Welcome

Editorial

There is a strange shift to write these lines for a website, accessible in one click by the magic of networks and virtual worlds, to write these lines so, by candlelight, praying that the battery of the laptop (painfully loaded with an old diesel generator) won't fail, while rains of the monsoon drum on the roof of the presbytery and all around the sounds of the forest accompany the sound of the keys of the computer keyboard . You who read these lines are not only eight thousand kilometers apart, but two worlds alien to each other. I do not want to speak only of language, of the climate, or of gastronomy, these are exoticisms that we finally accept well enough, and sometimes even look for. No, it is a much more profound and impassable otherness of cultures, which can not be compared to two periods of time, or space. Ponouaipou is not the Middle Ages compared (with some condescension) to our modernity, no more a country certainly distant but finally close of a few hours of plane. It is to say better another planet: it is a semi-nomadic people of the mountain and the forest, when our civilizations are of plains and farmers; it is an animist culture, attentive to the manifestations of an invisible world everywhere present in the manifestations of an exuberant nature, when our civilization was for two thousand years modeled by Judeo-Christianity and the Greek and Latin thoughts. They are people whose ways of believing and thinking are a thousand years away from us. We would then despair to understand each other, and to really meet each other, if we were not able to see, between the Karens and the French volunteers and friends of passage, beautiful and sometimes long relations of friendship, laughter common to innocent pranks, conversations without sense, half in the language of the signs half in this strange French-speaking Sabir which was constituted by the frequent visits of french volunteers ... In spite, or thanks to our differences, is born anyway a relation of "Sympathy" which Catholic theology calls "communion of saints", and which is one of the most beautiful articles of our faith. May this new website compete!