Sustainable Development Goal 3: Health and Well-being
The Secretariat of Solidarity, invite you to focus on Sustainable Development Goal number 3, “Health and Well-being”. Like the other goals, it aims to be achieved by 2030. This goal is clear in its aims: “to ensure the best possible health for all”, with a special focus on the health of the most vulnerable.
Our increasingly global world urges us to continue to look to the “other”, with ever greater awareness of what is happening to our brothers and sisters around the world. The media make it easier for us to be more and more connected, to know more and better what is happening beyond the borders of our home, work, and country.
In the last two years we have seen, experienced and even suffered the consequences of a global pandemic. The disease, the fear of contagion, the health and economic crisis… have shown us that we are all interconnected, have made us see that we depend on each other, have reminded us that we are all brothers and sisters, that we are a global family, that we are children of the same God.
The data of this global crisis have been and continue to be alarming in many ways. But we have also been able to see how hundreds of initiatives have arisen to help others, and how thousands of institutional and governmental initiatives have been developed, together with those of anonymous men and women, with the “simple” objective of “caring” for one another.
In the Marist world we have experienced this double situation at first hand: the suffering caused by the pandemic and the realisation of new projects in response to emerging needs. We can say that little by little we continue to respond to the call of the 22nd General Chapter when it told us to “respond boldly to emerging needs”.
As Marists, we are called to dignify “the fundamental equality of all God’s people” (as the last General Chapter also told us), and this involves concrete actions of care for others and for preventive elements that favour health: caring for the sick, for the body and the mind, and making resources available. We have precious examples of many Marists of Champagnat who have taken care, during illness, of their brothers in community, of their relatives, of people in need in their environment. We have seen, during this pandemic, how prevention has become our daily routine: washing our hands frequently, using water-alcohol gel, wearing masks, keeping a social distance… But prevention, for good health, also means continuing to develop aid projects, caring for the nutrition of the neediest, providing means for access to health centres.
We are called, today and always, to ensure that solidarity is not empty word, but a real concern that begins daily for our closest brothers and sisters, an attitude that leads us to specific action in response to concrete needs. Let us continue to walk, as a Global Family, being beacons of hope and boldly responding to the emerging needs of our time, to the needs of our sisters and brothers, especially those who suffer most, here, and now!
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Br. Ángel Diego – Solidarity Secretariat