I first met the Brothers of St John of God when I was 17 years old, attending a summer holiday camp. That experience gave me my first contact with the world of mental health and with a God who is closer, and ever-present, compared with the God that had been presented to me previously. The following year I joined the Juventude Hospitaleira (Young Hospitallers) movement and embarked upon a path of Christian and Hospitaller formation, which led me to Mozambique as a lay Hospitaller missionary from January 1995 to June 1997.

My experience as a Hospitaller missionary in Mozambique also enabled me to conduct a more thorough discernment of my vocation, culminating in my decision to consecrate myself to God as a Brother of the Hospitaller Order. After completing my postulancy I entered the Spanish-Portuguese Interprovincial Novitiate in 1991 and stayed there until 1999, when, on September 12, 1999, I made my simple Profession as a Brother of St John of God.

Even as a child I had always wanted to be a missionary, and my experience in Mozambique confirmed the feeling that I had a vocation to serve others in “frontier areas” to share my life with people living on the sidelines of society and in territorial marginal areas: it was both a challenge and a Gospel imperative. As a Hospitaller Brother I have tried to live consistently with that vocation, and I can say today that I feel fulfilled by what I have done and am doing, and what I feel called to do, both in East Timor, where I have lived for the past 10 years (from 2004 to 2014) and where I have had the privilege of sharing hospitality with a new cultural environment, and as the Provincial Superior of the Brothers of St John of God in Portugal, Brazil and East Timor – a mission which the Brothers at the last Provincial Chapter asked me to undertake.