Jeanette Alonso de Ibargoyen (1930 - 2021)
On the evening of October 25, 2021, Jeanette Alonso de Ibargoyen, of Chicago, USA, entered the presence of the Lord at the age of 90. Jeanette was born in 1930, her parents were José María Alonso Aréyzaga (Spain) and Irene Jeanette Windecker (USA). She received her bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1955. Married Omar Ibargoyen Paiva (Uruguay) in 1964. Together with her husband and friends, she founded the Latin American Movement Gente que Avanza.
Many of those who know her relate her directly to the Latin American Movement Gente que Avanza and to a life dedicated to train young leaders for the transformation of Latin American countries.
Before embracing this incredible mission, Jeanette lived a powerful experience of change. She and her mother, a woman of strong character, had constant confrontations in their relationship and Jeanette was stubborn in pursuing serious life decisions with the primary motivation of antagonising her mother, who she felt wanted to control her in everything.
A family friend invited both mother and daughter to Mackinac Island, Michigan, to a Moral Re-Armament Centre where an assembly was taking place. Jeanette was 23 years old at the time. The play she attended "The Real News" had a profound impact on her and the testimonies shared there made her knees tremble. After three days she was able to look at herself and realise that she had lived so selfishly. And then many questions came to her heart: Why am I in this world? How should I use these years that God is giving me and that I feel I don't even deserve? What is my mission? Then she began to discover that God was there waiting for her to talk to her whenever she wanted to listen to Him, and when she opened herself to this possibility, she realised that she had to ask her mother for forgiveness and also begin to be honest with her about everything she had done behind her back. Mother and daughter met and were able to come to an honest discussion and after listening to her daughter and seeing how determined she was to start a new life, the mother said to her, "If you let God run your life, you don't need me controlling you or being on top all the time". This stunned her, but from this great reconciliation between the two, Jeanette decided to give her life to God and this was the kick-off for her life to bear countless fruits in every corner of Latin America and beyond.
Ten years later, the former journalism student married a Uruguayan lawyer, Omar Ibargoyen Paiva, a man who devoted himself totally to the spirit that had touched and transformed his wife.
In the early 1970s, there was injustice and hatred, guerrilla warfare and repression in Latin American countries, and all this led to physical and moral misery, hopelessness and cynicism. Ideologies had failed in their attempts to change the world because they had not worked at the root of the problem, human nature.
In Uruguay, Omar Ibargoyen wrote incessantly about his longing for the integration of Latin America to establish its place in the world, and also about his passion for forming revolutionaries inspired by faith.
In due course, with his wife Jeanette and two French friends, Jeanne Azam and Bernard Paris, he founded the group ¡Viva la Gente! aimed at promoting a show of the same name. Part of the arrangement included a training curriculum to develop young people to be leaders of a new Latin America. Over nearly 50 years, the resulting group visited 900 cities and towns in 17 countries, living in the homes of more than 10,000 families and often travelling with the support of government organisations and businesses. During the same period, some 1,200 young people participated in this itinerant programme for one, two or more years. Many discovered their vocation in life, to better serve their communities and countries: priests, diplomats, journalists, educators, psychologists, but above all, responsible citizens, creating families that nurtured new men and women. All of them, surely at some point in their process, had the loving accompaniment of "Mamy Jeanette", as she was known in the group, and probably more than one was confronted with phrases she used to say: "An experience is a passing thing, change is a permanent decision" or the famous phrase of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry "To love each other is not to look at each other, but together in the same direction", with which she supported the young people in their attempts to look beyond their own navels. Among the most striking traits of her personality, those who knew her can easily highlight her great organisation, her impeccable handwriting printed in the many letters she wrote every day, her spirit of harmonisation, her good humour and the affection she gave individually to everyone she met, the doorman of the building, the lady who helped with the domestic services, the young people, the families who housed her, the groups of her parish community, the government authorities of the different countries of the continent and hundreds of people throughout Latin America.
For many years, with Jeanette's guidance and journalistic skills, a high quality monthly magazine was published with the participation of young people and guest columnists. The impact of this group was profound everywhere.
In 1999, 40 young people from the Gente que Avanza cast visited the Moral Re-Armament Centre in Caux, a historic visit, where Jeanette was the linchpin for reconciliation between Moral Re-Armament and ¡Viva la Gente! Latin American, apologising publicly and with great humility for her share of responsibility for the divisions created in the past that were so far from the coherence of the mission of both Movements, thus promoting mutual cooperation in the different actions in Latin America as well as elsewhere in the world.
In her last years she accompanied the work of the Centro de Formación Gente que Avanza, which was based in the Edificio Mauá (Omar and Jeanette's house). Every morning she went out to meet the new generations to participate in the moments of community reflection, called "motivations", always giving of herself and everything she could see that was part of her calling and fidelity to God.
In her last moments, when she was already bedridden, she still babbled phrases such as: "I need to give myself better to people", which ultimately shows the great life of self-giving that she always had.
We thank God for having given us Jeanette's presence in our lives and in the life of our countries, for her faithfulness to her calling and for having spent each of her days so well. May she rest in the peace of the God whom she loved so much!
