Soon I will board a plane that will take me back home, thus ending my eighth humanitarian mission in the land of Africa.
The experience of the mission in this land is never easy to describe, there are moments when you are overwhelmed by emotions, your heart fills with smiles, looks, tears and gestures that will never leave you because they will remain imprinted in your soul.
This land teaches you to give importance to every little detail, to feel good and laugh with little, to learn to be happy with nothing, it makes you understand how precious water is.
Africa is a thought, an emotion, with so many contradictions.
During this mission, we reached, covering kilometres of track inside the forest, people in villages where medical assistance is pure utopia, people came, especially the elderly, who to our questions declared candidly that ‘they did not suffer from anything but had never been visited by a doctor, when they needed one they turned to the village healer’; we cared for children in several orphanages, some of which are well run where the little ones have found a family, while in other orphanages the children more than live try to survive; finally, we cared for premature and malnourished babies in centres or dispensaries, where lives are saved every day, thanks to the self-sacrifice and love of exceptional people.
Now we return home, tired in physique but with a heart full of emotions, how can we forget the eyes shining with happiness of some mothers when we delivered the powdered milk that would have saved the lives of premature, malnourished and lactose-intolerant babies; how can we forget “merci beaucoup” repeated over and over again by Sietou for having given her “normality” by repairing her prosthetic leg; many other emotions/moods will accompany me, but meeting Kossi is the strongest emotion that will accompany me for the rest of my life, seeing him run and play with his peers moved me, with much effort I had to chase back a few tears, in the memory of an entire night spent in hospital, together with his mother, to snatch him from the jaws of an inauspicious fate.
A kiss and a big hug to my travelling companions who supported and endured me, Valeria, Renza, Claudio, Enrica, Silvia and Romain.
A big THANK YOU goes to so many of you who are close to us in all our initiatives and follow us assiduously, you give us the strength to continue.
When, in a few days’ time, I miss treading on the red earth, the festive cries of the children as I pass by, “YOVO-YOVO” (white man), not a day will pass without my being assailed by Africa-sickness, a state of the soul before being a state of mind.
Goodbye Africa Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)