I should say that, when I was told that I would be the communication coordinator of my Province in the Congregation, I remembered there were concrete decisions taken in the 2018 CGP for us to go further. One of these decisions was on Communication at the Service of Communion and Mission. I had a mixture of feelings; fear, joy, anxiety, wonder and doubt. I enjoy reading and that is because someone has communicated some information in the form of books, magazines, videos, newspapers, emails, links and others. Still with these mixture of feelings and flow of thoughts in my mind, I was impressed by the efforts made by the CGP members to respond to the calls in the Congregation at this particular moment of our history.
Aware that I’m not very competent in technology and communication skills, I appreciate the little that I have and know. Just like a potential seed that has incredible harvest, I had the courage to follow the desire in my heart with the hope that my contribution would make a difference in making the Assumption more visible through communication.
My joy in reading gave me the motivation to improve myself in the field of communication. My first letter from the International Communication Team (Isabelle, Almudena, Mercedes) with the words, “ …… there is a new project underway that will gradually grow, you are a key part in it, you can count on our support”. This made me plunge into the waters of communication!!
I am grateful to Sr. Mercedes Mendez and in a very special way to Almudena De la Torre who has been patient and loving in my learning communication skills.
I started by writing the web content of my Province and came out with more than twelve pages with photos included. To my surprise, the International Team had prepared a template to help us and make a coherence in creating our web within the web of the Congregation. I neither knew nor understood how it works!! With my knowledge of Microsoft Word, I started to copy and paste my content and there was an overlapping on my screen. A big mess and I didn’t know how to come out of it as the menu options were different. These were tempting moments to stop working on the web but I never gave up my goal, instead, I worked harder.
The created template of the Congregation worked differently from the templates I know of Microsoft Work, Excel, PowerPoint, or Publisher. Thanks to the advanced technology, because I virtually met with Almudena every Thursday from 10.30am. We would do over the assignment step by step until all was clear to me and she was never tired of repeating a step even three times. She even sent to me video tutorial links whereby I learnt at my convenient time, repeated sections as much as I needed, I was taught and learnt by virtual examples and it was easy to access anytime. I retained and remembered more from the pictures. I was very encouraged in such moments because she worked and walked at my pace. I was supported and cared for. With the assistance of Almudena I came to realize that only words were used differently but the end result was the same.
I faced some challenges. First, with my photos. Most of them were taken vertically and depending on the phone camera, they were not clear, some were sent to me via WhatsApp and this reduced the quality of the photo. The other was when I failed to do the practice at least an hour per day, most of what I had learnt disappeared and could only recover it when I met Almudena.
I now fill confident to venture into different ways of communication for my Province like Facebook, Outlook, having a Google Photo Gallery and at the moment I am working on the Facebook Business Page.
I end by saying that, I am where I am today as regards communication because of;
We all have potential seed in us. If you stretch out your hand, you will find people like Sr. Mercedes Mendez and Almudena De la Torre to hold your hand and place you in fertile soil, weed and prune you, apply pesticides where necessary and at the end of the day you produce an incredible harvest to our world.
A BIG THANK YOU TO SR. MERCEDES AND ALMUDENA
Sr. Nancy Nyawira
East Africa