Fr Berton, Ana Lydia, Elio, Giulia… Men and women, religious and lay people who commit their lives in the most dramatically remote countries of the earth. Their stories emerged in the cycle of meetings “Above the G8: Works put to the test,” in collaboration with AVSI

BY GIAMPAOLO CERRI

G8 and anti-G8; global and non-global: at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, the talk was of poverty and development, of the south and cooperation, through the stories of men and women, religious and lay people who commit themselves every day of their lives in the most dramatically remote corners of the world. This was the series “Above the G8: Works put to the test,” realized in collaboration with AVSI.

“Up until now we have talked about the Third World; now, instead, we must listen to the Third World,” said the President of the Company of Works, Giorgio Vittadini, talking with journalists at the beginning of the event. “The anti-global movement,” he explained, “is a European movement. Here we shall listen to the poor, the children of the favelas of Bahia, those who are battling AIDS in Uganda and Kenya, and the youth of Kazakhstan who are looking for work. Then we shall have more ideas; both we and the anti-globalization movement.”

Sierra Leone
The story of Fr Giuseppe Berton, a Xaverian missionary from Marostica (in the province of Vicenza) is not new for many of those hearing it. But one never tires of listening to someone who, for thirty years, has been spending his life for the people of Sierra Leone, a portion of Africa where since 1991 guns have done the talking and children have been turned into ferocious soldiers. Violence within violence, horror within horror, in the face of which Fr Berton has never resigned himself, even going so far as to contact the military leaders personally. “Luckily, I have gray hair,” he told the people of the Meeting, “and in that part of the world, there is respect for the elderly.” Fr Berton was joking, but he has risked his life on more than one occasion. He reminded his listeners that the crucial last word on this and the other tragedies of the world is forgiveness. “I was struck by hearing it said by a woman,” he recalled, “who one morning saw moving about on the street, ably recycled into the winning faction, the man who had exterminated her husband, children, and relatives.” And furthermore, he explained, everything that one can do in those places, one does because of a greater forgiveness which has already happened. “Without faith, I would have said thousands of times, ‘Why in the world am I doing this?’”

Brazil
Then the compass of the Meeting moved toward South America. There is Brazil, whose enormous imbalances were listed by AVSI leader Enrico Novara: a huge country rich in everything, the eighth economic power in the world, “but where the income of the richest 20% is thirty-five times the average income of the poorest 20%.” It is a country where 32 out of 100 citizens live below the poverty level. “We are present in São Paulo, Rio, Belo Horizonte, Salvador Bahia, Brasilia, Manaus,” he said. “There are more than fifteen kindergartens and schools for children from 0 to 14 years of age. This year more than 2,000 people enrolled in our vocational training courses.” AVSI is working to clean up the favelas in Belo Horizonte and in Rio, while in Salvador Bahia, a grandiose project (sustained by the Italian government and the World Bank) aims toward giving dignified and healthy living conditions to 100,000 people, of whom 8,000 live in houses on stilts. “More than the numbers, we are interested in remaining faithful to the idea of relationship with the person, of acting together with the person.”

Ana Lydia Sawaya works at the Nutrition Education Center at the University of São Paulo: “Malnutrition is the ‘marker,’ the sign of the worst poverty.” Thirty years ago, barely 87,000 São Paulans lived in the favela; today they number 2 million. She, a Brazilian who has encountered the charism of an Italian priest brought up in the area of Catholic Brianza, tells about her relationship with globalization. “Something Fr Giussani told us came to my mind,” she recounted, “which is that in the things he does, man always starts with a desire for goodness, truth, and justice. This was surely the case for globalization; probably here it was a desire for communication.” Later on, Ana Lydia explained, “someone realized that there was a chance to exploit this process.” Most Rev Diarmuid Martin, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in Geneva, told how globalization should be viewed on the basis of the principles of the Social Doctrine: “Respect for the dignity of each person, awareness that God created humanity as a family, and the harmony of all creation. There cannot be true progress without a combination of all three.” This is a lesson for certain theoreticians of the saving virtues of the market and the healing powers of the World Trade Organization.

Uganda
We return now to Africa to learn what it means “to give one’s life for the working of an Other.” Piero Corti recounted the story of a life spent saving “poor souls” from every sort of illness, working in the midst of war, daily risking his life. His wife Lucille really did lose her life, infected by the HIV virus during an operation. Their St Mary’s Hospital in Lacor became a fortress against the new epidemic. And not only that: in the fall of the year 2000, in the district of northern Uganda where the structure is located, along came the lethal Ebola virus.

The battle against this new emergency was recounted by Elio Croce, a Comboni Brother born in the mountains, one of the health workers left in the hospital in the midst of seemingly unstoppable death. He never gave up, even though fourteen health workers at St Mary’s died. “During 2000, more than 17,000 patients were hospitalized, more than 170,000 were treated in the outpatient clinic, more than 2,500 major surgeries were performed, and 84,000 vaccinations administered,” he stated with pride. But even more than the statistics, what struck the audience was the list of those, lay and religious, who decided to stay there. Brother Elio remembered them all. Marina, head of the nursing staff, when her tour of duty at Lacor was over, decided to stay, as did Sr Miriam, from the Valtellina Mountains in Italy, who was in charge of the laundry; Sr Dorina, a doctor from Varese, Italy, who came from her mission as soon as she heard about the epidemic; Sr Giovanna and Sr Fausta–all remained. These are stories of faith, stories of love for the human, even when horribly plagued by death and suffering.

Kenya
The same faith suggested an operative aid to the local populations only several hundred miles away. This is the story of the St Kizito Institute in Nairobi, where Kenyan youth are taught how to work. In a country where half the population is below the poverty level and where increasing numbers of young people do not even reach the minimum level of schooling (the illiteracy rate is 30%), training someone means planting seeds for development, building the foundations for breaking the siege of poverty. Henry Kamande and Paolo Sanna, director and teacher respectively, effect this revolution every day. Their students come from the poorest neighborhoods of the capital. “We do not concentrate only on technical knowledge,” they explain, “but on the person as such. The students have to begin with a certainty of love and freedom every day.” Others have started, with this same spirit, to build works. Two of them are Stefano Montaccini and Michele Montagna. The former is the AVSI Representative for Kenya; he decided to get the latter, his friend in the Fraternity of Pesaro, involved too. Together, they set up a furniture factory adjacent to the training school. “Here we make the furniture typical of Bassano, Italy–what do you want to do in Kenya?,” Michele joked. “Rustic furniture made of solid wood. It is amazing to see 80 persons poring over the work plans, sawing their pieces, assembling them, sanding, finishing.” Amazing, because it is not easy to teach people to work in the heart of darkest Africa. At times, it can be a shortcut to work “in their place.” Stefano explains, “Working with the person helps us to avoid starting out from plans made at the drawing board, instead of from real needs;, and calls his freedom and yours powerfully into play.”

Kazakhstan
Solidarity and work interweave also in the midst of the steppes of Kazakhstan. The challenge here is that the very idea of work has been uprooted by 70 years of Communism. Now that the country has awakened from its long lethargy, it is difficult to get going again, hampered by unscrupulous businessmen, difficult working conditions, grueling work schedules. Between Alma Ata and Karaganda, a group of Catholic priests has become the hub of that kind of friendship that draws its inspiration from the charism of Fr Giussani. Fr Eugenio Nembrini tells of amazed people who ask to be baptized, embrace Christianity, and set to work. They have begun by setting up, there on the steppes, a bicycle pump factory that had closed down in Italy, and a travel agency to provide support services for the Italian businessmen whom the Company of Works–against every reasonable hope–are bringing there.

Julia Sysueva and Xon Liubov tell about the birth of the Church and the simultaneous rise, through those same people, of a new way of approaching work and of working; it is not a curse, but a means of self-expression. “The encounter with Christianity is the encounter with a concrete person,” they explain. “Since work is what occupies most of our time, the greater part of our lives, the first thing that has changed is the way we look at work. We have begun to understand that you can create a place of freedom within a system that is not free.”

The Balkans
But there is no need to think about the great Asian expanses in order to imagine this reconstruction of the human in which men and women are engaged. Since 1995, for example, AVSI volunteers have been present in the Balkans. As Giampaolo Silvestri recounts, already some hundred people have worked between Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia, helping more than 50,000 people, rebuilding 400 houses and 3 schools. “We have always tried to act in accordance with a criterion of subsidiarity,” he explained. “That is, our actions are aimed at helping to create and develop local, non-profit associations, persons who come together, and even realities in the Church that begin to respond to needs.” Another connecting thread has been support to the Church. “In this region, where often the ethnic group corresponds also with religious affiliation,” Silvestri said, “we are helping the Muslim widows of Kosovo through the Catholic Church. In the European school in Sarajevo, the majority of students are not Catholics. And then there is aid to the Orthodox families in Serbia and the education of children of all ethnic groups and religions in Albania.”

Most Rev Franjo Komarica, Bishop of Banja Luka, testified to how difficult peace is to achieve. More than five years after the Dayton agreements, almost half the Catholics of Bosnia-Herzegovina are living far away from their land. “In my diocese, two-thirds of the Catholics are still missing. Of the 70,000 who were driven away or fled, only 1,488 people have been able to return,” the prelate stated. “For international and local politics, this is a truly negative result.”

Peru
The Church as a factor in the reconstruction of the human was the focus of the session on Peru. Here, in the new diocese of Carabayllo, in the northern part of the capital Lima, Lino Panizza, an Italian Capuchin friar who has been in Peru for thirty years, met Andrea Aziani and Dado Peluso, also Italians, who have opened a house of Memores Domini there. Since his nomination as Bishop for two million souls, of whom 600,000 are between the ages of 14 and 25, Most Rev Panizza feels the problem of the education of youth to be a priority, “because, of these young people, fewer than 1% will make it to the university and only 5 out of 100 go to high school,” he says. With his Italian-Peruvian CL friends, Panizza began talking of a university for the youth of Carabayllo. AVSI got involved. Since February 2000, the presence of the Church and of human development–possible in the midst of neighborhoods that have grown up topsy-turvy in the last fifty years–is this university which opens its doors every day to 1,400 students. They called it “Sedes Sapientiae” [“Seat of Knowledge”]. “We have two schools,” Most Rev Panizza explained, “the School of Education, presided over by Dr Giancorrado Peluso, and the School of Economics, presided over by Dr Clara Caselli.” Caselli is in Lima thanks to an agreement with the University of Genoa, where she teaches; she spends eight months a year in Peru and four in Genoa. “Our hope is to start two new degree programs,” said the Bishop, “one to prepare politicians who will be able to remain true to what they believe, and the other to create information professionals whose main principle will also be to remain faithful to the truth.”

Thus, centuries after the birth of the first universities, this Bishop and his friends are building a place that is true to the very etymology of the word “university”: unum-vertere, or, “bring back to unity,” to One, all the reality that passion causes to be investigated.