Leaving for a very poor country with the intention of going to help, thinking of giving without receiving anything in return; returning richer than when you left, incredulous in front of the beauty of a heritage that had not been taken into consideration when packing your suitcase. The magic is repeated every time we leave for a humanitarian mission, convinced we are giving when in fact we are only going to receive.
The 98th World Mission Day will be celebrated on Sunday 20 October 2024, an opportunity to remember the importance of this bond, of an alchemy that goes beyond all predictions and fills the lives of those who are its protagonists.
We talked about it with Francesco Cosmi, director of the Convenio di Salud, a social work of the Catholic church that works in the Chaco area, in Bolivia, born thanks to the work of a Franciscan father, Tarcisio Ciabatti, who arrived in this enormous territory in the 1970s South American, inhabited by the Indians, to be precise by the Guaranì people, discovering a people who lived here – and still live – in conditions of extreme poverty. And without rights.
“Most of the villages then were within the properties of large breeders – he says – and the communities that worked there were treated like serfs”. Father Tarcisio’s work since the 1970s has always been to respond to emergencies , combating mortality from preventable diseases, from chickenpox to cholera. “A first intuition – says Cosmi – was to train young people from the same communities, so as to reach people through language. In the Guaranì and indigenous world in general, when we talk about health we mean not only the absence of disease but complete physical, mental and spiritual well-being, a condition of full life. Because there is no health without education, or water, or rights, or land, or peace. Based on this idea, Father Tarcisio began to train the first nurses, so that they would go into the community to vaccinate, simultaneously trying to free these populations from servitude, an operation carried out thanks to the various organizations that gravitated around the church, gradually buying land”.
Gradually many of the younger couples abandoned their master and moved to communities bought by the Vicariate thanks to the support of their Italian friends. A liberation that earned Father Tarcisio the definition of “our Moses” by the local indigenous populations. Over the years, this shared path of peace has given rise to an increasingly stronger bond between the Guaranì people and Italy, which has led to the birth of a training school also recognized by the World Health Organization as a model of interculturality.
The Tekove Katu School of Public Health it is a miracle of solidarity characterized by intense pragmatism. A reality that has saved and continues to save the lives of thousands of people starting from a very simple assumption: to fight hunger, disease and poverty it is necessary first of all to train the local population, make it autonomous and invest as much as possible in the knowledge of new generations.
Totally free for all the Indians who attend it, the school is therefore based not on welfare but on autonomy, to the point of being totally self-managed. To attend it, the children leave their community and then, after learning, return home, to the isolated places where they were born, to share their knowledge with the rest of the village.
Nursing, nutrition, environmental health: there are many courses held by doctors and specialists from various sectors, who voluntarily make their skills available to the population. Over time it was also put on a mobile unit, an ambulance that travels around communities to get a snapshot of the reality of a huge territory, populated by villages made up of a few families of 6 or 7 people. Even this ambulance, which initially worked to respond to emergencies, over time transformed into a place to do an apprenticeship.
“Many problems – continues Cosmi – are linked, for example, to childbirth, which produces maternal and infant mortality or serious disabilities, with cerebral palsy which is another consequence of the severity of childbirth. This mobile unit is a magnifying glass of the situation”. To work on prevention in the 1980s Father Tarcisio made an agreement with the University of Florence and above all with the chair of infectious diseases of Careggi, so that they could prepare an epidemiological photograph of the situation and gave suggestions to the Bolivian Ministry of Health to prevent these cases of illness. A historic alliance that continues today, with the Florentine university which, with the chair of Infectious Diseases, helps carry out scientific investigations and then shares them with the local Ministry of Health. “The collaboration – continues Cosmi – has also extended to the Universities of Siena and Pisa, Rome, Catania and Turin: a group of friends has been created who works to try to give support to this population “A lot of work at school is done with disabled people, who are often left to fend for themselves in these communities because their families don’t have funds or are too numerous. Families where very often there isn’t even food for everyone.
The project made a physiotherapist available to the Indians, giving assistance and teaching them to do physiotherapy exercise sessions and three years ago a space was also created, “Tembipe”, which in Guaranì means “The light that comes from above”, used for the rehabilitation of disabled people, where for two weeks a month volunteers go to the communities to pick up the person with their family member and bring them to the facility. Here they stay for a week with one group and for another week with another group, and during this period of time they not only carry out the physiotherapy part with more continuity, receiving teachings on new techniques, but they benefit from a family environment where the mothers can share their experiences, discuss and learn to solve some very practical problems, such as liquid nutrition for children with cerebral palsy, who are not able to swallow or chew.
“All this – specifies Cosmi – was possible thanks to the help of the Franciscan Missionary Center, which in Italy is the fundamental point of reference for collecting aid, and which for the Tuscan province of the Friars Minor is led by Fra Giuseppe Caro. Help in the name of exchange, because we often think that the mission is only about giving but in reality it is above all about receiving. In this world of violence, revenge and war, being able to listen to the voice of the last, which is a voice of peace and forgiveness, is something that transforms you.”
There are many stories that testify to this transformation, such as that of the pneumology department in Pisa, which managed to bring a defibrillator to an isolated community, a gift that has saved and will continue to save many lives. “When they received it they couldn’t believe it,” says Cosmi. “The happiness painted on the faces of these people cannot be described.”
Stories like that of Andrea and Laura, two doctors from Pisa. “Our experience – says Laura, a neonatal pediatrician – began last year, because on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary we decided to use and give value to this anniversary by taking a trip to these missions that we had known through the Missionary center of the Franciscan friars of Florence. We went to the Bolivian Chaco and mainly visited the communities and served as doctors and this year we repeated the same thing. We visited several communities and became aware of their health situation, which is non-existent, and their hygiene situation, which is devastating, because the first thing that appears is that there is no water and without water there is nothing. The most important thing we did therefore was to train at the Tekove Katu School, my husband Andrea as a dermatologist and me as a pediatrician and neonatologist, and we also did some exercises. The local communities are very poor but as always happens, the good received is greater than the good done.”
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