José & Val
A Shared Journey
We first met as children. We grew up in the same small church in Vila Romana, on the west side of São Paulo — a neighborhood shaped by Italian heritage, streets bearing Roman names, and a passionate devotion to Palmeiras football club. It was there that we were baptized, made our public professions of faith, and began serving among young people and through music.
Toward the end of our teenage years, we began to see each other differently. Friendship took on a new shape, and we started imagining a life together.
When José’s father, at great personal sacrifice, was finally able to buy him the flute he had dreamed of since childhood, Val was already nearby. After his lessons at the home of João Dias Carrasqueira, José would often go to see her. She witnessed the birth of Grupo Pescador, the recording of the album Contraste, and the first steps of MILAD.
In January 1985, José’s father passed away. Around that same time, MILAD was preparing for its first public performance in Rio de Janeiro. José did not go. Val stayed by his side.
We were married in December of that year. About ten days after returning from our honeymoon, we boarded the MILAD bus together for a thirty-day journey through Northeast Brazil.
That image says much about the life we were beginning: marriage, grief, music, the road, beauty, community, uncertainty, and vocation were already intertwined.
The Road and Everyday Life
Over more than forty years, we have lived in São Paulo, Costa Rica, the United States, Londrina, João Pessoa, Maringá, Marília, and now the Greater Curitiba area. Other cities and countries have also become places of encounter.
Our family grew along the way. Gabriel was born in 1994, Mariana in 1996, and then Larissa joined us. Later came Stefani and Matheus, our first granddaughter, Eliza, and now, in July 2026, Luiza. Every move to another city and every change in the direction of our ministry was also a family decision, carrying different costs and possibilities for each of us.
For this reason, we do not tell our story as though vocation were something José pursued while Val and the children simply accompanied him. Vocation had to become everyday life: home, meals, school, farewells, shared rooms, hospitality, bills, weariness, and new beginnings.
Many times, Val made inhabitable what José perceived as a direction. While he traveled, taught, connected people, or responded to an emergency, she sustained the continuity of our home and family. At other times, she went with him: on MILAD journeys, in the move to Costa Rica, while exploring the possibility of establishing a base in South Africa, in welcoming refugees, and through our successive moves across Brazil.
This does not mean that we have always perceived or interpreted events in the same way. A shared journey does not erase differences. Part of what we still hope to do through Teleiós is to create space for Val to recover her own memories, questions, and ways of seeing.
The Clothes We Have Worn
José began the journey dressed as a musician. He played flute and saxophone, was part of Grupo Pescador and MILAD, worked professionally as a musician, and joined the original formation of the São Paulo State Jazz Symphony Orchestra.
Other clothes came later: pastor, teacher, mission director, researcher, mobilizer, network-builder, host to refugees, and apprentice in agroecology. Some were worn at the same time. Others seemed to have been put away, only to reappear years later with a new purpose.
Val has also worn many different clothes. She was a MILAD vocalist, a mother in the midst of journeys and transitions, a host, organizer, caregiver, and partner in the decisions and work that emerged along the way. Today she is vice president of Abuna and coordinates its entire hospitality and residential care ministry, involving several houses and teams.
But that title cannot contain the fullness of her participation. Before there was an organization, she was already making room in our family life for people to arrive.
These clothes helped us serve in each season, but we have tried not to confuse them with who we are. Institutions change. Positions come to an end. Projects encounter limits. Yet vocation may continue beneath them, searching for another way to respond.
From the Road to the House — and Back to the Journey
In 2013, encountering Syrian families displaced by war began to transform our lives profoundly.
Church rooms became temporary bedrooms. Our home began receiving people who arrived in Brazil without a support network. Val helped organize meals, bedrooms, bathrooms, and all the practical things that allow hospitality to move beyond intention and become everyday care.
When our children’s bedrooms could no longer accommodate the continuing arrival of guests, we rented another house nearby. That was how our first House of hospitality began — not as the planned expansion of an organization, but as a response to the physical limits of our own home.
This experience grew and received the name Abuna, an affectionate Arabic word for father or spiritual guide. Over time, Abuna developed its own structure, teams, networks, and territories. Today its work brings together the hospitality and resettlement of forcibly displaced people, formation, advocacy, and care for the earth.
But Teleiós and Abuna are not the same thing.
Abuna is one of the concrete forms our vocation has taken. Teleiós is the place where we can return to the experience, listen to it more slowly, and ask what it has done within us.
Here, the focus is not primarily on projects, but on vocation; not only on the House, but on the road that brought us to it — and that continues beyond it.
Who We Are Today
Today, we are a couple who have walked through more than four decades of shared life. We are parents and grandparents. We carry joys, scars, old friendships, new relationships, and many questions that remain open.
José continues writing, teaching, pastoring, connecting people, and learning from those he encounters. Val continues making vocation inhabitable, sharing in the decisions, the care, and the everyday life of Abuna. Together, we continue learning both to welcome and to be welcomed.
We arrived in the Greater Curitiba area not as people who had reached a final destination, but as people recognizing a new season. Relationships that began in our youth have reappeared. New responsibilities have arrived. The Abuna House and the land of Abuna Ambiental are beginning to bring together stories, people, city, and earth.
Teleiós is our notebook for this journey.
Here, we want to share stories not because our lives offer a model to be copied, but because perhaps the questions, encounters, missed encounters, and returns that have transformed us may offer companionship to others.
We are still on the road.
The Road That Brought Us Here →