ARGENTINA, Clara Bianco Herbón/mkf. Villa La Angostura rates as one of the most beautiful tourist places in Argentinean Patagonia, a place that appears in schoenstatt.org, news once in a while as the home of the news writer and just one of the hundreds and hundreds of collaborators for the Schoenstatt website. One example is her article about the simplest opening of the triennium in the entire world, and she is also the translator for Italian articles on the website. Recently two young women from the German Schoenstatt’s Youth visited her. She and her husband have an inn, Puerta del Sol, (Door of the Sun) and she is the Schoenstatt founder in La Villa. She recently related, “The entire city I live in is covered with 40 cm. of volcanic ash (a really very thick sand with small rocks) as a result of the eruption of Chile’s Puyehue volcano located thirty-five kilometers in a straight line from our town.”
Clara, how is life in La Angostura now?
We did not have electricity until last Thursday (6-16), and some places in the city still do not have it or water.
¡What an 18th! How did you live it?
Yesterday afternoon when I (wearing glasses and a chin strip because of the ash) went to greet the Blessed Mother at the wayside shrine, it really hurt to see that everything around Her was gray, a tree had fallen down just behind her, but none of the branches hit the wayside shrine. I almost took a photo to send to you, but I did not because I was very sad to see Her covered with ashes. Fortunately today my husband and son cleaned the wayside shrine and cut the tree branches.
Many Schoenstatt people have called me to say they are praying for all of Villa La Angostura and its people. I know there are many people who are in a worse situation than ours, and Divine Providence will not leave us unaided and as the song says: “we will be born again from the ashes and the plants will bloom once again.”
Some day we will move the mountains
Yes, Clara, we believe it. The Blessed Mother from Her Original Shrine and all the Shrines, wayside shrines, and home shrines allover the world will help to remove the ashes and will bestow graces on all of our apostolic projects, all of our initiatives to create a world that is more humane, more just, more attached, more in solidarity…a world more of God and more of man, a covenant culture that can only be born from our hearts in covenant…that world that we desire and that we are already building every time we sing and heartily believe:
“We will be born again from the ashes.
We will plant the flower where there is none.
And we will speak of love where there is hate.
And some day, some day we will move mountains…
We will build peace over war,
we will fill the house with joy.
We will call each man/woman brother/sister
then men/women
will be a family …”.
Celina M. Garza: Spanish/English translation Melissa Peña-Janknegt: English edit
