Tightly packed in a circle

I’m Martina, I’m 28 years old, and I work on the border as a legal worker and as a coordinator of migrant support desks. In April I got married to Luke, and our dreams are as many as the number of birthdays ASCS will celebrate between now and the next million years in all the world’s borders.
I met ASCS in 2015 in Borgo Mezzanone. I was coming from a month-long Santiago walk that, despite the patches on my feet, had not exhausted my strength but had been a springboard for new discoveries. Father Jonas without knowing me looked at my aching feet and then smiled at me. When you meet people as part of activities and projects with ASCS you already know that you share the most important things in the world with the person in front of you: the desire for discovery, for peace, for justice, for deep information, for the protection of rights, for service, for getting away from the center and being in the world. The how is built together step by step and by weaving threads.
When I decided to participate in the first volunteer camp with ASCS I had a dream of discovering my own way of spending and being in the world, I found a community of shared ideals that continually inspires me in turning them into lived life.
If I had to think of a specific memory of a special moment we experienced together, the following comes to mind. one of our circles on a meadow in Gaziantep, a border town between Syria and Turkey. We were listening to the testimony of a Syrian journalist who was willing to risk his life for his duty to tell of the injustices and evil done against his land and its people under the bombs. Our silence as we listened to him was so loud, we felt like squeezing more tightly in that circle to leave no space between us and to promise each other, without needing to tell each other, that we would never shut our eyes to injustice and that together is better than alone.