the water that descends abundantly and stormily, also regenerating the underground aquifers.
People here are very aware of this; one does not pay a bill, but rather thanks the good Lord for what He sends to the earth.
Perhaps the volunteers who built the systems and brought the solar pump donated by the Pedrollo company by plane also deserve appreciation.
And there was light, illuminating a well-executed Salongo.
But since there is light now, the technicians will not budge from the power station.
It will be the aroma of the sisters’ good cooking that draws them out, now that they also have a new flue and no longer get smoked out as before.
As we know, there is a shortage of vocations; if the sisters then get blackened and smoked… heaven help us… we’ll end up like smoked ham.
