In a silent work, like an ant, he started writing letters to libraries in São Paulo, offering books by José Trigueirinho Netto. Twenty-five years later, the number of his selfless actions is impressive because of its magnitude and reach. Since he began and up until December of 2019, he has donated 52,000 books and 7,011 recordings to 3,183 libraries in Brazil and in 35 countries on all continents, but as he himself explains: “not all, there is one exception, Antarctica.”
This man who acts almost anonymously is Domingos Scatena. Today he is retired and widowed.
When asked what motivated him to begin this work, he simply responds: “I really liked the books of Trigueirinho and felt everyone should come into contact with his work. I didn’t have a definate “aha.” I only felt that I had to do something. I realized that these teachings should be made available to more people. But how to do this dissemination? In the beginning I thought about buying a vehicle and going out to distribute the books to the libraries of Brazil,” he remembers.
He didn’t buy the car and drive off… He chose a more simple strategy: he investigated and wrote letters to all the Brazilian municipalities with more than ten thousand inhabitants, offering the works of Trigueirinho and other authors published by the Irdin Editora. He had the help of his Spanish wife, who translated the letters into her mother tongue, and of some collaborators of Irdin Editora, who would point him to people who could open the way and facilitate access to libraries.
Scatena met Trigueirinho only twice throughout his campaign. But for him, Trigueirinho is a benchmark. An example of honesty and of taking a firm position. “To listen to his talks, for me, has the same significance as going to mass. It always brings up important and good things to move forward with.”
In those 25 years, many things changed. The emergence of technologies makes it possible to access the works of Trigueirinho and all the other authors of the Irdin Editora through the internet. Besides books in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and other languages, the Irdin catalogue has more than 3,000 recorded live talks, DVDs, and flash drives of music and instructions.
In spite of the changes, Scatena continues to write his letters to the libraries. Now his focus is Brazilian municipalities with nine thousand inhabitants and under. He continues committed to this mission that he chose for himself. The results? They appear in little stories that reach him. Like the story of a girl that read a book by Trigueirinho in a library in São Paulo and today is active in a Light-Community.
As a learning experience, he points that his ability to organize has improved, his maturing in understanding what he can or cannot do if he did not have the available resources. In his words, what really matters is that he continues to do everything “with a lot of willingness, a lot of joy.”
According to him, it was his wife who chose the excerpt from a book that is included with all the reports that he sends to the Irdin Editora. There could not be a better definition for this silent work that he does:
“In the same way that a bird sings just to sing, because this is one way of glorifying Life, an evolutionary group work, a service, must not have any external objective, but to follow inner indications and use the instruments that each one has to praise and with joy, offer oneself to the Creator,” (from the book ‘A Time for Healing’ – Trigueirinho).
