Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rayong (Fides Service) - On the main road from Bangkok to the border with Cambodia along the east coast Rayong city is at the heart of one of the main development poles of Thailand. A few kilometres from a popular tourist centre crowded Pattaya, the outskirts of Rayong is a rural area with fields and villages and also chimneys and towers of petrol-chemical plants and hydroelectric centres indispensable for the continual growth of this Asian country and life in its capital.
At Rayong, in Buddhist Thailand were Catholics are a decimal minority, children and young people managed to live a different sort of Holy Week and a Stations of the Cross which can be easily identified with daily life which for some is a real miracle.
The children are members of Camillian Social Centre, opened in Rayong ten years ago to help people with AIDS rejected in state hospitals and for innocent children born HIV+ orphans whose only hope was care from some kind relation or acquaintance until the end of his or her short life. Today the Centre, started by the Fondazione San Camillo as a private initiative directed from the outset by Camillian Fr Giovanni Contarin, is a highly appreciated pilot-initiative at the centre of major projects for information and treatment. The centre is staffed by Thai and foreign volunteers and also by former patients who have recovered thanks to treatment at the Centre.
Rayong Centre Thailand, sent Fides a reflection on its Easter celebrations. Opened to help adults, today the centre has mostly child patients, about 40. They arrive in desperate conditions and make a marvellous recovery, but still face lengthy care and discrimination difficult to overcome. They were the ones who organised an original and moving Stations of the Cross.
The prayer was organised by the children with local material, gestures and iconographic elements combined with typical joy of childhood and seriousness of common commitment with is , characteristic of the Centre. All wanted to play Christ who drags his cross to Calvary, which was not just a game. Most of the children are baptised. Besides basic religious education they have tragic personal and family experience, physical limitations and soul wounds difficult to identify and to heal which make them credible messengers of the sufferings of Christ who offered himself as an innocent victim for the salvation of humanity. (SV/AP) (20/4/2006 Agenzia Fides; Righe:40 Parole:504)
