October is the month dedicated to all those who follow and make the spirit of the mission their own. On this occasion, we publish the beautiful testimony of a girl from Milan, Miriam Decemberwho tells us with an open heart, in a profound, sincere and touching way, his experience last summer in Northern Brazil, on the outskirts of the Amazon Forest, thanks to a project of the PIME-Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions aimed at young people.
I believe that each of us is born with a purpose and is destined for something great, and that life is what allows us to run, to search, to explore, to discover why we came to this earth. I’m only 24 and I can’t say I fully understand it, nor do I think I’m halfway there yet. But I know with certainty that I have to do everything to find the meaning of what I call “my mission”the reason why I’m here. My name is Miriam and in real life I am a nursery school teacher in Milan. I feel full of goals to achieve and dreams to live, and one of these came true just this summer. For almost ten years I had a dream: to go on a mission, travel to the other side of the world and live a true, profound experience. In reality, my wish was to go on a volunteer trip, one of those that change you, where you play with children all day and work hard to help those in need..
So when I finished university and started working, I decided to embark on a path called Youth and Mission with PIME (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) of Milan: a two-year journey, at the center of which is a missionary experience. Yes, a missionary trip, not a volunteer trip. But this, in September 2024 (when I started the first year of the PIME journey), I still hadn’t realized this. This path puts you to the test: it tests your desire for mission, digs deep and forces you to look inside yourself, in search of your most authentic “self”. Once a month, for a weekend, I went to Villa Grugana (Lecco) together with 35 other guys from Milan, Lecco and the surrounding areas. We shared questions, thoughts and the truest part of ourselves. The peculiarity of this route is that you cannot choose where you will go or with whom. Educators decide for you. There was only one thing left for us to do: say yes and trust.
After a year, in August 2025, I left with my mission companion for Macapá, a city in Brazil, in the State of Amapá, completely unknown to me until then. We lived for a month with four Missionary nuns of the Immaculate (the so-called “PIME nuns”) from different countries. With them I discovered what it means to be missionaries in a community that has not chosen itself, in a foreign land, where the only real decision is to follow Jesus and take him into homes where, otherwise, he would never enter. Missionaries dedicate their lives to God, to prayer and to spreading the faith in the places that need it most. I lived with them day by day and I understood how important it is to have a mission in life. But I also understood how difficult it can be to live for Jesus in a distant country, where sometimes it seems that He is the only one you can count on.
In Brazil, faith is lived differently than what I know, and this too was a gift: discovering another face of spirituality. During one of the four weeks, I lived on a boat with two PIME fathers, whose mission is to sail for eight months of the year on the Amazon River, bringing the Gospel and the sacraments to the most remote islands, where there are no stable priests or parishes. The conditions were far from comfortable, but I saw up close a life of dedication, sacrifice and deep faith. After returning this month, I realized that I hadn’t found all the answers. I didn’t satisfy my desire for volunteering in the classic sense, I didn’t have the feeling of being “useful to the world” as I expected. But I saw something else.
I saw the tireless faith of the missionaries, their strength that cannot come only from themselves. I saw children, yes: children eager to receive the First Eucharist, communities that see the priests only twice a year and welcome them with feasts and abundant food. I participated in masses that were very different from those I was used to, and sometimes even in celebrations of the Word led by the nuns. Maybe Brazil wasn’t the first country I wanted to go to. Yet, right there, I saw and experienced things that I would never have encountered elsewhere. People in the right place at the right time, who showed me what it means to live in and for Jesus.
(In Miriam’s photos December: the mission in Macapá, in Northern Brazil)
