English 
Guinea Bissau, “my mission land”, always becomes a new Galilee with its traditions, its dreams, its struggles and its resistances, but it is the place from which the mission is continually relaunched.
45 years after the arrival of our first sisters, from their stories, I see that the mission here is a continuous living and deepening of the missionary responsibility of this particular church, through experiences, testimonies and contacts with different cultures, in the light of the preferential evangelical option for the poor, defending life and nourishing hope among the people.
Seeing how far we have come, I sometimes ask myself: what paths have we taken to respect the commitments we have made? What paths have we opened to project our Churches ever further beyond borders, in following Jesus and in a permanent approach to the new, to people and to God?
A phrase by Fr. Giorgio Paleari (a PIME missionary now deceased) sums up the possible answer well: “It is part of the mission and it is proper to the mission to cross borders, it is proper to the missionary to always be on the move”. This path that is journeyed between past, present and future, that makes us discover how important it is to “remember” our origins and revive our charismatic heritage. This strength motivates us to resume our choice today and to launch ourselves towards the future by living our mission with more enthusiasm and creativity. Thus, we discover that from the beginning, we are on the move and we open new paths, in simplicity and poverty, supported by the Hope that does not disappoint.
However, this is not enough, the journey must continue in the future. We know that the Church was born to go out and is missionary by nature. In our formation and catechesis, we say that every baptized person is sent and animated by the desire to make Jesus Christ known and loved. For this reason, our being missionaries cannot stop at ourselves. We must reawaken, with our being and our actions, the seeds of the missionary vocation that God has sown in the hearts of young people.
In this Jubilee Year, we are called to be “Pilgrims of Hope”. This makes me think with gratitude, not only of all the graces that we Missionaries have received, but also of the challenges of this time. We must be grateful, but we are also called, by vocation, to help the Church to be open in giving from its poverty. This is what motivates us to work for vocations so that “the whole Church is for the whole world”.
In the experience of accompanying the young people, we communicated to them that to be a missionary means to become aware of God’s call to go out of oneself, live in communion with the project of Jesus and build the Kingdom of God. Therefore, we as well as the young people we accompanied have become aware, that the Mission comes from God as a gift and returns to God as a service to become more and more a gift for the world.
Sr. Eliane Armoa, Guinea-Bissau
