That Winning Lottery Ticket!
...There are no volunteer groups in this town (well, there's the Red Cross, and you know what? Last August when they started, the women went to the salon before putting on their uniforms).
My daughter doesn't have any infectious disease, but here people treat her as if she did — and treat us too, because I'm always fighting to get her the rights she's owed (the town hall calls me a troublemaker, excuse the language). I go around asking for things I've learned I'm entitled to. But I keep going. I rely only on my own strength, my husband's, and my son's — he's so attached to his sister that heaven help anyone who says or does anything to her. Sometimes I daydream about winning that big lottery jackpot, and then I don't think about helping anyone in my town. First would come my friends at Ombre e Luci — I'd give them a lot of money so they could help people like me who often find themselves struggling. But that's just a dream. Still... who knows?
Immacolata
I Will Support You
I was happy to receive your magazine through a mutual friend. Since we had twin grandchildren, one of them with cerebral palsy from complications at birth, we've become interested in all the related problems. I had never encountered such situations before, and they always made me uncomfortable — I never would have chosen to volunteer in this field. But life itself is now teaching me how to relate to these people. [...] As for me, I'll gladly support your magazine. Thank you. Best regards
Annalisa Bilotta
In Communion with China
Dear friends,
...though I write you a letter only once a year, I assure you of my affection and my prayers. You are especially present to me when I pray in the morning before leaving my room and having breakfast with "Mom" and the six young men in the new group home where I was sent after returning from vacation. It is a moment of communion with God and with so many people scattered everywhere — a moment when my room opens to the whole world. [...] It's been two years now since I came here, since I opened a door into China. It is beautiful to be present in this land of adoption, even if I cannot do what I could do in Hong Kong. [...] I am here in communion with the Church of China. I remember how in my early years in Hong Kong I went to the border many times, but all we could do was look at China from a little hill! Today, living here, it is possible to offer something to Chinese Christian brothers and sisters — to give them a hand, to support them as they face the challenges of modernization and secularization in a society changing so rapidly.
I renew my thanks to all those people who gave contributions during my time in Italy for the disabled at Huiling and for the Church of China. I am glad to tell you that one of the projects the Caritas of the Como diocese will propose is the renovation of our residential center for adults [...]. Living in a group home for so long, I see firsthand how small communities are the best place for the formation of the people who live there. So the people at Huiling have decided to establish some new group homes, where gradually we will move the people now in the large center. In time the center itself will become a place for daytime activities. [...] I give my thanks at once to whoever responds to Caritas's call and lends us a hand. [...] I will feel you near me.
Fr. Mario Marazzi
My Little One
I received the latest issue of Ombre e Luci, leafed through it, read it, and found myself staring at the cover—images I'd seen before, words I'd sung hundreds of times. But every time...!
The day my father wrote the words to My Little One, he sang them to me so I could hear the melody. I was barely six years old and picked it up right away, fell in love with it at once. I remember that day perfectly... And I remember being hurt when Dad told me I wouldn't be the one to sing it because it needed a boy's voice! But I was just a child and couldn't imagine how important "My Little One" would become to me. I think back to Assisi, under that shelter, reading the same words on so many faces—words from a song born that way, in the quiet of a night without pretense, simply to express a father's love for his special child. With "My Little One" I find my father each time in such lightness and simplicity that thinking of him suddenly feels "easy." It's as though the father in "my little one" lives in all of you, because Fede e Luce has given this song a beauty and a meaning beyond what my father could ever have imagined. Thank you, because remembering him that way becomes sweeter; because it was in community, it was at a gathering that naturally and simply those tears finally came—the ones that always have such a hard time falling. Thank you to Ombre e Luci for having the idea to make space for fathers, all fathers, especially those we miss so much and who taught us to live, because they lived fully; who made us grow, because their guidance was precious; who taught us to love, because their love was great and was everything to us.
Giorgia Fontani