In one of my July posts I wrote about the IFFD’s International Family Enrichment Congress (www.iffd.org) that we were going to hold on October 18-20. It was entitled: Family, the Face of Humanity, and it is the good cause that prevented me from writing for two weeks in a row. How fulfilling life is when you manage to forget a little about yourself!

We left Barcelona on Thursday in full social convulsion, we arrived in London in full political turmoil and, shortly after arriving, we met our Ecuadorian and Chilean friends, who are also experiencing moments of political and popular agitation. Afterwards, we greeted many others, up to the 70 countries of the five continents members of IFFD. Although not everyone could be physically there, everyone was in spirit.

Boarding the plane back last night, I began to check whatsapps and I found a sentence from my dear sister-in-law and neighbor, who has accompanied us to London to present a precious social action project, Families without Barriers, and which definitely inspired me this post: «Let the politicians take off and let the families do!»

I will leave the politicians in peace, but if one thing is clear to me after sharing these three days my passion for the family with 1,300 people from the five continents, is that, in fact, if families were allowed to sow the peace that the world needs so much, they would end up in a jiffy all the selfishness, aggressiveness, incomprehension and hatred that some are determined to encourage and spread.

Renata Kaczmarska, the focal point of the United Nations family programme, has been with us and has confirmed once again what we already knew: that the family is the place of the human being and the area in which all social evils are best dealt with and solved, and that every euro of investment in the family has a much greater social return than every euro allocated to the individual.

It is true that IFFD families are special families. Not because they have special talents or intelligences, not because they accumulate wealth or power, not because they occupy places of influence or social or political position from where they can determine the future of nations. Neither because they constitute a pressure group nor for any of the reasons that society usually praises and claims.

IFFD families have only one thing in common, their passion for the family, their own in the first place, and those of others later. That is why, after a hard day of work carried with the joy of knowing that you are always welcome at home, they decide to fill much of their free time with the families of others, to share and discover together the beauty of family life.

There, in the united family that struggles every day to love more and better, there is no room for selfishness, vandalism, violence or differences of race, religion, nation or ideology, because the person rooted in the fertile soil of a family that is loved always ends up looking for what unites and building on it.

Such is the strong atmosphere we have experienced these days, which could be summed up with the expression used a few years ago by our good friend Joachim Chu, president of the Family Enrichment in Hong Kong: «Family Enrichment culture». Believe me, a culture to expand. And we, from the IFFD, will continue to do so.

Javier Vidal-Quadras Trias de Bes