Twice a year the priests and laypeople who together form the mission family of the Columbans in Chile gather for a three- or four-day workshop. We share stories and set our priorities for the year, and evaluate our pastoral work, and generally enjoy each other's company. We make up quite an international team, from Korea and Tonga and Ireland and, naturally, Chile, as well as a half-dozen other countries, and we use Spanish as our lengua franca for documents and public discussions.
The newer people find this tough going, trying to follow the conversations and the normal give-and-take of banter and proposals, but it´s part of the game. There´s still plenty of time for get-togethers with others from the same home language group, for a dinner at day´s end in a nearby restaurant, and these are important. I remember how important it was for me to take some time just to speak "Americanese" with a fellow U.S. citizen for a while, during my first years here, in the 1980s.
Lay people were not part of our family when I first came to Chile, but we still felt widely varied and rich with different cultural perspectives. I think that the dictatorship years brought us close together, too, since we lived and worked in precisely the areas of the population most suspected of subversive activity by the military regime, the working-class poblaciones of Santiago, back then. All of our phones were tapped, many of our parish officials and catechists were threatened, spied upon and even 
tortured, and some of our own priests were whisked off the streets and expelled from the country in the roughest fashion for living among the poorest and connecting well with people opposed to Pinochet.
Our camaraderie was a vital source of relaxation and support. The pressures weighed heavily, and we slept badly at periods, for the intense fear created generally among people by the repressive policies and actions of the dictatorship, especially through its secret police, who acted without any limits on the sort of violence and mayhem they created.
In these calmer, democratic and freer times, our need for such fraternity seems less intense, but our workshops continue to create an essential event in our collective life here. We continue to fascinate each other with the customs and outlooks our own particular cultural backgrounds have 
imbued in us, and have a lot of fun finding the basic common denominators of our humanity--the love of song and dance, the jokes, sports (especially soccer), meals, and most importantly of all, our common faith in its variety of colors and inculturated forms.
It's nice to be part of the picture, just one more missioner from yet another country--our internationality is growing, and we are no longer, in any exclusive sense, the "Irish missionaries" once known for throwing a great party on St. Patrick's Day. We try to celebrate a lot of different holidays and anniversaries from our own countries, and do pretty well at it--enjoying sitting on palm-leaf mats died in natural colors, drinking yangona from a kava bowl in the Fijian fashion, or downing mouthful of kimchi at one of Santiago´s two Korean restaurants, where the tables are fitted with their own butane-gas burners, or singing along to the Karaoke programs from different countries--and finding a lot of songs that we all know, in this globalized world, like the Beatles' Yesterday.
I especially liked a new cultural addition to our family--the Peruvian seminarians who study here along with their Chilean peers, preparing for ordination and mission to other countries in our House of Formation. At the most recent workshop, one of them played the guitar and sang in flowing Quechua, 
the language of the Incas--his first language, since he was raised in one of the rural areas of Perú where Spanish is seldom spoken. That was a first for us, here in Chile, although it did call to mind the Irish seminarians I met 28 years ago, for whom English was a second language, having grown up in a Gaelic-speaking area of Galway. You could say it wasn't the first time an indigenous language was heard in this mission family, the Gaelic-speaking Irish being the Original People, and oppressed by invading cultures (another trait shared with the Original Peoples of the Americas), of that green island.
As Chileans join us, to journey to Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Fiji and England (as they now do) and serve the People of God in those countries, they prepare other future missioners to come work with us here in the shadow of the long continental column of vertebrae called the Andes, and further enrich 
our own experience here, making for quite a mixed family with at least one thing in common--the experience of Christ, the first-born of many in the New Creation.
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