Of Arcangela Saverino.
Rome, March 19, 2019 – The word resilience can take on different meanings. Transforming pain into a great resource, into love towards the most fragile, using it not to resist but to regenerate, is the meaning it takes on in the story we are telling you. Franco Vagelli he is an ordinary person, one of those you meet every day on the street: Neapolitan by adoption, once he obtained his diploma as a surveyor, he began working for an important insurance company. After many years spent working, he retired convinced that the time had come to fully enjoy the pleasures that life offers, but a series of negative circumstances, including the loss of his wife in September 2007, pushed him to make different choices. In October of the same year he went to Africa to personally verify that the long-distance adoption, supported for some time, was working as it should. He realized, however, that this was not the case. Or, at least, it was not enough. Franco understood that to improve the life of a child and the community in which he lives, ensuring medical care, drinking water, food and education, it was necessary to do more. It was necessary to work to make local populations autonomous and improve the education and protection of children.
«One of the greatest emergencies on the African continent is the state of total abandonment in which children up to eight years old, the age at which they enter school, find themselves.", Franco tells neifatti.it. Therefore, the Onlus was born Gocce d’Amore per i bambini dell’Africa which operates on the island of Zanzibar promoting and financing the construction, maintenance and recreational support of kindergartens. The first kindergarten, dedicated to his wife, was built in Jambiani, a village of about 6,000 inhabitants, located on the south-eastern coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago, in Tanzania. «Before founding the association – continues Franco – I gathered a group of friends to make sure they could follow me and support me in the project in Africa that requires my presence in Naples. In fact, if I had moved there permanently, I would not have been able to take care of the economic aspect of the mission that requires, among other things, fundraising». To date, they have been born 11 kindergartens (the twelfth is under construction) and more than 1,300 children Every year they learn and play in a peaceful, social context where the teachers are women and men from the village.
The Gocce d’Amore project is based on two inspiring thoughts: "My commitment involves an expenditure not only of energy, but also of money. From this point of view, the association takes inspiration from the thought of Mother Teresa of Calcutta "If you do good, they will attribute to you ulterior motives of selfishness. It does not matter, do good"». The other thought that inspires Franco and the other volunteers is Nelson Mandela: “My greatest ambition is that every child in Africa goes to school because education is the gateway to freedom, democracy, development”. A great ambition: the end of a welfare system that does not mean freedom, but only the ability to choose a different form of slavery. "The construction of kindergartens is a means for the development of those villages in the south of the island of Zanzibar that are in conditions of poverty. In Tanzania, school age begins at eight years: before then, children are exploited by their families to bring home some money, so much so that school dropout reaches 70%. Furthermore, following Mandela's teachings, in the kindergartens built up to now, about 70 local teachers work because we did not want to impose the presence of Westerners".
Without a doubt, Mandela left a great legacy in the world of solidarity and international cooperation: his story, his choices and the strength of his ideas in the name of freedom and human rights that never cease to inspire the army of volunteers who, like Franco, are convinced that education is the key to making dreams come true, even if you live in the poorest and most marginalized parts of the world. «In one of the trips we organized for the volunteers – Vagelli tells us more -, I met two psychologists who wanted to interview the children who had attended our kindergartens in the past years. We discovered that we had given them dreams and hopes, the possibility of believing in a future: many expressed the desire to continue their studies to become a doctor, a professor or even an aviator. At that moment I became aware of the importance of the work that the association carries out in Zanzibar».
The next project is to bring “the village into the nursery”, involving doctors willing to carry out specialist visits to children and provide the population with everything needed to deal with emergencies. "The goal is to bring mothers into the kindergartens and counter their resistance to sending their children to school, also by organizing sewing courses: if they can understand the work we do inside the structure, the collaboration will bring benefits to everyone. In some villages we have been prevented from entering to build kindergartens". The greatest satisfaction, he explains, is no longer seeing children of a few years old, completely naked, walking or hanging around outside their homes without supervision and in an absolute lack of hygiene: today they write, draw, and have learned to wash their hands before and after meals. A “non-life” that, little by little, is turning into life. The maintenance of the nurseries and the mission of bringing the village into the nursery keep the many volunteers busy who, through the association’s website www.goccedamore.com they go to Zanzibar. Every journey becomes a journey. A journey towards freedom.
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