As a child and in my youth people would often ask me, “What you do want to do when you grow up?” And all possible paths would open up before me, as dreams, illusions, possibilities or probabilities, before I could nswer that question. And my reply, a vocational response in every sense, summed up the pathway which would gradually take shape and acquire meaning as it slowly became true, writing my own personal history.

I was at the feet of St John of God when I finally recognised that I had a vocation to hospitality. Because using his own feet, St John of God took food, clothes, firewood and alms with which to comfort the most vulnerable people. With his feet, he trod the streets of Granada, in the heat and in the cold in search of responses and meanings. It was the history and the energy in those feet that revealed to me the path of my vocation. Perhaps the vocation had already awakened within me, but the realisation of the efforts made by the Saint of Montemor-o-Novo and the stimulating effect it has had on so many men and women who have followed in John’s footsteps for five centuries, made me concentrate on this pathway which I have been treading for the past 16 years.

And so it is that, every day, I endeavour to meet the needs of others, to make a response to them and give them meaning, through my attitudes, actions and work. I have no idea where my feet will take me along this path, but I do know that on the path of hospitality I feel deeply satisfied, and today I am nurturing what I now recognise to be my vocation.