My name is Ana Maria, and I hail from Barcelona, although my parents and my sister come from Seville and Granada. It was seven years ago that I first became consciously acquainted with Hospitality when I took up my job as librarian at the Biblioteca de San Juan de Dios.

I cannot say that hospitality was unknown to me before that time, because I had been brought up in a simple, working family, and my grandmother’s garden gate was always open, and when the bell for Mass rang, we would go and hear Mass with our grandfather. I experienced the welcome my parents received in a land which was not our own, but which they have came to love and respect and to see it as their own home. So although I cannot say that I had no idea about Hospitality, I was unaware of its significance on a day-to-day basis.

During the course of my work, I have been able to live in the manner of John of God through the people I have met. Being committed to following John of God’s attitudes and conduct is something which becomes second nature, and ‘contagious’. I believe that this also forms part of feeling a member of the Hospitaller family.

I do not expect to do anything extraordinary apart from living and handing on to my family, my friends, my companions, and my clients and everyone else the values which Hospitality epitomises, and the commitment to give the best of myself in the most most insignificant things I may do in life.