Emmaus movement
The Beginning of the movement:
The Emmaus movement was founded by a French cleric and MP, Abbé Pierre (Father Henri-Antoine Groués), in 1949. A former Capuchin monk, he trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1938. During the Second World War he worked for the French Resistance. He took many Jewish families and others under threat over the mountains into Switzerland. He was later denounced to the Gestapo, but managed to escape and join the Free French forces in North Africa. His war ended as a senior naval chaplain, and despite his opposition to the Gaullists, he was persuaded by General De Gaulle to stand for parliament.
It was with another former resistance worker, Lucie Coutaz, that he established the first Community. To begin with, he simply opened his own presbytery to homeless people who he found on the streets of Paris. He had planned his large, dilapidated house in Paris suburb of Neuilly Plaisance, to be a student hostel fostering reconciliation among Europe's post-war generation. But already it was pointing in the direction he was to go; it was being shared with 18 homeless men on whom went his whole salary, buying war-surplus materials for them to put up temporary homes, first in his own large garden.
Gradually these Communities, whose members became known as Les Chiffonniers d' Emmaus (the rag pickers of Emmaus), took on a dynamic of their own as the compagnons and showed they could support themselves by using skills learned whilst they had been living on the streets.
By recycling, refurbishing and re-circulating other peoples rubbish, the Communities were eventually able to make enough income support themselves.
In parliament, an independent allied to the socialists, he found himself battling, not just with the social problems of his poor constituency in the mining town of Meurthe-et-Moselle, but with those of the unemployed and roofless refugees crowding Paris in 1949. Abbé Pierre has consistently sought to champion the cause of the underprivileged and to fight against the poverty, unemployment and homelessness which scar modern society. Emmaus is just one of the fruits to have grown from the seeds of hope he has planted in people's minds.
Emmaus Turku
The first Emmaus communities in Finland were founded in the sixties, and most of the aid is directed to developing countries. Nowadays, however, such communities don't exist anymore, and living communities have been replaced with working communities. There are Emmaus groups in Helsinki, Jokioinen, Kuopio, Mariehamn, Siilinjärvi, Tammisaari and Turku.
Emmaus Turku was founded in 1985, in connection with Emmaus Jokioinen, and has since directed most of its support to war-refugees in Angola. Other benefitters have been people in Namibia, Ghana, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Kosovo, Estonia and Russia. Recently Emmaus has also began to help local homeless.
Emmaus Turku co-operates with private people and some associations, by receiving donations of clothes and furniture. The furniture, and some of the clothes are sold at the fleamarket, but the bulk of clothes is sorted, packed and sent as aid. The income of the fleamarket is used to pay the rent of the sorting facilities. We do not operate to make profit. Our yearly output in terms of material is about 40 tonnes of secondhand clothes to needy people in different parts of the world.
Our working community consists of ca. 10-15 volunteers, it is located with several other NGO's in an old factory building near the centre of Turku. We aim to carry out equality, autonomy and solidarity in our daily work and living. Most of the Emmaus workers are not, for one reason or the other, capable or willing to take paid jobs in the society or leading comfortable middle-class lives. A certain degree of poverty, putting our selves in service of other people and a modest way of living is a concious choise for us in this modern society of Finland, which is strongly orientated towards competition and efficiency. These are hard values, which have destroyed the possibilities of many people to live a good life.
Emmaus Turku
Aurinkotehdas
Kirkkotie 6-10,
20540 Turku, Finland.
phone +358-2-2500958, fax +358-2-2371670
e-mail emmausfi@yahoo.com
net www.yahoo.com/emmausfi
