Thank you—you're a real help
I want to thank you for your magazine, which is truly sensible and useful to so many families raising children with various disabilities, especially mental ones. I'm grateful from the bottom of my heart on behalf of all the people who will treasure your advice, suggestions, moral support, practical examples, and real experiences you present through parents who have lived through difficult periods firsthand and who, by meeting the right people, were helped to overcome certain barriers and find a peaceful, calm daily rhythm even with a disabled child. I'm also deeply thankful that your magazine carries a Christian presence. We desperately need to show God's love to our neighbor as the first rule of our magazine for Christians.
Your latest issue discusses prevention for deaf children. I'd like to share a copy of a project carried out in Como in 1977 by the C.D.T. It was a wonderful initiative that produced excellent results. You might find it interesting. I'm also sending you contact information for people working on these issues.
With warm regards and my full support.
Annita Viola (Chiavari)
Thank you for introducing us to a truly interesting initiative that we can share with our readers.
Good choices
I thank you for the sample copies of Ombre e Luci you sent me.
I appreciated the magazine overall, but especially issue no. 3, which focuses primarily on deafness.
I think devoting each issue to a specific disability, with new perspectives in both medical care and employment, is very valuable and enriches everyone. I also enjoyed the excerpt from "A Day with Me," which gave me much to reflect on.
I've decided to subscribe to your magazine not only for myself, but also for a cooperative for disabled people in my city (AIES). It's a small gesture of respect for these young people, so they'll find interest, solidarity, and friendship in your pages.
Rosanna (Lanciano)
I'd like to hear other voices
Anna Maria is 29 years old. When she was 11, her illness struck. For our parents and for us—her brothers and sisters—it was a blow, a shock. That's when our ordeal began.
Psychiatrists and hospitals became our anchors. The diagnosis: dissociative syndrome, psychosis.
I want to tell my story without feeling like a victim, I want to cry out my suffering to everyone without being judged, and now, finally, I've found someone ready to listen.
The life of someone living with a mental disability is no longer life. You do everything to feel normal and you're not; the constraints pile up so much that eventually you give up. Hope and the will to fight crumble fast, and helplessness crashes down on you.
"Think about your own life, you can't sacrifice yourself," friends say. But is that really how it should be done? Can you live well by pretending nothing's wrong? I couldn't manage it. Why? I put my sister's needs before mine. I put her needs before my own and, sometimes, before those of the person I loved. Did I do the right thing? I listened to my conscience, believing I was doing good. My boyfriend didn't understand. He felt sidelined, unimportant to me, and accused me of not caring.
I'd like to hear other voices on this issue, other stories, so I don't feel alone in this selfish and indifferent world.
Vincenza Cavaliere c/o Edizioni ADV - Via Chiantigiana 30 50023 Falciani Impruneta, FI
Can any of our readers respond to Vincenza and share your thoughts on what she's raised?
Ombre e Luci has already replied personally.
This is how it's done!
Today I made a modest contribution to your postal account after receiving your magazine, which I very much appreciated.
I don't know who gave you my address, but I'm grateful to them for introducing me to you.
In turn, I'd like to suggest two people I know who are interested in issues affecting disadvantaged people in Lanciano.
A.M.R. Lanciano
This is how Ombre e Luci spreads across Italy. We take this chance to thank everyone who sends us names of people interested in receiving the magazine free for a time, and we invite our readers to do the same—especially those who haven't before. Thank you to our friend in Lanciano.
Ombre e Luci is here to help, to understand, to know, to keep no one alone
Ombre e Luci is here to help, to understand, to know, to keep no one aloneVolunteers of Suffering
Dear friends,
when I received and read your magazine straight through, I felt the urge to exchange ideas with you. If you're willing, please let me know, and we'll send you our newsletter "Samaritans… Today," which describes the work of the Center for Volunteers of Suffering in the Diocese of Novara. Our Association was founded by Monsignor Luigi Novarese in 1947. I won't burden you with all the details, but he grasped and lived the "redemptive value of suffering," and we try to carry this vision forward among the sick and the healthy.
Another hallmark of this apostolate is that it is the sick person who becomes an apostle and who, in the first place with the help of healthy brothers and sisters, bears personal witness to a life of suffering lived in love—offered because, if offered, pain costs less and means more. Ours is not, to be clear, a masochistic position (as our name misleadingly suggests) or passive resignation, but rather a new way of understanding suffering—seeing pain through the lens of faith. All this applies to people with physical disabilities. But in cases of mental illness—and there are many, increasingly many—our approach changes. In these cases, our care and presence are assured; we follow them with deep love, trusting firmly that God reaches them even when it doesn't seem so, and through them gives us the greatest signs of love. But if parents, family, or those caring for them embrace this vision, they too enter into the plan of redemptive salvation.
We mention this to introduce you to another association working in the church's mission: "in the Lord's vineyard" all are called without distinction… that few answer the call is another matter!
In the certainty that we dwell in Christ's heart and that the tears on our faces are the same tears that fell from His, let us support one another through prayer so that we might bring a little more humanity, solidarity, and love to this increasingly impoverished world. Warmest regards.
Paola Pettinaroli