Friday, 18 January 2002
The MMM is the Maryknoll Mekong Missions, an entity composed of the Maryknoll mission teams in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. We get together for an annual meeting either before or after the retreat in Thailand each January.Because, after starting originally with only a retreat in January, we had kept adding meetings until we had more than doubled our time in Hua Hin, we decided last September to move more of our MMM business to the September meeting to make our time together in January a more reflective time.
This morning we still had an MMM meeting, but it was only for a little more than two hours and we basically did reporting and catching-up on projects, to make sure things are running smoothly, rather than discuss new items or initiatives. A big part of this meeting also was spent coordinating dates for our gatherings through January 2004 and choosing retreat leaders for 2004 and 2005. We have to work several years in advance to get some of the better known retreat leaders.
The afternoon was non-scheduled, and while a few people were able to play golf, many more stayed around the retreat center for committee meetings and to prepare for tomorrow's meetings of the sending groups.
This evening all the MMAF members from Asia took Chong and Pooja Park, our two newest members, out to eat at a seaside restaurant.
The photograph shows one wing of the Salesian Retreat Center where we hold many Maryknoll meetings. Beyond it is a pre-school that was built two years ago. About a kilometer in the distance is the sea, with a beautiful, miles-long beach.
Today and tomorrow were set aside as meeting days for what we call "sending group" meetings. For us in the MMM, our sending groups are the Congregation which sends the sisters to mission; the Society which sends the priests and brothers; and the Association which sends the lay missioners and associate priests. Because the Congregation and Society have major, every-six-year meetings coming up this fall, they had a lot of content to deal with. The Association members also had to address some major issues about the placement of their people, especially whether to open up new countries to work in or not. Everyone reported that it was quite a productive day. This picture is of the Maryknoll Sisters present from Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, East Timor, and the Philippines.
