Seven months have been ripped off the 2012 calendar in my small room since I stepped into Don Bosco Boys Home – Liloan for my practical training. A lot has happened for sure with all the energy and movement around our boys. If time flies in the post novitiate because of hours and hours of study and reading, here in Boys Home, time flies because of hours and hours of endless activity and keeping up with the unrelenting energy of these supercharged boys.
I took this time to write again while I am assisting the boys for their daily serious study period. Serious, because talking is disallowed, nor is standing, eating, sleeping, and all other things except reading. They are fewer with some in Balamban attending the provincial meet for sports. So I began our study period with an exhortation, feeling like a prophet of old, to maximize the study period for reading and learning for its sake, because we never stop learning until we are six feet under the ground.
A joke runs among Salesians assigned to Boys Home that the unyielding physical activity in this house is not conducive to serious study for us, it takes extra will power to read a book while in Boys Home, and so they say the place dulls intelligence. From my seven-month experience, it has some truth to it. Partly true, because the lack of venue for serious reading certainly curtails the intellectual pace of the post novitiate and its philosophical musings. However, practical training is a different dimension to say the least. It is grasping the ropes of being a Salesian on-site.
Practical training did me its name’s worth: practical learning. I have learned much of how to deal with people as a Salesian religious.I learned more on living with a religious community of people older than I am. And so, learning takes on a different phase here.
Taking seriously the advice of a mentor, I should not stop reading (or writing). I may be in a practical phase but as the dictum goes, we never stop learning until we die.
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