Inma Cuesta. Smc
Sister Laura Díaz chose an unusual word when describing what intercultural community actually requires. She didn’t reach for the standard vocabulary—tolerance, respect, acceptance. Instead, she used a verb that comes from the earth, from agriculture: “It’s not only about living in harmony but about growing through the encounter with the other, and with the richness that the other IS for me and that I am for her, and learning from our differences and cultivating them.”
Cultivating. When you cultivate something, you don’t just leave it alone or tolerate its existence. You work the soil around it. You water it. You protect it. You create conditions for it to flourish. You invest time, attention, energy into helping it become what it’s meant to be.
Sister Laura lives this reality daily in Ethiopia, in one of those international communities that the Comboni charism has always imagined: sisters from different continents, different languages, different ways of seeing the world, attempting to live and mission together. “We live in a fragmented world with so many conflicts,” she observes, “and we live together in international communities where we try to be witnesses of the Gospel in our daily life.”
But here’s where Sister Laura goes deeper than the usual discourse. She makes a distinction that’s easy to miss but crucial: “It’s not only about living in harmony.” Wait—isn’t harmony the goal? She’s saying no, that’s not enough. Because you can live in harmony through distance, through staying politely on separate sides, through avoiding anything difficult. You can have harmony the way roommates have harmony—shared space, minimal conflict, but no real encounter, no transformation, no growth.
What Sister Laura proposes is more demanding and more fruitful: “growing through the encounter with the other.” Not just coexisting. Not just respecting the other’s space. But actually growing—being changed, expanded, deepened—through the encounter itself. This implies you’re not complete as you are. That the other has something you need. That the encounter isn’t optional or supplementary to your growth but essential to it.
And then she says something that deserves emphasis: “the richness that the other IS for me.” Not “has.” IS. This is fundamental. The other person, in her very difference, in her cultural alterity, in the ways she sees and does things that are foreign to you, IS richness. Her being itself, not just what she possesses or teaches, but her very existence as other than you, is wealth.
This challenges how we typically frame intercultural relationships. We tend to think: this person has interesting customs, has valuable perspectives, has skills I can learn. All of which frames difference as something the other possesses—attributes that might benefit me if I’m open.
But Sister Laura is saying something more radical: the other person, simply by being different from me, simply by forcing me to encounter a way of being human that isn’t mine, enriches me. The difference itself is the gift. Not what lies behind it or what can be extracted from it, but the difference as such.
“And learning from our differences and cultivating them.” This is where the agricultural metaphor really works. Because when you cultivate something, you’re not trying to make it the same as everything else in the garden. You’re helping each plant become most fully itself. A good gardener doesn’t try to turn tomatoes into peppers. She creates conditions where each can flourish according to its own nature.
Applied to intercultural community, this means the goal isn’t homogenization. It’s not about everyone eventually thinking the same way or acting the same way. It’s about creating conditions where each person’s cultural way of being can flourish, where differences can be themselves more fully, where the Italian can become more deeply Italian and the Ethiopian more deeply Ethiopian, not in isolation but in relationship, each becoming more herself precisely through encounter with the radical otherness of the other.
This is hard work. Cultivation requires patience, skill, attention, and plenty of failure. Plants die. Seasons disappoint. The work is never finished. But the metaphor also suggests something hopeful: that with the right conditions and enough care, growth happens. Not instantly, not through a single intervention, but gradually, organically, through the mysterious process by which living things develop when tended well.
“More than ever today in the world, this dimension of interculturality is necessary,” Sister Laura insists. In a world of walls and borders, of nationalism and tribalism, of algorithms that show us only people who think like us, the witness of people choosing to live together across profound differences, not just tolerating but actively cultivating those differences, is desperately needed.
Sister Laura, young and in mission in Ethiopia, has discovered something essential: that the richness that the other IS for me can only be accessed if I’m willing to do the slow, patient work of cultivation. Not the quick fix of tolerance. Not the comfortable distance of respect. But the daily, demanding, fruitful labor of helping differences flourish, of learning from them, of being changed by them, of growing into something neither of us could become alone.
Listen to Sister Laura share her experience on Instagram @comboniane