Society

An “Italyana” Abroad

On the evening of September 6th, in Rome, Rosetta Brambilla received a prize awarded by the Ministry for Italians in the World, for her work in the Brazilian favelas: 35 years spent building kindergartens, dispensaries, training and hygiene courses, and a center for abandoned children

BY RICCARDO PIOL

Along with Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Lord Charles Forte, the owner of the British hotel chain, the name of Rosetta Brambilla appears among the ten “illustrious emigrants” awarded the “Italyani” Prize, promoted by the Ministry for Italians in the World and presented very ceremoniously on September 6th in the theatrical setting of the Vittoriano in Rome. Applauding these ten “Italyani” were well-known television personalities like Pippo Baudo and Maria Grazia Cucinotta, the highest government officials, many ordinary people, and the RAI International film crews, ready to transmit the awards ceremony to the more than 1,600,000 Italian emigrants all over the world. This initiative was “created,” as its promoter, Minister Tremaglia, explained, “to value the Italians abroad who bring honor to our country by their achievements appreciated not only in Italy but throughout the world.”

Rudolph Giuliani can boast of having been the mayor of New York and is appreciated the world over for the great sense of responsibility he showed in leading the city after the events of September 11th; Charles Forte has built a hotel empire. And Rosetta Brambilla? In over twenty years of life in the favelas of Brazil, her presence has meant help and hope for thousands, especially mothers and children who in these twenty years have passed through the kindergartens that were born out of the creativity and passion for people of this woman from Brianza, Italy, who by now is not very Italian and is very Brazilian.

Born in 1943 in Bernareggio, in the Brianza area of Lombardy, Rosetta began working at an early age in a ceramics factory. She encountered Fr Giussani and the nascent Communion and Liberation and began going into the Bassa Milanese area with many others who in the early years of the Movement did charitable work among the poor families in the southern part of Milan.

Then, in 1967, she made her life choice: she set out for Brazil. She lived in São Paulo for three years, serving the poor families and the “favelados,” those who live in favellas. From 1975 to 1976, she was in Amazonia, where she worked as a nurse and lost the functioning of two fingers of her left hand in a work-related accident. In 1978, she moved to Belo Horizonte. Since then, she has lived in the 1° de Maio favela, and her presence has given rise to kindergartens that today serve hundreds of children. Although many of them and their mothers do not know that Rosetta is Italian–her sister says that “by now she is so Brazilian in her head and heart that when she comes to Italy she cannot wait to get back to Brazil”–they do know that she loves them with all her heart, and that she looks at them as no one has ever looked at them before. They know that Rosetta is like this because she has encountered Christ; they know that she treats them like this because she has been treated like this and because she has a group of friends around her.

Indeed, ever since the moment she touched Brazilian soil, Rosetta has never tired of meeting and helping all the people she has met along her path. It has been a toilsome journey, passing through the years of liberation theology, the crises that have struck Brazil, and the poverty that seems never to stop growing. Hers is a path studded with works, including pastoral work in the favelas in the early 1980s, which brought together the communities engaged in the promotion of the rights of the inhabitants of the favelas, and with the first pro-favelas law, later imitated all over Brazil, by virtue of which the favelado is recognized a citizen and cannot be expelled. The myriad of initiatives over the years have also included schools, dispensaries, training and hygiene courses, all the way to now, when, together with AVSI, Rosetta has opened three kindergartens, an after-school program, and a center for abandoned children. Today, the friends with whom she works–what in technical terms would be called her “team”–number 73. They are mostly Brazilians, with some Italians, working with the more than 800 children who noisily fill the kindergartens of Belo Horizonte. She repeats one iron rule to her team: “You must look at each of these children as though he were the only one in the world.” And the children, if they only could, would give Rosetta and her friends a prize every time they meet in the rooms or the courtyard of the school. They would give everything for this woman who on that recent Roman evening of honor was a bit ill at ease among all those famous people. They would give everything. Every time they see her, they hug her and smile at her because that is all they have to give, and it is also the sign of all that Rosetta wants for them.