CIG Missionaries: A Week of Celebration
This week, the Generation Peace Academy Cheon Il Guk (CIG) Missionary Trainees celebrate Holy Week in the Christian tradition, True Parents’ Holy Wedding anniversary, and their growing Unification family.
Contributed by Anick Mulecki
This week was “Holy Week” in Costa Rica. On Monday, April 10, we had a wonderful feast with fried chicken and a variety of tropical fruits to celebrate our hard work and also just to appreciate our missionary teams. Even though we all live together we don’t always get a chance to do something like this so it was a really special moment.
On Tuesday, a few of us went with one of our longtime guests to a volcanic national park here in Costa Rica, and on Wednesday, April 12, we celebrated True Parents’ Holy Wedding anniversary. We attended service at a local church, where the pastor read from Chambumo Gyeong about the significance of True Parents and their Holy Wedding. At the end of the service, the second-generation members of the community performed “You Raise Me Up,” and together with our peers from the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, we performed “Color Esperanza.”
We had an amazing Ohana event with the theme “Joy is in the Voice of Love” on Saturday, April 15. After our group discussion, we did a craft activity to reinforce the event theme of happiness. On one side of a piece of poster paper, we drew something that makes us unhappy and on the opposite side we drew something that makes us happy. In the middle we wrote on the sails of pictures of boats action steps that we can take to move from unhappiness to happiness. Together, we committed to apply these actions this week if we ever find ourselves in an unhappy state.
Like we do at the end of every event, we then invited our guests to share about their experiences. Here are a couple of brief testimonies from Saturday’s Ohana event:
“A few months ago I was walking at school and I saw Eunhyo, and she told me she was having an event at CARP. I couldn’t come, but then she asked me a few weeks ago about this Ohana event and I’m able to be here. I really appreciate this event. Hearing about different beliefs and points on happiness, like what I can do, how I can help others to be happy—I really liked it and I felt so much love from my group everything was so cute.” –Eunice
“During this event I was able to understand better what happiness is and also accepted the opinions of my group and I’m really grateful for that.” –Carlos