In our Congregation of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit, it is customary for a member of the General Council, based in Rennes, to come to the Mother House in Saint-Brieuc to meet the people who have been working to promote our internationality from the past to the present, both in the Archives and in the Communications Department via the International Site: Olga, from Burkina Faso, who is in charge of these services, came to join us on Tuesday 14 January 2025. Present: Sister Elizabeth, from Nigeria, Georgi, from Bulgaria, and the French sisters, two of whom spent several decades in Cameroon.
After the customary greetings and introductions, we were taken to one of the Archive rooms, where Elizabeth showed us how the many files were arranged in a ‘herringbone’ pattern. They contain treasures from the lives of the sisters over centuries of our history lived in different countries. She quickly unfolds one of these files: we realise how rich it is and how much we understand that the Archives Service is waiting for echoes of life today, from every continent. It’s a rich source of information, often used by researchers and families of sisters in search of our history.
Then we move on to the nearby office. This is where Georgi, who comes in for a few hours a week, makes an inventory of objects from all over the world, traces of our involvement in various cultures. He looks for the main characteristics. On his table is a magnificent Chinese painting, very colourful, brought by our sisters who were expelled from Manchuria in 1951. A parade of images shows us how Chinese iconography has acculturated Gospel scenes. Thanks to her meticulous research, there are so many wonderful treasures yet to be discovered!
Finally, Marie Thérèse introduces us to her office, the sanctuary of the international site: a rather narrow space where, every week, accounts of events experienced today, from the North and South, by the sisters and members of the Spiritual Family converge, accompanied by photos. This is where the image of our identity and our life, which we now give to the world, is conveyed. Marie-Thérèse assures us that, thanks to our three languages, our site is visited beyond the countries where we are present! … How could we not be ardently invited to echo the authors of the articles by ‘Reacting’ on the site. In this way, through our different locations, we create, in real time, ‘an extraordinary proximity of temporal and geographical expansion of digital communication’!
These visits, which were both enriching and fascinating, continued, as usual, with a festive meal around a table that had been magnificently decorated by a Nigerian hand: exchange of greetings, thanks, tasting, conversations with a very international flavour where old events that still leave their mark were recalled, and the story of today’s events that are particularly darkening Africa… but from which we also hear so many stories that testify to the dynamism of the mission of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit in these countries where we are!
A wonderful meeting!
Armandine BAGOT, DHS. Published on 21 January 2025.
