The Witness of a Voluntary Worker Who has Worked for a Long Time in Somalia Serving those Most in Need

My name is Analena Tonelli. I was born in Forlì in Italy on 2 April 1943 . I have worked in health care for thirty years but I am not a medical doctor. I graduated in law in Italy . I have a qualification to teach English in Kenyan high schools. I have certificates and diplomas in the control of tuberculosis from Kenya ; in tropical and community medicine from England ; and in the care and treatment of leprosy from Spain . I left Italy in January 1969. Since then I have lived serving Somalis. These have been thirty years of sharing. In fact, I have always lived with them, apart from small interruptions spent in other countries which I could not avoid. I decided to be for other people – the poor, the suffering, the abandoned, the unloved – when I was a little girl and this is what I have been and will continue to be until the end of my life. I wanted to follow only Jesus Christ. Nothing else interested me so strongly: he and the poor in him. For him, I chose radical poverty, even though poor like a real a poor person, the poor of which my days are full, I could never be. I live at the service of others without a name, without the security of a religious order, without belonging to any organisation, without pension payments being paid on my behalf for when I am old. I did not marry because this is what I chose with joy to do when I was young. I wanted all of myself to be for God. I have friends who have helped me and my people for thirty years. Everything that I have done I have been able to do thanks to them, above all to my friends of the Committee for the Fight against Hunger in the World based in Forlì. Naturally, I have other friends in other parts of the world. It could not be otherwise. The needs are great. I thank God for having given them to me and for continuing to give them to me. We are one thing in two breaches that are different in appearance but the same in substance – we are fighting to ensure that the poor can be raised from the dust and freed, we are fighting so that all men can be one. I left Italy after six years of service to the poor in one of the slums of my city of birth, the children of the local foundling hospital, the mentally handicapped children and the victims of major traumas of a family home, and the poor of the third world, thanks to the activity of the Committee for the Fight Against Hunger in the World, which I had helped to establish.

I thought that I could not give of myself totally if I stayed in my own country: the boundaries of my action seemed to me so tight, so suffocating. I soon understood that one can serve and love everywhere, but by now I was in Africa and I felt that God had brought me there and there I stayed with joy and gratitude. I left committed to ‘crying out the Gospel with my life’, following on from Charles de Foucauld, who had ignited my existence. Thirty years later I cry out the Gospel with my life alone and burn with the desire to continue to cry it out until the end. This is my basic motivation, together with an unconquerable passion, which I have always had, for those who are wounded and reduced without deserving such a fate, beyond considerations of race, culture and faith. I try to live with extreme respect for ‘those’ that the Lord has given me. Where possible I have adopted their style of life. I live a very modest life in my housing, my food, my means of transport, and my clothes. I spontaneously abandoned Western habits. I have looked for dialogue with other people. I have given care, love, loyalty and passion. I hope the Lord will forgive me if the words I have spoken are on too great a scale.

I have almost always lived with the Somalis, first with the Somalis of the North-West of Kenya, and then with the Somalis of Somalia. I live in a world that is rigidly Muslim. The only friars and sisters who have been present in Somalia , who were there from the times of Mussolini until the civil war which broke out eleven years ago, were accepted exclusively to provide religious assistance to Italians. I lived for fifteen years in Borama in the extreme North-West of the country on the border with Ethiopia and Djibouti . There, there was no Christian with whom to share my time. Two times a year, roundabout Christmas and roundabout Easter, the bishops of Djibouti came to say Mass for me and with me. I live alone because the companions of my journey, who together with the poor made my life heaven on earth during my seventeen years in the desert, left me after I was forced to leave Kenya . That was in 1984. The government of Kenya tried to commit genocide against a tribe of nomads who lived in the desert. They wanted to exterminate fifty thousand people; they managed to kill a thousand. I managed to prevent the massacre from being carried to its completion. For this reason, I was deported a year later. I kept quiet about the young ones that I had left at home and who would have been punished if I had spoken out. However, the Somalis spoke with one voice and struggled to ensure that light was thrown on the truth about this genocide. Sixteen years have gone by and the government of Kenya has publicly admitted its responsibility, has asked for forgiveness, and has promised compensation for the families of the victims. The newspapers and the BBC spoke at length about my role. And today Somalis who felt rancour towards me now accept me and have become my friends. Today they know that I was ready to give my life for them, that I risked my life for them. At the time of the massacre I was arrested and brought before a military court. The authorities, all of them non-Somalis, all Christians, told me that they had arranged two ambushes which I providentially avoided, but that I would not have escaped another. Then one of them, a Christian, asked me what had led me to behave in that way. I replied that I did it for Jesus Christ who asks us to give our lives for our friends. On more than one occasion during the course of my long life I have seen that there is no evil which does not see the light of day. What matters is to go on fighting as though truth was already upheld and wrongdoing was not able to touch us and evil was not triumphing. One day good will shine forth. We ask God to give us the strength to wait, because we may be dealing with a long wait – even until our deaths. I live waiting for God and I understand that waiting for the things of men weighs on me less than on other people.

I live deeply immersed amongst the poor, the sick, and those who nobody loves. I am largely concerned with the control and treatment of tuberculosis. I went to Kenya as a teacher because that was the only work that, at the beginning of such a new and strong experience, I could do without causing anyone any harm. Those were times of intense preparation of lessons in nearly all subjects, because there was a lack of teachers, of studying the local language, culture and traditions, and of intense involvement in teaching out of the belief that learning is a force for liberation and growth. The students, many of whom were of my age or a little younger than me, had gone to the headmaster when they learnt that a female teacher was about to arrive and assured her that they would have prevented me from entering the classroom, turned out to be very committed and motivated. The results were so good that various students of that time now fill splendid positions in the various Ministries of the government, in private activity in the country, and often the news comes to me that all the students of the North-East of those times say that they were my students and that I was their teacher – something, of course, that is true.

I remember that almost immediately after my arrival I fell in love with a child who was ill with sickle cell and hunger - those were times of a terrible famine. I saw many people die of hunger. During my life I witnessed another famine, ten months of hunger, in Marca, in the South of Somalia, and I can say that those experiences were so traumatising that they threatened my faith. I brought fourteen children who were dying from hunger to come and live with me. I immediately gave my blood to that child and begged my students to do the same: one of them donated some and then many others followed suit, thereby overcoming the resistance of the prejudices and closures of a world that in my eyes at that time seemed to ignore any form of solidarity and pity. And this was perhaps my first experience of the fact that in a Muslim context as well love generates love. But my first love were those who suffered from tuberculosis, the people who were the most abandoned, the most rejected, the most turned away of that world. Tuberculosis was widespread in Somalia for centuries. It is thought that almost the whole of the population was infected. Providentially, only a few of the people who are infected develop the illness during their lives. I was in Wajir, a desolate village in the heart of the desert of the North-East of Kenya , when I met the first people suffering from tuberculosis and I fell in love with them and this was a love that has lasted my whole life. Those with tuberculosis were in a ward for hopeless cases. What most broke one’s heart was that they were abandoned, and that their suffering was accompanied by no kind of comfort. I did not know anything about medicine. I began to bring them the rain water that I had gathered from the roof of the fine house that the government had given me as a teacher in a secondary school. I went with canisters full, emptied them of the very salty water from the wells of Wajir, and filled them with fresh water. I was given sorts of orders by people who were apparently disturbed by the clumsiness of a young white woman whom they wanted to get rid of as soon as possible. Everything was against me. I was young and thus not worthy of being listened to or worthy of respect. I was white and therefore despised by that race which thought itself superior to everyone else: whites, blacks, yellows, or the members of any other nationality. I was a Christian and therefore despised, rejected, and feared. Everybody at that time was convinced that I had gone to Wajir to proselytise. And I was not married, something that was absurd in that world where celibacy does not exist and is not a value for anybody; indeed, it is to a certain extent an anti-value. Thirty years later, because of the fact that I am not married, I am still looked at with compassion and contempt throughout the Somali world by those who do not know me well. Only those who know me well say and say tirelessly that I am a Somali in the same way that they are and that I am an authentic mother of all the people I have saved, healed, and helped, thereby ignoring the reality that I am not a natural mother and never will be. I immediately began to study and to observe, and every day I passed with them, I served them on my knees. I was beside them when they turned round and did not have anybody to take care of them, anybody who could look them in the eyes, anybody who gave them strength.

After a few years, in the TB Manyatta (village) each sick person who knew that they were about to die wanted only me next to them so that they could die feeling that they were loved. I began to supervise the patients’ treatment after they were discharged from the hospital. The fact became known about. Treatment carried on and completed in the desert did not exist. They were all defaulters – at the rate of 100%. In 1976 I was asked to become the head of a project of the WHO to deal with tuberculosis in the nomad population, a pilot project for the whole of Africa . I was asked to invent a system to ensure that the sick people received the anti-tuberculosis treatment every day for a period of six months. In fact, for the first time in Africa short-term treatment was given to an open number of sick people, treatment that allowed a cure for a period of six months, where up to that time a period of eighteen months of medicines taken every day had been necessary. That was in September 1976. I decided to invite the nomads to come to a piece of the desert in front of the Rehabilitation Centre for the Disabled where I worked with my companions who over the years had come to work with me, all of whom were women and voluntary workers, and all of whom worked for the poor and for Jesus Christ. Together with them I had created a centre where they helped in the rehabilitation of polio victims of the desert of the north-east for a period of ten years. We were a family. Together with the polio victims, we took in especially pitiful people to treat and rehabilitate, in particular blind, deaf, physically and mentally handicapped people: the children grew up with us full-time mothers and I am still for them today a constant point of reference. Meanwhile the nomads began to come with their tents tied down on the backs of their camels.. They took down the canvasses, the bent frames and the ropes and built a tent. For six months the taking of medicines was closely supervised each day. A diagnosis was carried out solely with the examination of sputum through a microscope. The administration of the medicines was absolutely regular – something that was almost a miracle for Africa . At the end of six months the camels arrived and the whole caravan and the cured person returned to the desert. This policy, called by the WHO ‘the directly observed therapy short chemotherapy’ has since become the world policy of the WHO for the control of tuberculosis in the world and is applied in many countries of Africa, Asia, America and Europe, as one of the best instruments by which to guarantee the compliance of the sick person with the treatment, without which there would not be authentic recovery and the curse of tuberculosis would continue to expand throughout the world and increasingly in the most tragic form – that of resistance to anti-tuberculosis medicines.

TB Mamyatta was a great adventure of love, a gift of God. It was thanks to TB Manyatta, and only in part thanks to the Rehabilitation Centre, that the handicapped count less than those suffering from tuberculosis in my world, that people began to say that perhaps we, too, will go to heaven. For five years they had thrown in our faces that we would never have gone to heaven because we did not say ‘there is no God other than God and Mohammed is his prophet’. Then a very serious event occurred which put our lives in danger and then people began to say that we would certainly also go to heaven. Then we began to be taken as an example. The first to do so was an elderly chief who cared a great deal for us. “We Muslims have faith”, he said one day, “and you have love”. It was like a great thaw. People increasingly said that they ought to behave as we did, that they ought to learn from us to care for other people, and in particular for the most sick, the most abandoned. Seventeen years later, immediately after the massacre of Wagalla, an elderly Arab stopped me in the middle of one of the main streets of that poor village. He was greatly moved because his friends were amongst the dead, because he had seen me being beaten while I was burying the dead, because he had been afraid and had done nothing to save his people whereas I had dared to and had risked my life for people who had become my people. He cried out, because he wanted to be heard by everyone: “In the name of Allah, I say to you that that if we follow in your footsteps we will go to heaven”.

In Borama, where I now live, the people constantly pray for my conversion to Islam. In other places as well that I have been the people at a certain point have begun to pray for my conversion to Islam. They spoke about it often to me with sensitivity. Always adding that anyway God knows and that I will go to heaven even though I remain a Christian. They do not want me to feel offended. And then they try to make me feel ‘assimilated’ by them, and very near to them. They tell about every ‘hadith’ in which the Prophet Mohammed, following in the footsteps of Issa – Jesus – ate with lepers from the same dish, had compassion for poor people, and showed love towards the least. I returned to Italy for a month last June. I had been away for many years. For my people down there in Somalia it was a great event. Many feared that somebody or something would have stopped me from coming back. They felt great joy on seeing me again. And the most loved sheik, a sheik who has been and still is the teacher of the Koran for all the other sheiks of the area, immediately came to my office and told me that while I was in Rome – for them it is almost as though there is only Rome in Italy – they were happy and shared my pilgrimage in their thoughts and prayer because this was an authentic pilgrimage. Sheik Abdirahman, rightly proud of his knowledge, repeated to me that they knew that some of the disciples of Issa – Jesus –, their great prophet, are buried in Rome . To visit the places of martyrdom is one of the pilgrimages that every Muslim wants to carry out during his or her life. And thus it was that they felt that it was they who had sent me on this pilgrimage and they waited for me to tell me about it and share it with them. In a very broad sense this is what dialogue with the other religions amounts to. It is sharing. There is almost no need for words. Dialogue is life lived better; at least I live out dialogue in this way – without words.

I was saying that tuberculosis is a scourge of the Somali world. Just think that in Borama, a centre which has fifty thousand inhabitants, we have diagnosed and treated one thousand five hundred people suffering from this illness each year, almost all of whom had positive sputum, above all during the early years. We now have the problem of AIDS. For three years now we have been seeing people with TB and AIDS, but the problem is spreading. We got down to eight hundred cases last year but the presence of HIV is rapidly on the increase. In a country like Somalia , in which tuberculosis is endemic, tuberculosis is the first opportunistic illness developed by people suffering from AIDS. We are working very intensely to ensure that the population becomes aware of the problem and fights both internally and externally to make sure that patterns of behaviour change and that the spread of AIDS is checked. I began five years ago with thirty beds and an increasing number of huts for the seriously ill who could not obtain a bed in a ward, until I had more than two hundred. Today I have two hundred beds, eight wards built by UNHCR for our people, a laboratory built by UNDP and almost one hundred huts for those sick people who cannot find a place in their own village – some come from far away, from Ethiopia, from Djibouti, from other parts of the country; others are rejected by their families because of the stigma attached to the illness. Tuberculosis is a part of the people, it forms part of their history, and part of their struggle for existence. And yet tuberculosis is a stigma and a curse, the sign of a punishment sent by God because of a sin that has been committed, whether openly or in a hidden way. Every day the struggle to free people from ignorance is continued in Borama – from stigma, from the slavery of prejudice. Still today we witness people who choose not to be diagnosed, treated and cured, and thus choose to die so as not to admit in public that they are afflicted by tuberculosis. This fight is carried forward by our staff primarily at a personal level. With the DOTS system we see all the patients every day, every day we speak to them, every day we deal with their small and large problems. Every day we discuss with them what keeps them slaves, unhappy, and in the dark. And they become free, happy, and they are increasingly in the light. In the TB Centre we have opened schools for the patients and their friends – a school to study the Koran, a school to teach literacy, and a school to teach English. I have been involved in schools for thirty years – I organise them, I build them, and if necessary I finance them. A creature able to live in God is certainly an event of grace. There remains, however, the reality that with education man flowers more easily in a creature who is capable of living in God, his creator and provider of every good. Sick people come to us as wounded, suffering, frightened, beaten and unhappy beings. After the first weeks of care and treatment, as soon as they feel better, they want to flee and go back to the bush, to their camels, to their goats, to their fields of millet. In the ‘school’ of talks with the staff that take place every day, in the schools to teach literacy, the Koran, and English, they gain in trust, understand the reasons why they have to finish their treatment and take their drugs and medicines under supervision, they no longer suffer, they are no longer afraid – it is possible to recover from TB and become strong, stronger than their family relatives, their friends and acquaintances. Once they have been cured, TB does not spread to their children, to their wives. Before they did not know how to read and write, they knew almost nothing about their religion, now they know, they know it in translation, they learn to understand and to appreciate the universal values of good, the truth, and peace, of giving oneself to God: ‘Allah has given, Allah has taken away, blessed be the name of Allah’. They learn to face up to physical suffering and death, and not to fear them, not to reject them, to accept them. Allah exists! Allah knows, meets, guides. We speak about this together every day, we console each other, we find strength and trust in this awareness that is acquired and reacquired and won every day. And their lives change. And our lives change into an increasingly deep awareness, into an ability to live in the presence of God that is increasingly authentic.

After six months there are patients who ask to be admitted in order to go on attending the Centre so as to complete a school course, their study of the Koran, and all of them feel that they are teachers and with pride show the others their achievements, their progress, and their growth in human dignity. In the meantime I share my life, I deal with all the aspects of their care and treatment. Every day I study medical works in order to learn how to cure them, in order to keep up to date. I look for male and female nurses and search for funds because I do not have access to the funds for the NGOs given that I am a person on my own without an organisation. I serve the sick people on my knees. I give many hours of lessons to the nursing staff to make them more sensitive, more attentive, more capable of care, and more capable in a professional sense. And it is thanks to this sensitive, attentive, caring staff that at the TB Centre we also have a clinic for epileptics and for people who are mentally disturbed. They bring them to us in chains, dirty with their excrement, often shouting. After a few days of treatment and care we free them from their chains; they begin to wash and gradually they come to take their drugs and medicines without the people who accompany them. Slowly, they flower into normal people. And it is thanks to two obstetric nurses on my staff and two sheiks – the most loved and respected who work closely with us – that we are engaging in a campaign in the region to eradicate the mutilation of the female genitals and infibulation which in our world are practiced at the level of 100%. And it is also thanks to our staff that we have an eye camp twice a year. A team of eye specialists, friends of many years standing, come to the Centre. Over a period of four days they operate on an average of three hundred and thirty blind people, who suffer for the most part from cataracts, using an intra-ocular lens. During the last camp, which was held in August, they surpassed themselves. They restored sight to four hundred and fifty blind people. The people are infinitely grateful for this service. We fill Borama with flags: ‘I was blind and now I can see’ – our John the Evangelist, but they do not know this.

But let us turn to the school for deaf children. Four years ago, the first Kenyota Somali who had been deaf from birth, whom I had brought to school to receive a special education for deaf people in Kenya when he was four years old, and was now a man, came to visit me in Borama after an event-filled journey of almost a month’s duration through Kenya and Ethiopia. He was suffering from love sickness and had felt the need to speak to me because in a certain sense I had been his mother and had helped him to become engaged. He immediately decided to stay and together we set up a school for deaf children. A school for deaf children had never been opened, nor one for blind children or mentally handicapped children. University professors did not believe that it was possible to educate a deaf child until they saw our school. Nobody thought it was possible. Today, everybody knows that a deaf child can do everything except hear, that he can feel everything, and that he can understand everything. It is certainly the case that one is dealing here with a long journey but perhaps we can now already see a light which is a little less pale. In the distance there is a light which is so bright that it can make your heart explode with joy and gratitude looking forward to a day that is not so far off, a new earth and a new heaven. In our school we began with three deaf children, then five, then eight, then twelve, and today we have fifty-two. We began to teach in a room in a small house that I rent in Borama, and then we built another room in the courtyard of that small house. In the meantime, some physically handicapped children, the victims of polio and wars, came to beg us to take them into our school because they were afraid about attending schools for normal children. Our world is a hard one – the world of the strong. There is no space for the weak. We decided to take them in, we told them that when they had gained confidence in themselves, the fact that they knew like the others and knew better than the others would have inevitably given them the strength to rise up and to feel like the others, and that we would have then paid for them to attend normal schools. We employed an excellent teacher for them. In the meantime, the first TB children had been cured and discharged, and after learning how to flourish in the schools of the TB Centre they wanted to go on learning. However, many of them did not have the money to pay for the school fees. And thus it was that we decided to place them in the classroom together with the handicapped children. In the meantime, people spoke increasingly about us, about the miracles that were occurring in our school. And thus it was that the High Commission for Refugees offered to build a real school for us. In 1998 we built four classrooms, an office for the teachers, a small storeroom, and bathrooms. Then our friends of Forlì built two other classrooms, and some English Protestant friends whom we had met because of a series of providential circumstances, humble and generous people, who ask me not to send too many details when I provide an account of how I have spent their money, who say that everything is going well, that everything is fine, that everything is the gift of the Lord, built three classrooms and two bathrooms, and then once again our friends from Forlì built another classroom. On the piece of land that the community gave us there is still room for another classroom.

Over the last two years we have taken in thirty children belonging to a clan despised by the Somalis – they work in iron, in leather, are barbers, and are hunters of small game. They have never sent their children to school. They are ghettoised, their girls do not marry boys from other clans and their boys do not marry girls from other clans. They are in rebellion against God and men because of their status of being the rejected, the despised and the marginalised. They are great workers. Many of them were ill with TB and thus they had the opportunity to go to the school in the TB Centre, and to savour the beauty, the greatness, and the joy of learning, of understanding, of growing, of developing, and of becoming free. And thus it was spontaneous for them to ask us to agree to educate their children, children who for centuries had begun to work when they were still children and encounter trials like no other children encounter trials, and earn their daily rice with the sweat of their brows. It than happened that some intellectuals and then some rich people came to beseech us to accept their children in our school because it is a serious school, because in our school there is discipline, and because our teachers are committed, love teaching, love children, and are well trained. And we decided to accept them. There are only a few of them. Today the school is a wonderful mixture of children from every background, with all kinds of personal histories, of every kind of capability. The deaf children naturally study in separate classrooms made up of a few children but during playtime the deaf children and the ‘normal’ children are together and this is one of the most encouraging, most consoling experiences, and the one most able to give hope of a world in which men will want to be and are one. This ut unum sum has been, and is, the loving agony of my life, the torment of my being. It is a life that I fight for and that tortures me, as Gandhi said, my great mentor together with Vinoba, after Jesus Christ; a life that I fight for – I, a poor thing – to be good, to be truthful, not through violence but through thoughts, through words, and through action. Every day in the TB Centre we work for peace, for mutual understanding, to learn together to forgive. Oh, forgiveness! How difficult forgiveness is! My Muslims encounter difficulty in appreciating forgiveness, in wanting it for their lives, for their relationships with other people. They say that their religion is so fudud, that it makes so few demands. God asks man, they say, to forgive, but then if man is not capable of this, well, God is forgiving. Every day we fight to understand and make it understood that blame does not lie only on one side but on both sides; we reason together and strive to see everything that is positive in the other person. We look each other in the face, in the eyes, because we want truth to be done. My staff has learnt to laugh at their limits, at their baseness, at their ‘monetary’ mentality, at the harshness of their hearts, at the thirst for revenge when they are wounded. These are all things that make forgiveness very difficult. It is certainly the case, they say, that Allah does not want this, even though Allah is infinitely merciful. I, for my part, for many years have learnt or better have understood in the depths of my being that when there is something that is not right – misunderstandings, attacks, forms of injustice, enmities, forms of persecution, or divisions – certainly the fault is mine, certainly I have made some mistake. At the feet of God, the search for my faults is easy, it does not take any time, it makes me suffer but not very much, because it is so beautiful and great to recognise one’s faults and fight to ensure that the blame is cancelled, so that mistaken forms of behaviour are changed, so that in every relationship with other people my approach becomes positive. Our purpose on earth is to make live. And life is certainly not condemnation, a ius belli , accusation, vengeance, putting one’s finger in a wound, pointing out the mistakes and the faults of other people, hiding our faults, impatience, ire, jealousy, envy, a lack of hope, and a lack of trust in man. Life is always hoping, hoping against every hope, throwing our misery behind us, not looking at the poverty of others, believing that God exists and that He is a God of love. Nothing worries us and we always go forward with God. Perhaps this is not easy, indeed it could be a titanic task to think this way. In many ways, faith is such darkness, this faith that above all other things is a gift, and a grace, and a blessing. Why me and not you? Why me and not her; not him, not them? And yet life has a meaning only if one loves. Nothing has a meaning outside love. My life has known so many, indeed so many dangers; I have risked my life so many times, and then so many times again. For years I was in the middle of wars. I have experienced in the flesh of my own people, of those that I loved, and thus in my flesh, the wickedness of man, his perversity, his cruelty, his unfairness. And I came out of this experience with the rock-solid belief that what counts alone is to love. If God did not exist, only love would have a meaning, only love frees man from everything that makes him a slave, in particular only love allows him to breathe, grow, and flourish; only loves ensures that we are no longer afraid of anything at all; that we turn the other cheek which is not yet wounded to the mockery and thrashing of that person who hits because he does not know what he is doing; that we risk our lives for our friends, that we believe in everything, that we bear everything, that we hope. And thus our lives become worthy of being lived. And thus our lives become beauty, grace, and blessing. And thus our lives become happiness even in suffering because we live in our flesh the beauty of living and dying. I strongly feel that all of us are called to love, and thus to holiness. The poor woman of Leon Bloy who wanders from door to door, a beggar: “there is only one kind of sadness in life, that of not being saints”, she constantly repeated. I love to think the following: there is only one kind of sadness in the world – that of not loving – which is after all the same thing. It is certainly the case that we must free ourselves from so much rubbish. But there are practical methods, there are paths, there are clear signposts, there is God in the cell of our souls who is calling us. However, this voice is small and silent. We must listen, we must keep quiet, we must create a place of quiet, which is separate, even though often of necessity near to other people, like a mother who cannot be too distant from her children. Indeed, in order to love it is not always enough to have a heart, feelings, and a thirst for God. It is a part of the experience of everybody to decide to place oneself at the service of the poor, who are not easy to love, and that the heart of man, even of those who give of themselves, can in a mysterious way be very hard. At Wajir we were a community of seven women, and all of us, albeit in different ways and to a different extent, had a thirst for God. We understood that when we were losing or about to lose the meaning of our service and the ability to love, we could find our lost possessions only at the feet of the Lord. For this reason, we built a hermitage and we went there for a day or a few days or for even long periods of silence to place ourselves at the feet of God. There we once again found balance, quiet, long-sightedness, wisdom, hope, and the strength to fight our battle, every day above all against what keeps us slaves inside, what keeps us in the dark. We left that place and felt immediately ignited with renewed love for all those people whom the Lord had placed on our path. At times we confided with each other; most of the time we kept silent. But the faces of my companions were so beautiful, so luminous, that they told me everything that modesty prevented them from telling me about with words. During the course of my life there have been other hermitages, other silences, the word of God, great books, great friends, so many and so many again who have inspired my life, above all members of the Catholic faith: the fathers of the desert, the great monks, Francis of Assisi, Chiara, Teresa of Lisieux, Teresa d’Avila, Charles de Foucauld, Padre Voillaume, Sister Maria, Giovanni Vannucci, Primo Mazzolari, Lorenzo Milani, Gandhi, Vinoba, Pina and Maria Teresa. But at the centre there has always been God and Jesus Christ. Nothing that is outside God, outside Jesus Christ, really matters to me. The least, yes, the suffering, I go crazy about, I lose my head over these embers of wounded humanity, and the more they are wounded, the more they are ill-treated, despised, without a voice, of no importance in the eyes of the world, the more I love them. And this love is tenderness, understanding, tolerance, absence of fear, and audacity. This is not something to be praised. It is a requirement of my character. But it is certain that in them I see him, the lamb of God who suffers in his flesh the sins of the world, who takes them upon his shoulders, who suffers but with great love. Nobody is outside the love of God. I have blamed myself a thousand times for having agreed to come here and speak to you about my life; I was weak and accepted the opinion of my friends who are convinced that at this point in my life, forty years later, it is a good thing to share the gifts of God with other people. But if this ‘putting me in public’ could help someone who does not believe, someone who does not have within themselves this extraordinary reality – that God loves every man, from the most worthy of love in the eyes of men to the most rejected and despised, to the bad man, to the criminal – then I would bend down and give a blessing because He who is powerful has done great things in me. The man who is not good, the man incapable of forgiveness, the man who loves to wound, the man who wants vengeance, the false man, are not bad men, incapable of forgiveness, false necessarily. They are that way because they have not encountered on their paths a creature capable of understanding them, loving them, and taking on their faults. “Have you done wrong? I will pay in your place”. This is what Gandhi said, This is what Jesus Christ has been saying for two thousand years. Who knows why we men have been so deaf? Certainly, his voice is often small and silent, but then he is in the cell of our hearts and it should not be so difficult to go down there and live with Him. Words? No. Truth! Reality! Certainly, for most of us humans it will be, and it is, necessary to create silence, quiet, to turn off the mobile phone, to throw the television out of the window, and to decide once and for all to free ourselves from the slavery of what appears to be and what is important in the eyes of the world, but which counts for absolutely nothing in the eyes of God, because they amount to non-values. At the feet of God we find again every lost truth, everything that had fallen into darkness becomes light, everything that was a storm becomes still, everything that seemed a value but is not a value appears in its real clothes and we reawaken to the beauty of an honest, sincere, good, life, made up of things and not appearances, invested with good, open to other people, in an omnipresent very strong tension towards making men one.

The time has arrived to come to the end of my paper. I have given a lot to the Somalis. I have received a lot from the Somalis. The greatest value that they have given me, a value that I am still not able to live out, is that of an extended family, as a result of which, at least within the clan, everything is shared. The door is always open and welcomes the most distant member of the clan. The meal table is always shared. What has been prepared for ten people will be shared with anybody who comes to the door, and with the greatest naturalness. There are not, and there will not be, recriminations, complaints, and forms of pretending to be a victim. To share with one’s brethren is the most natural thing in the world. In my world, in Borama, unemployment is the great scourge. Some people have never worked in their lives because they have never found a job. And thus it is that those few who work are ‘forced’ to share the fruit of their labours with twenty to thirty other people who do not work. But such people do not live this as a ‘constraint’. They live it with naturalness. Down there sharing is a part of existence. And then their prayer five times a day where what you are doing, even if very important, is interrupted to give time and space to God. Ever since I have been with them, for these thirty years I have tormented myself at the fact that in our world we do not stop working, get up if sleeping, interrupt any talk to be silent and remember God, something which is done better with others, to acknowledge that we come from Him, we live in Him, and we return to Him. But the most extraordinary gift, the gift for which I thank God and them forever and for always, is the gift of my nomads in the desert. They are Muslims and they have taught me faith, unconditioned self-abandon, surrender to God, a surrender that is not in the least fatalistic, but a surrender that is solid and rooted in God, a surrender that is all trust and love. My nomads of the desert have taught me to do everything, to be everything again, to work completely in the name of God. ‘Bismillahri Rahmani Rahim’: in the name of God Almighty and Merciful. People get up in the name of God, they wash, they clean their homes, they eat, they work again, they study, they talk, they do a thousand everyday things, and finally they go to sleep – all in the name of God. The custom of the name of God being repeated constantly that had already upset and fascinated my life as narrated by a Russian pilgrim before me departure, permanently transformed my life. I thank my nomads of the desert for having taught me this. And then life has taught me that my faith without love is useless, that my Christian religion does not have a series of commandments, but only one; that it is no use building cathedrals or mosques, that services and pilgrimages are of no use, that the Eucharist which scandalises atheists and the other faiths includes a revolutionary message: “this is body made bread so that you also become bread at the meal table of men, because if you do not make yourself bread you will not eat bread that saves you but will eat your sentence”. The Eucharist tells us that our religion is useless without the sacrament of mercy, that it is in mercy that heaven meets the earth. If I do not love, God dies on earth; I am the cause of God being God, says Silesius; if I do not love, God does not have epiphany because we are the visible sign of His presence and we make Him live in this hell of a world where it appears that He is not present, and we make Him live every time that we stop at the side of a wounded man. In the end, I am really capable only of washing the feet of the abandoned in all the meanings of that word, of all those people who nobody loves, of those who, mysteriously, are not in the least attractive in any way in anybody’s eyes.

Luigi Pintor, a so-called atheist, wrote one day that there is nothing more important in life than bending down so that somebody else, clinging to one’s neck, can get up. That is the way it is for me. And in kneeling down, so that by clinging to me they can get up and go on their way, or even walk where they had never walked before, I find peace, a very strong charge, the certainty that everything is grace. I would like to add that the least, those without a voice, those who count for nothing in the eyes of the world, but matter a very great deal in the eyes of God, His chosen ones, need us, and we must be with them and for them, and it does not matter at all if our actions are like a drop of water in the sea. Jesus Christ never spoke about results. He spoke only about loving us, about washing each other’s feet, and about always forgiving. The poor are waiting for us. The ways of serving are infinite and left to the imagination of each one of us. We are waiting to be instructed in the field of service. We are inventive. And we will live new heavens and a new earth every day of our lives.