Listen, Michel. I want to tell you something, and forgive me for staying anonymous—I'm a mother involved in Fede e Luce.
You're leaving soon. You've made a commitment and you're going back to your country, you say. And you're right. We'll miss you. It would be natural—too easy, really—to quote your countryman's words: "Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas...".
Back home, you don't yet know exactly what your work will be. Surely the local authorities will give you demanding responsibilities. You'll do important things. Maybe you'll come back to see us sometimes. Maybe, caught up in new activities, you won't have time to think of us, and Fede e Luce will fade slowly into the distance. (But something from this experience will stay with you, perhaps without your knowing it.)
Who knows what you'll do, Michel? Teaching, speeches, concrete works and deeds. You'll meet new people. You'll speak to so-called important figures. You'll throw yourself into your work with the sincerity we've come to know in you—work for which you'll be appreciated, sought after, praised. Certainly you won't escape difficulties either; no one does. You'll have to fight, keep preparing yourself, work, pay a price for every success.
But remember one thing, Michel. If someday, far from now, someone asks you—as some people do—for an accounting of what you've done in your life, you'll surely be able to list a series of fine and honorable actions that will close your ledger in the black. But if you want to truly win, don't forget to add this: that in days long past, in the early seventies, to a group of Roman boys and children unfairly burdened with problems too large for them—children to whom life offers little and promises nothing—to those boys, to those children, you once gave a smile.
A mother from "Fede e Luce", July 1976