Taranto (Italy). For some years now, the Roman Province of St. John Bosco (IRO), together with the Province of Emilia-Liguria-Tuscany Our Lady of the Cenacle (ILS), and the Central Province of the Salesians of Don Bosco, organizes some summer missionary experiences.
Small groups of young people reach the missionary realities of the FMA, Daughters of Mary Help of Christians to give service after a formative journey called Missio-Lab lived during the year. The young people leave knowing that they will learn and grow, and are excited about this. After the experience in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Malta last year, this year the young people learned about the realities of Taranto and Benin.
From 17 to 26 July 2024, a group of them reached the L’Aquilone Oratory of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians of Our Lady of Good Counsel Province (IMR) of Taranto, to engage in educative street activities in collaboration with the FMA and local educators.
Corrado, of the Taranto Missionary Group, recounts his experience:
As always, it all starts with the Word of the Lord. The word of the Gospel of Mark begins our departure: “and He sent them two by two […] He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick” [Mc 6: 7-13]. In this passage, we enclose the first steps of our missionary experience. To accompany us, we do not physically have a walking stick, but the cross of our missionary mandate, indelible sign of the true and first support, Jesus.
Strengthened by this, every morning we make our way on tip-toe to Piazzale Nenni to play with the boys and girls of this place and try to cheer up their mornings with games and laughter, even if only for a short time, in the shared educative effort aimed at breaking down the voices they hear daily and the stories of lives that they already seem destined to imitate: the street, crime, addictions, a vortex of vices and waste.
The Paul VI district of Taranto, epicenter of our mission, has been seeing and living in darkness for a long time. There are few who challenge the entrance into the fabric of the road and bet on the salvation of hearts. Called to read in hearts the potential for the good are the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians who daily face here the breeding grounds of crime. It is thanks to their incessant and benevolent action, under the guidance of Sister Mariarita and Sister Maria of the “L’Aquilone” Oratory, that it is possible even to narrate our experience.
Our mission is made possible by their exhausting and continuous service in the territory and community, which teaches us every day how the mission is an exercise of faith and joy, charity and love, hope and passion. The two FMA, in fact, are daily faced with trials to which they must respond with wisdom and promptness and obstacles to be overcome by perseverance of prayer and listening, helped by magnificent people who put themselves at the service of others and of the oratory.
In a context as dense as Piazzale Nenni, where everything seems destined to slip away among fires, ashes, furniture, dirt, weeds, rubble, disillusionment, shame, and faces that prefer to hide, we move in an attempt to build paths of hope in the marginality, standing among them, trying to meet them in an authentic way, without pretending trust and making them understand that there is an alternative to the ruinous culture of the street.
In giving continuity to the activity carried out on the streets in the morning, in the afternoon we welcome the children with joy in the spaces of the L’Aquilone oratory, taking part in the Peace Olympics, where they can have fun and learn.
We do not know how much we will be remembered, how concretely we will change things or how effectively our presence and example will help this reality. However, we can say with certainty that what was done, seen, realized, and lived in the Paolo VI district of Taranto will change us forever.
We measure in the variable that “sin will not be there tomorrow,” “thus, you go on Saturday” or “here I feel at home” and the affection that these young people have experienced, makes them ready now to give it every day.
We say “thank you”, a heartfelt and shared thanks that will gather in itself our desires and our hopes to be looms, needles, and threads of a new and fruitful yarn, one that will contribute, in the hands of the wise Tailor the Lord Jesus, to make clothes to the measure of dignity, of respect, of fraternal and human love, of support, of the heart.
