A twinning has brought the managers of the Osa sports club of Sesto San Giovanni to our missions to give life to a great tournament and other activities for the young people of Moheshpur
The “CSI for the world” project restarted this winter from Bangladesh, which since 2012 aims to bring the educational style of the Italian Sports Center to every country, a reality that involves thousands of young people in our oratories in its activities. And the first post-pandemic experience saw the Oratorio Sant’Andrea (Osa) of Sesto San Giovanni involved in a twinning with a PIME mission, the community of Father Almir Azevedo in the district of Dinajpur.
The “CIS for the world” project was born immediately after the earthquake in Haiti, with the aim of bringing a sign of hope to the areas affected by the earthquake. Since 2013, however, the idea has expanded, involving all continents. «The activity usually consists of three different trips – says Massimo Achini, president of the CSI of Milan who coordinates the initiative -. The first trip aims to train local coaches and managers; the second involves a group of young people, adequately trained, with a sports entertainment programme; the third trip is that of the actual twinning with an Italian sports club, exactly as happened with the Osa in Bangladesh». It was the PIME missionaries in Bangladesh who had expressed their interest in the initiative. OAS officials visited the country for a week in late February and early March. First stop Dhaka, which they described in their “logbook” as a large and chaotic but also very hospitable metropolis. Then they moved to Dhanjuri, where the mission of Father Fabrizio Calegari is located. Finally they arrived in Moheshpur, the parish dedicated to St. Joseph of Father Almir Azevedo, a Brazilian missionary who has always organized sports tournaments for young people.
The parish is home to an aggregation center for children; with them the OAS has created a soccer tournament, in which young people of different ethnicities and religions who have come from nearby towns and villages took part. Sport has thus been translated into a real element of encounter between cultures and different approaches to the game. Also in Moheshpur a training course was also held for about 80 young people, for which the managers said they were enthusiastic. The CSI and the OAS thus had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the Bangladeshi reality, as evidenced by the images of the boys holding their flags.
But the experience of the “CIS for the world” will not stop there: other groups of seven sports clubs will soon return to Cameroon for the Olympics in local prisons; in July, then, a return to Peru with the young people. “The objective of these missions – comments Achini – is not to change the territories in which we arrive, but the gaze of the young people who leave, compared to realities that we know very little”.