Luisa is calm and gentle—that's what her father says about her. She's the one who opens the door to the municipal daycare center in Rome where she's worked for ten years. It's a pleasure to see how much at home Luisa feels here! It's equally clear how warmly others speak of her. In the kitchen, the cook calls her the best assistant she's had in any school. "And I've worked in plenty of them!" she adds. "She washes the fruit, prepares the dishes, does so many things for me."
Luisa is always available. As one of the staff members who showed us around remarked, everyone here does what needs doing—someone's short in the kitchen, and whoever's free goes to help. It's like a family, and that atmosphere has helped Luisa love her work. More than that, she genuinely enjoys being with the children.
Beyond the warmth everyone shows her, I noticed the calm and the smiles on the faces of the little ones—two or three years old. There are plenty of toys. The classroom walls, decorated by the teachers, make the modest buildings feel inviting.
Luisa is forty years old and has an intellectual disability resulting from complications at birth. She walked and spoke late, but she had no trouble in nursery school. In elementary school she learned to read and write, though she struggled with arithmetic, her father says.
After several years in special education classes and schools, she joined the sewing workshop at Anffas, a disability services organization. She was very good at it—skilled at the sewing machine. In the 1970s, encouraged and supported by a social worker, she left Anffas to do an internship at a daycare center. It was a big change for Luisa, but she was welcomed warmly and followed regularly by the social worker. Things have only gotten better. At first, her mother walked her to work; now Luisa goes alone, a two-kilometer walk that she loves. Her independence has grown tremendously. She gets up before her parents in the morning and makes her own breakfast. She leaves at seven. She loves going to work so much that her father says she'd go even with a fever. It's not about the money—it's the contact with the staff, being in the environment, and the fact that what she does now is real work, something she's good at and that gives her purpose.
Alongside her job, Luisa has her family life with her mother and father; her sister lives nearby. At her parish, she has all her friends from Fede e Luce, people she's known for years.
To me, Luisa seems like a happy woman.
— Nicole Schulthes, 1991