When I think of Faith and Light, I tell myself I've been truly blessed. Fausta, Carla's mother, used to say it to me all the time: "You've been so lucky to find Faith and Light. What would life have looked like otherwise?" Just me and Carla and her father Alberto, always on our own. I'd never have met you all. I wouldn't have so many friends. My home is always open now.
That's always been, for me, the heart of Faith and Light: a stroke of luck. Like life itself. What would my life have been without it? I don't know. I certainly wouldn't have had as much fun. I certainly wouldn't have as many friends.
You ask me—come on, but what exactly is Faith and Light? You're asking the right person. I've known it since I was eighteen. I'm fifty-four now. "So you've come to some kind of understanding."
I like to think each of us has formed 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 meeting one another. Everyone who passes through Faith and Light sees and feels at least these three things. You feel them when you first arrive. You feel them when you can't manage to leave.
It's a little world made of relationships, sacrifice, suffering, vacations, celebrations, and funerals. A community that lives, that sometimes struggles hard, that renews itself and sometimes dies.
So let's talk about the emotions. There's the feeling that takes hold when you share what you're living through. The excitement of those first times (I'm not doing anything special, really, just lending a hand). Then comes the anxiety—when you realize you can't help without entering into a real relationship, and these relationships are "special" and "different," and they leave you vulnerable and exposed. Everyone could tell their own story. Mine are too many to fit on this page. But the greatest one for me is the feeling of belonging to a community. Your community, and the community of your province and region, and knowing you're part of a community scattered across the whole world. I was so lucky. When I lived through 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, stories. But I was truly blessed.
This blessing is what I want to commend to you, especially in the hard moments. Those times when we don't know how to answer all the questions that come from parents and their children. Those hard times when we feel alone, when we grow old and feel small in the face of illness. What a blessing it was to meet Faith and Light. Maybe it didn't make us better people. But it certainly brought us all joy together.
Stefano Di Franco, Kimata Province Coordinator, 2015