When I think of Faith and Light, I tell myself… I've been lucky. Fausta, Carla's mother, used to say it all the time. I was lucky to find Faith and Light. What kind of life would I have had otherwise? Just me and Carla and her father Alberto, always alone. I would never have known all of you. I would never have had all these friends. My home is always open now.
That's always been, for me, the heart of Faith and Light—a great blessing. Like life itself. What would my life have been without it? I don't know. But I certainly wouldn't have had this much fun, and I wouldn't have so many friends.
You ask me, okay, but so what is Faith and Light? You're asking someone who found it at eighteen and is now fifty-four. "You must have formed an idea by now."
I like to think that each of us has come to our own understanding, carrying all the emotions this experience brings with it. I like to think we share some fixed points: community, our young people, and the joy of encounter. Everyone who has passed through Faith and Light has seen and felt at least these three things. You feel them when you first arrive, and you feel them still when you can no longer leave.
It's a microcosm of relationships, sacrifice, suffering, vacations, celebrations and funerals—a living community that sometimes struggles hard, that renews itself and sometimes dies.
So let's talk about the emotions. The rush you feel when you share what you're living through. The excitement of those first moments (I'm not doing anything special, really—just lending a hand). The anxiety that arrives when you realize you can't help without entering into relationship, and that these relationships are "special" and "different," and they make you fragile and exposed. Everyone could tell their own story; mine are too many for this page. But the greatest one for me is knowing you belong to a community—your own, and your region's, and your province's—and that you're part of a community spread across the whole world. I was blessed. When I lived that international dimension, I was never alone. With me were Corrado, Ciaccia, Fausta, Frank, Paola Maiolo, Rossana, Carla, Pietro and Antonio and Annarosa—I could fill pages and pages with faces, adventures and stories. But I was blessed.
It's this blessing I want to commend to you, especially in the difficult moments—when we don't know how to answer all the questions parents and their children ask us, when we're alone and growing older and feel small before illness. It was a true grace to have found Faith and Light. Maybe it didn't make us better people, but it certainly gave us all so much joy together.
Stefano Di Franco, Coordinator, Kimata Province, 2015