In Vila de Cruces, the heart of rural Galicia, lies Poboado Mineiro de Fontao, a small village which used to be a mining emplacement abandoned around the sixties, later refurbished in 2004 and currently hosting a large number of families.
Since 2005 people from different regions have arrived to Poboado Mineiro de Fontao. Despite all belonging to different places, age groups, women, men, children, we all have something in common, that is, everybody shares the same illusion of creating a new life in Poboado Mineiro de Fontao, next to one of the most important mining spots extracting wolfram during Second World War, know far from those “gilded mining years”.
It did not take us long to start greeting each other, knowing each other, inviting each other for a coffee. In other words, it did not take us long to build a community. Lacking a place to gather, we used our own homes until the so desired “happy village” moment arrived, without even noticing it.
Families started to grow in number, and in a few years the five or six original children would grow into a dozen, even more than twenty children, and with them new projects, new illusions.
Every new arriving member to our small community would make it larger, allowing us to build warm connections through cultural activities, traditional festivals, leisure afternoons in the children´s park, projects, laughs and coffees, many coffees…moments to tell stories, to share our hobbies, to make plans… but also to share experiences, ask for advice and in this sense we have been learning from one another.
During these thirteen years of living together in this community, through our association A.V. Minas da Brea, we conducted a large number of activities. Among them, we had the amazing opportunity to participate in two European projects, Happy Village and The Story of Me as partners with two other teams, the Polish and the Czech. Both people helped us to gain knowledge of Poboado Mineiro de Fontao´s history, an important matter for our common identity, but also sharing live experiences with the Polish and Czechs partners help us realise that we shared many common concerns and concerns as member of a community.
From this continuous learning context, together with our growing, both collective and individual, springs our need to build a new space with this inspiring project, MOMMAS Coffee, an space to listen to, earn, share our concerns and live experiences, know new ways of parenting.
Poboado Mineiro de Fontao´s community knows well because the role of the family goes beyond the limits of the family house to involve the community as a whole. Our doors are always open to learn and share.
Now, with the MOMMAS Coffee project, our families grow to reach Czech Republic by LOS Libereckáobčanská společnost´s hand and Poland by UNESCO Initiatives Centre´s hand.
The importance of MOMMAS Coffee for the Galician team lies in the way the project will help us continue growing, through the acquisition of knowledge and sharing expectations, and we hope to bring happiness to our kids and to our community.
Author: Paula Rivela