Course Cenfi 107

Missionary Culture Center (CCM)
Center for Intercultural Formation (Cenfi)

COURSE FOR INITIATION
TO THE MISSION IN BRAZIL

for missionaries who come from abroad

Brasília, 26th February to 25th May 2012

The CENFI Course

The CENFI Course is a is an initiation course into the mission in Brazil. It is aimed at missionaries who have just arrived from abroad. The Church in Brazil has been promoting such course for fifty years, beginning in 1960 in Anapólis, Goiás, by the Franciscans OFM following the idea of Ivan Illich, a famous sociologist and theologian.
Today the course, following its initial inspiration, is not only a language course for missionaries. This initiative comprehends four integrated proposals altogether:

1. systematic learning of Portuguese;
2. training outside with a family;
3. an introductory learning about society, cultures and the history of the Church in Brazil;
4. a common life that allows a valuable interchange amongst the participants, coming from different nations, cultures and churches, as well as an adaptation to the life in Brazil through fraternal relations

The duration of the course is 90 days. Its main target is giving to the foreign missionary an introduction to Brazilian reality.

Lodgings

The Cenfi participants are lodged in the Missionary Culture Center (CCM) an institution linked to the National Conference of Bishops in Brazil (CNBB) and its main purpose is forming missionaries. The address is the following:

This very spacious house can accommodate 45 people. There are conference rooms, meeting rooms, classrooms, sitting-rooms with cable TV, a library, a lab, a chapel, an oratory, a communitarian laundry and an external area of 4,000m2. The bedrooms are individual or, in some cases, double rooms with bed clothes, bathroom and telephone. In all rooms we can connect wireless internet. We have six community computers.

Administration

There is a very competent and dedicated team who welcomes, assists and helps the missionaries adjoining the teachers, monitors and employees: Father Estevão Raschietti, SX, director of the CCM; Rosilene Coelho and Emilene Eustachio, coordinators of the course; Osmar Favretto, administrator of the CCM; Sister Rosita Milesi, mscs, coordinator of the SCAI (service of orientation and juridical and administrative assistance for the missionaries); Susana M.R. de Oliveira, coordinator of the language courses.