“Unpack your assumptions! Don’t take them in your luggage,” says Christine Bruggeman, “they will only weigh you down!” Christine, Director of L’Arche Training and Formation, is back from a formation session in Asia, which had gathered 40 participants: “Today, formation is more than ever giving a format that invites people to reflect on their own and each other experiences. Of course we still share the more than 50 years’ experience of L’Arche, but not in the first session. The whole thing is that people can interpret the values we try to live in l’Arche, in their own culture.”

“Take the word ‘generosity’” agrees Su Wen, who, as L’Arche Envoy for those countries, had organised the gathering: “we used this word to describe Jean Vanier’s original act of welcoming Raphael and others from the institution. But we discovered that in Chinese, it has no direct translation! However, the little group of Chinese-speakers got together and came up with four different characters in a proverb: “Many rivers flow into the sea.”

That is a great image for the meeting itself, with delegates coming from L’Arche Kana-No-Ie (Japan) and L’Arche Punla (Philippines), as well as groups L’Arche is working with in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. “Our countries share a difficult past,” recognises Su Wen. “We easily make assumptions about each other. But in actually meeting each other, we see that we are truly brothers and sisters, and can help each other!”