"Dear Judge, I asked to speak with you because I've decided to tell you many things about my dad. These things happened when I was six, and they went on until I came here(...).. When Dad would come see me at night while I was sleeping—or when I was awake, really, because I couldn't sleep, I was so afraid! My father hit my little brother too, but I protected him. How many times he beat me. How much pain my father caused me."
Welcome to the land of wonders—the disbelief we feel in the face of such cruelty, such broken families, such merciless fathers, such submissive mothers that they shut their eyes to threats, confinement, beatings, sexual abuse.
Welcome to the land of wonders—the amazement we feel that the child who wrote those words, who told the magistrate that her father did not behave like "a real father" but like "a boyfriend," survived that unspeakable devastation and now lives peacefully in a new family.
Welcome to Ostuni, in the province of Brindisi. We are in one of the facilities of La Nostra Famiglia, the organization founded by don Luigi Monza in the postwar years. The Land of Wonders is what the staff calls the unit for "Maltreatment Syndrome"—it takes in children from birth to age twelve, referred by the Juvenile Court. Right now there are forty-four. The director of the facility, Carmen Chiaramonte; the head of the unit, Maria Grazia Bacco; Dr. Luigi Russo; Beatrice Panarelli; and other staff members tell us many stories. All different. All terrible. Often made more complicated by the presence of mental disability. All marked by the deepest wound of all: the loss of trust in adults. Yet the young people cultivate a profound solidarity with one another. "Everyone here has some kind of trouble," they say. But they arrive wrapped in a fear that one of them described like this: "Over time I discovered that life is a path where you often stumble, and you can't get up because you're afraid to find out that nothing has changed. The fear of facing life after enduring something that leaves its mark. The subtle, constant presence of the fear that people around me won't notice that I exist." It is from this noticing—from being seen—that the work of those in the center begins. They must restore dignity and instill trust. It is difficult work, and dangerous too, because at any moment you risk being drawn into the kind of family conflict that tears everything apart. Work so precious that in his recent book, *Nighttime Conversations in Jerusalem*, Cardinal Martini compares social workers to liberation theologians and all those who exercise "the option for the poor"—and for this reason, he says, they must still expect persecution today. In Ostuni, the anguish takes many forms: the struggle to heal wounds, obviously and above all. But also the waiting list to enter the center, always far too long. And then the doubts when you have to find a new family for foster care, or even more so for adoption. "It's important to help the young people understand the timeline and nature of their journey out of trauma," the staff explain, "but with great gentleness." For example, when they speak of possible new parents, the staff never use the word "family" because that word evokes only suffering. Instead they speak of new "friends" to meet—friends who, with time, may become mom or dad.
Then Christmas arrives. In the form of gifts and a great meal all together. The young people are always amazed that there are appetizers, and that they receive—once a year, and thanks to the secret generosity of their "friends"—all the gifts they ask for, even the expensive ones: iPods, Silver Nikes. You might well ask: food and gifts like in the most ordinary Christmas imaginable? We could answer that what they receive, whatever it is, is only a pale recompense for lives like theirs. But that would be an ordinary answer too. No, in places like this, the Christmas of the spirit either happens all year or it doesn't happen at all. Faced with wounds like these, the Holy Spirit has so much to do that it cannot wait for Christmas. Like a "gentle breeze," it blows every day and bears fruit—small but unforgettable fruit. As usual, it is the young people themselves who find the words best suited to describe it. "If this house were alive, I would call it my mom," one wrote. And the girl we began with, speaking to an aunt about how she could finally sleep, said: "They watch over us even at night!" At the wedding of one of the educators, another girl—who came from an extremely poor family—offered this prayer: "I wish your husband is good and that you have at least a public housing apartment."
Vito Giannulo, 2008