- ATD Fourth World

The 24 of january, after several days confined to her bed, Madame Alwine de Vos van Steenwijk passed away peacefully. Her strength that she had given without hesitation or calculation to build our movement finally left her. She was 90 years old.

At the end of the 50s, when Madame de Vos was a diplomat in Paris for her country, the Netherlands, she heard about Fr. Joseph Wresinski and his fight alongside the families in the emergency housing camp of Noisy-Le-Grand. Shocked by the dreadful conditions in which families there were living, she was drawn by the originality of what they were undertaking with Fr. Joseph. She decided to take the dusty dirt track to the camp; she wanted to talk with Fr. Joseph. He suggested that she help sort the myriad things that people dropped off the families in the camp. How could she sort and arrange clothes when so many were torn and left unwashed. When the night fell, Fr. Joseph found Alwine crying and sitting on a chair in the coatroom. "Why are you crying?" "I realize how my own milieu can humiliate people in poverty. They think they are being useful by sending old shoes." "If you want to be useful, help me set up a research institute."

Thus Madame de Vos lay the foundations of the Bureau for Social Research which gave fresh credibility to the Movement’s cause. It is still developing today within the framework of the International Joseph Wresinski Center. Her work marked the start of a skillful and energetic campaign for the world of science to take into account the experiences and thinking of families in deep, chronic poverty. Hundreds of texts of all descriptions bear witness to the determination of Madame de Vos to bring together and share the knowledge acquired and developed day by day so that the world would learn from it and free itself from the grip of extreme poverty and violence.

On January 26, the international colloquium, "Poverty is Violence- Break the Silence- Pathways towards Peace," will conclude with a meeting at UNESCO. This participatory research project begun three years ago brings together different sources of knowledge from a diversity of people. It reminds us that in organizing the International Colloquium on Extreme Poverty in 1964 at UNESCO, Fr. Joseph and Alwine de Vos prepared the ground for the acquisition of knowledge founded on reciprocity among people of different backgrounds.

Later, Fr. Joseph asked Alwine de Vose to become an ambassador for his own people with the ambition of enabling the Fourth World to climb the steps of the United Nations and become a new participant in international public life where the future of the community of humankind is debated developed and shaped. She never left a meeting with a top official without having posed the questions, "What shall I say to families in deep poverty" "What commitments are you prepared to make?"

After Fr. Joseph died, her chief preoccupation became to make his life known. She wrote the first biography of Fr. Joseph and worked on the creation of the two volumes "Ecrits et Paroles du Père Joseph" (Writings and sayings). She devoted all her energy to having the actions and thinking of Wresinski recognized in their own right, become more accessible, and be discussed so as to remain sources of inspiration not only in his own church, but also in political, scientific and cultural spheres. It was the first step toward developing the International Joseph Wresinski Center.

These last years, in the Netherlands, Madame de Vos launched into a marvelous experience of theatrical production with actor and professional director Laurens Umans and with families confronted with the exclusion which leads to the injustice of extreme poverty. Their highly artistic plays of great depth opened and inspired the hearts and minds of many audiences of all cultural, social, spiritual and political horizons throughout the country and Europe as a whole. A few hours before she died, she said to those around her, "Tell the families I love them."