To look at the other as “one of my own”.

Hello, my name is Didier TCHEDRE, I am JSM a from Togo. I have a degree in electricity and work at “Brasserie de Lomé”. I met the missionaries when I was in the technical high school. And that’s when I started to participate in their workshops and to frequent the community house. I want to tell you how I have come to live a different fraternity, to look at the other as “one of my own”.

The moment that marked me the most was the first day I entered the sisters’ house. As soon as I arrived, I met a group of young people from the high school. There was something different between them, I perceived different relationships, they lived “brotherly” relationships.

Since then something started to change inside me. I come from a family of two different ethnicities. My mother is from the south and my father from the north. For those who know Togo, as far as the differences between the north and the south are concerned, you can imagine that it is not easy for different ideologies to coexist in the same family. It is not easy to love with brotherly love all uncles, brothers and cousins of different ethnicities.

This experience of fraternity gradually enabled me to look at the other as “one of my own”, as if he were of my own ethnicity. What I do to the other is the same as what I wish for myself.

This enabled me to live in a different way, not only with others but also in my own family. I am an orphan of both mother and father, and that means it’s the uncles I have to listen to. Without this brotherly love I could not live listening to my paternal uncles who tell me one thing and my maternal uncles who tell me another. Not only did I learn to love everyone as they are, but my own family perceives a different love for them and for each other.

Of course this fraternal experience has changed my life, everywhere I go I can’t help but try to love and create this type of relationship.

Didier TCHEDRE. Lomé (Togo)