To start with: what did I do that warrants attention? I spent time with Emanuele over three years—two afternoons a week, then just once a week last year. All told, it amounted to a few hundred hours.
The most striking thing about this commitment was its consistency. I picked Emanuele up on the same days, at the same times, without fail. It was modest help, yes—but it let his family plan around those afternoons and hours, making things possible that would otherwise have been out of reach.
Limited help, offered regularly, carries real weight and works on many levels
Limited help, offered regularly, carries real weight and works on many levels.When I started spending time with him, Emanuele was seventeen—the same age as my son. They were born a month apart. Our families had been close for years before that, and the friendship only deepened. We lived in the same neighborhood, saw each other often, and shared both happy and difficult moments. Our children—Emanuele and his three younger siblings—grew up almost like cousins.
Emanuele himself was important to that friendship. He was with us constantly, and we learned to see him fully: his sensitivity, his genuine passion for music and rhythm, his remarkable warmth. Yet at seventeen, he could speak only two words—"mama" and "papa"—plus a string of unintelligible syllables. The only three-syllable word he could pronounce was "matita" (pencil). Whoever taught him that must have worked hard. He said it with pride, in and out of season, over and over: "ma-ti-ta." This was the second reason I decided to give him more attention.
Emanuele was lonely. Music was his refuge—he listened constantly—but it couldn't let him talk, and talk was what he desperately needed. Most of the time I gave him went toward that. The early work of exploring what he could do was difficult for us both. Building a small vocabulary seemed the obvious place to start—a basic framework on which other learning could grow.
Emanuele knew me as a friend, and in that climate of trust, he opened up completely. The atmosphere in which you work matters more than people realize. A friend, for a handicapped person, can accomplish more than his limited experience might lead him to believe. And for a boy struggling as Emanuele was, having an expanded family—not just his own but his friends' families too—meant his world grew larger, with more chances to learn and flourish.
So it becomes clear: limited help, offered with some regularity, has weight and reaches across multiple levels. As for me, I have to say this: when I look back at what I gained from those years with Emanuele, I honestly can't say which of us came away with more.
by O.B., 1986