I am Jesus Osornio and this year I am living my novitiate. The year of the novitiate is a time and a place where I built the foundations of my religious life. I have had the opportunity to grow much more in prayer and in my relationship with God. Different situations have happened this year, one of them is the pandemic. This shows us that we can be weak as society. At the same time we realized how good we can become with each other, for example the doctors and nurses who from the beginning of the pandemic are working on the front lines.

Unfortunately, George Floyd's cruel death made the situation even more painful with the pandemic crisis. When I think of the people who were killed like George, for whatever reason, I think about my own life. I could have been him. I could be the one who left a mother without her son and a daughter without her father. We are all worthy children of the same, no race, God. There is not a single day that my fellow novices and I are not praying for everything that is going on around us. Of course, we have been praying intensely since the recent justice movement began.Prayer is powerful but just as Francis of Assisi once made a claim to society of his time in favor of God's creation, so now we join in a small way to this claim to all. Let's reflect, let's start changing this world.

It took me a week and a half to be able to have the courage and the strength to watch the video of George Floyd's murder. It was just frightening to see those images. Several times I turned off sound the video, and with a great helplessness I saw the scenes. I could not finish watching the video. It was too much for me. George was still in pain even if I was not listening to the video. The policeman
heard his suffering for more than eight minutes (8:46).

When we wrote the signs for the photo, the video always came to mind and the policeman's action. My sign said this phrase in Spanish "ALTO A LA BRUTALIDAD POLICIAL”, (stop police brutality). This simply cannot be happening in a Christian world. In this life we have to learn to use our authority with responsibility, conscience and above all of these, with an extreme love for others. Our country is in need of reconciliation. Just as the Afro-Peruvian activist Victoria Santa Cruz once
said. “I am Black and I am part of the mosaic that is humanity; black, white, yellow, red. So long as red, white, yellow, and black people do not realize they are ONE, they will never be able to understand what humanity truly is."