Fr Caccaro: school in Prey Veng, God is greater than our strategies
PIME missionary visits the school he founded years ago. Now run by a Korean priest, it quickly became the reference point of education in the province. Its students have achieved excellent results, and were congratulated by Prime Minister Hun Sen himself.
Prey Veng (AsiaNews) – Fr Alberto Caccaro, a priest with the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), founded the Chomran Vicìe school in Prey Veng, southeastern Cambodia. The facility “has become quite popular,” he told AsiaNews, “the pictures of the kids getting a prize from Prime Minister Hun Sen have been posted online and many new students want to sign up. Each year we can accommodate only 40 applications but last September we got four times.” Now it is the point of reference of education in the province. Recently he returned for a few months to Cambodia, where he spent his time of mission from 2001 to 2011. We publish a letter he wrote a few days after returning.
"Words hold me like crutches, like wings wings wings under my clothing
Like roads and rivers (...).
I only have words and uncertain wings - wings and uncertain words.[1]
A few days ago I visited my old mission in Prey Veng. In particular, the high school founded in 2008. I met the teachers, especially the students who last August passed their exam. Four of them got full marks, whilst more than half of the class got a slightly lower score. In short, it was an exceptional outcome that rewards the students’ commitment and the teachers’ dedication. Our meeting was meant as a celebration of their achievement.
The school is becoming quite popular, the pictures of the kids getting the prize from Prime Minister Hun Sen have been posted online and many new students want to sign up. Each year we can accommodate only 40 applications but last September we got four times.
At the start it was hard to find students willing to come to us. They still did not know us and they feared that coming to school was a prelude to being proselytised and forced to join the Catholic Church. When I think about it I smile. God is greater. He does not need our strategies, but rather of our dedication, in conscience and truth.
A few years later, and after passing the baton to Father Joseph Kim of the Foreign Missions of Korea, I wondered what were the ingredients for such success. I told the kids that someone’s success is due to the help of his fellow travellers: God, friends, teachers, mom and dad, textbook authors, and many of those characters the books speak about. I know for certain that students work, and have agreed to endure it in order to understand. I have the proof: some of them have tightened their belts, and even given up food just to have something to buy more important books for their deeper work.
"Sometimes, Father, I’d rather have one less meal and one more book,” one of our former students told me. He is now a university student in Phnom Penh. "Similarly, I would be willing to have a little less to eat to keep those books,” wrote Etty Hillesum shortly before she was deported. Although she died a little later in a gas chamber, Etty was ready to give up food just to have room in her backpack,“ just to keep the two volumes Fyodor Dostoevsky’s and a small Langenscheidt dictionary"[2] between the covers. One must know how to endure to understand.
The school is now doing well. Handing it over more than five years ago and taking a step back undoubtedly contributed to its growth. The goodness of an experience is measured in time and, if it survives us in content and finances, then the experience can be said to be positive. Of course, it always requires constant attention, just like the child of man, but the fact that it is small makes it manageable. "Small is beautiful" was the motto of those years. The school had to be small to ensure quality. From hindsight, it was built to the right size. A second reason is that the dean felt at home right away.
The other day I had the confirmation of that as I listened teachers saying so. This sense of belonging between him and the school gave and gives the school a father. This means there is someone who will fight for the students’ fate as if their fate was his and they were his children. This sense of mutual belonging that is communion gives their work a totally spiritual quality. At the end of the meeting he asked me if I was thinking of setting up another school. I told him that I had just returned to Cambodia and need time. However, yes, I'm thinking about it!
Another important ingredient, clear from the start, was to give dignity to each subject matter. Not only the sciences, considered the most important for their weight in the final score, but also the humanities. “Words, not just numbers!" As long as one knows 2,000 words and one knows only 200, the latter will be oppressed by the former. Words make us equal," said Don Lorenzo Milani. Therefore, as important as science is, it not enough, it does not tell the whole truth.
Too much science and technology in Italy’s school system has impoverished us, reducing experiences and thoughts to simple brain processes, "where the only possible relations are physicochemical, because they are the only ones that one can calculate exactly."[3] That our era is defined as one of sad passions, that psychotropic drugs are being abused, and we spend more time holding our smartphone than real hands, can be blamed on something else. In fact, we lack words that hold “like wings wings wings under my clothing / Like roads and rivers”. We lack the symbolic perception of reality and we therefore miss all its depth. That comes from literature, from words and sciences, together. Like in Good Will Hunting when Prof Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) lifts Will’s (Matt Damon) sense of guilt that he exists.
Etty wanted to take with her another volume, this one by Rainer Maria Rilke. However, uncertain about everything, she read it all before she was deported. Thus, even without room in her backpack, once read she would take it with her, inside her, in that ''infinite vastness, and faith in God, and ability to inner life"[4] that men's violence can never extinguish. That book contained the letters of the Austrian writer and poet. In particular, in one, Rilke compares spiritual work to a kind of "inner garden", season after season. "Tending my inner garden went splendidly this winter. Suddenly to be healed again and aware that the very ground of my being — my mind and spirit — was given time and space in which to go on growing; and there came from my heart a radiance I had not felt so strongly for a long time"[5].
Listening to the new proud and happy graduates, ready to go, I felt that the school was their mother because it led to deeper self-awareness, and introduced them to "a great season of the spirit." With their marks, they can now have the right to speak anywhere and can help others have the same right.
Yes, in all likelihood we shall build another school. I do not know where, how or when. I know one thing however, that "the school is sacred to me as an eighth sacrament. From it, I expect [. . .] the key, not of conversion, because that is God's secret, but certainly of the evangelisation of this people."[6] So be it!
[1] M. GUALTIERI, Fuoco centrale e altre poesie per il teatro, Torino 2003, 34.
[2] E. HILLESUM, Diario. 1941-1943, Milano 1996, 175.
[3] U. GALIMBERTI, Il corpo, Milano 2010, 79.
[4] E. HILLESUM, op. cit., 167.
[5] R. M. RILKE, Letters to a Young Woman (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900041h.html).
[6] L. MILANI, Esperienze pastorali, Firenze 1957, 203.
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