Venezuela - Schooling emergency increasingly dramatic

19 September 2019

(ANS - Caracas) - "The new school year will be a tragedy": this is the beginning of the article that the Catholic historian and theologian Luis Ugalde, Jesuit, recently published to testify to the state of Venezuela today. At the forefront of the country's moral rebirth, the Salesian bishops share this vision and propose it to the Don Bosco Missions so that it may be its spokesman in Italy.

"During the 2018-2019 school year," Ugalde denounces, "the government broke all the negative records and left schools without teachers, without students and without resources." The teaching profession is so degraded that students increasingly abandon the faculties of pedagogy and education.

The exodus of educators and hunger in families generate the emptying of schools. Before such an emergency, the Church seeks solutions. The Salesians and other congregations have been concerned for some time about combating this enduring contingency "with food and books".

Luis Ugalde continues his analysis: "We know that individually neither the teachers, nor the parents, nor the ministry officials have the strength or resources to overcome the disaster," he writes. So where to find the resources to rescue Venezuelan education and give the new generations hopeful prospects?

The author of the appeal acknowledges the necessity to create "new synergies, which support each other in order to jointly promote, organize, take responsibility for national and international humanitarian aid, which so far have been started very timidly with the Red Cross or with Caritas."


The Salesian Family, in all its components, has also taken active part in building this flow of resources. The Venezuelans are supported by the entire Salesian Congregation and by the Rector Major. "You are not alone. From the various parts of the Salesian world we are concerned about you. We are attentive to what you are living and well aware of everything that happens to you," wrote the Successor of Don Bosco in April 2017. Fr Ángel Fernández Artime has repeatedly reassured the Venezuelan confreres that he, and the Congregation, is at their side: “We sense the pain you experience and the tiredness you have reached. For a long time we have prayed for this beautiful country and its good people."

The Salesians are an eminently educational Congregation, why they have not abandoned schools and vocational training centers. A concrete contribution of the sons of Don Bosco is in fact the presence in 18 scholastic works at the national level, including primary, general and vocational education. The educational service is aimed at children and young people, especially the poorest and most disadvantaged.

Source: Don Bosco Missions

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