English 
“With You I Will Walk”, these are the words that resound in me since my arrival in Cameroon!
Cameroon-Chad is my first – long-awaited and desired – missionary destination, which today finally comes true in being among these people, where I arrived on February 6, 2025!
With You I Will Walk, (also the title of a song by Gen Verde) is actually an encouragement that has been with me for some time. In particular, since I had the opportunity to spend a month of prayer in Bologna with the Jesuits (the Ignatian month). This in preparation for the perpetual profession and missionary mandate, celebrated in Roseto degli Abruzzi, in my home parish on October 20, 2024, on World Mission Day!
These very important steps, such as the surrender of my life in perpetual profession and missionary destination, are the fruit of a long journey rich in experiences, which could have led me to believe that I had already reached the finish line, but… With you I will walk! It is with this awareness that has allowed me to live with joy and peace the arrival in the mission, knowing that the journey simply continues and that it is up to me every day and forever, to choose to Whom to entrust it and with Whom to do it.
The perpetual profession in my parish was a great gift, a moment of fulfillment in which to say thank you to the Lord and in which to thank with Him all the people who have walked a stretch of the road with me and who continue to do so even from afar. The beauty of that day celebrated and feted with all my family, together with the different communities to which I belong – the Roseto one and the one of the world, together with many old and new friends and together with various witnesses (sisters, priests, catechists, animators), helped me to broaden my gaze even further. I experienced once again that I am the one sent, like a seed thrown into a field beyond the horizon, which in the abundant and generous gesture of the sower brings with it the story of many people who have enriched the journey! I leave, but Someone sends me and when He sends us, we never go alone!
Instead, the interesting part – and perhaps a little curious one – is precisely the image of the journey that accompanies me in a moment in which, I cannot walk. Just two weeks after my arrival in the community in Yaoundé, I suffered a sprain that caused a micro fracture in my foot, making me unable to walk.
I stopped due to a fracture in my foot just after arriving on mission… and at the same time the word that comes back most in my prayer, in my desires, in my small and brief encounters, as well as in the words of the Pope in the message for Lent 2025, is precisely WALK!
Jesus is who first testifies to us in the Gospel what the journey is made up of. You are not alone! Jesus himself often lets others do it, to the surprise of those he meets, and thus saving him. I think of the delicacy and attention with which my fellow sisters help me in the small daily things. This for me is a bit of a reversal: I, a nurse and neuropsychomotor therapist by profession, with a deep-rooted passion for taking care of others, find myself considering that letting others do it and allowing others to take care of me is also part of the journey!
In this initial moment of insertion and adaptation, I then feel a strong call to patience and silent listening: what intrigued me about these people, of whom I have certainly seen too little, is in fact the joy of a living faith, which must be discovered more and more in the depths of everyday life, with much perseverance and waiting.
I do not know exactly what I will do here, for now I am focusing on studying the French language, but I know that there is a path to continue, and it will not be just the recovery of leaving home after this small initial incident. It is the journey with the Lord in the midst of the people where I was sent, a path that is an encounter, relationship and a great ability to let oneself be transformed, a path in which to be a sign of Peace.
I make this wish for myself and for you: to be in Peace and to be a sign of Peace for others!
I conclude by sharing some words written by Fr. Enrico Fidanza, a PIME missionary in Myanmar, originally from my parish in Roseto, which were an aspiration for me at the time of my missionary mandate.
“Peace.
It is a beautiful greeting; it is an experience that tells everything you are living in this moment and everything that is promised to you with the missionary vocation.
Peace.
… with your definitive consecration, this is the wish that your life brings to the world: peace to those who cry, peace to those who are desperate, peace to those who are depressed, peace to those who are struggling with their own history, peace to those who are struggling with every history. To all the peace of the Lord Jesus.
Peace.
This is the vocabulary of the Kingdom of God! We have nothing else to say and nothing else to experience, except the peace that the Gospel gives to humanity.”
Sr. Francesca Centorame, Cameroon
