Justin Shema from Rwanda

Ciao Gen, how are you?

 I lived my experience back at school, where I am a class representative of over 130 students at the night class. It is not surprising that I may be among the youngest students in my class because majority of the people I attend with have households, jobs and so many other responsibilities. Which is why they chose the night class. So, the challenges I faced were that the first night class students were mostly private, therefore, I had to work with the head of department to find a suitable time for exams. Which is when everybody would have paid their school fees. But often, people abused this flexibility and they made up many excuses just to dodge the exams. It is evident that I would have conflicts with some of them because I could not tolerate such behaviors and I did not want to have any bad encounter with the Head of Department. I would do all of that out of total humility, but some of them would come to me in a more violent way. That made me feel like giving up (thinking, I was not being paid to be their representative, yet I was being overly stressed out). One time, one of them reached out to me and asked me which religion I am in and I asked him why he asked me. He then told me that the way they stress me and how I humbly accept it fascinates them. That if it were him, he would have given up a while back. At my surprise, when we were voting for the new class representative, they all voted for me again, saying that they would never want another person to represent them. All of this reminded me of when Chiara said that we mustn’t go around shouting Focolare Focolare, but we must LIVE so that others see FOCOLARE in us. Thanks be to God that He helped me through this.