It’s time to give back

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop” – Mother Teresa

 

We turn to the left, leaving the grey asphalt road that cuts in two side the savannah for the uneven dirt one where the red light spoil flies in the air after the passage of the jeep’s wheels: one second that seems a time jump, leads us in a new dimension. The gaze sweeps with no boundaries to chase colours and new spaces, and looking at the landscapes becomes a kind of meditative moment of connection with the surrounding nature.

We are in Uganda, in the region of Karamoja, one of the poorest of the county and we are going to visit some green schools, where kids, guided by the agriculture teacher, learn how to take care of a garden and grow vegetables and plants to support their nutritional needs. It is one the several projects that Costa Family Foundation, in cooperation with the team of the NGO Insieme Si Può Africa, finances to support the population in Uganda.

Orphanages, medical dispensaries, assistance to children living in straitened circumstances or support to women emarginated by HIV, vocational schools, a settlement to host the South Sudan refugees, waste management projects, … I see the faces and shake hands of the news that sometimes reach me through magazines and newspapers. I learn to dip in a different culture, its talents and its difficulties. I discover the beauty of a wild nature and within it the cruelty of its dry spell and its continuous challenges to survive. I meet the people who with these difficulties have grown and who, facing these extreme conditions, live everyday. I sense a new for me shade of love, perhaps the purest and most powerful one, the one of solidarity. I try to observe and listen, divesting as much as I can the usual mind-set. Like in front of a blank page before writing a letter, I leave these days writing the more appropriate words. Far away from the daily routine, priorities and points of view reset and a new sense of belonging – not to family or circle of close friends, not to my country or its history, but to the whole humanity – takes shape.

I’d lie if I did not say that the return back home, keeping me busy with the usual business and personal engagements, did not soften the strong and important message I received from each one of the kids, women and men I met in Uganda, because it happened so. The inertia of the daily life style swallows me in its dynamics, weakening day by day the feeling of that experience and the borders of that print that so clear and vivid seemed to be during our stay and just right after coming back home, is vanishing.

But what is important is that the seed has been planted. Now it is my duty to cultivate it so that the journey of the hearth that has started for me in Uganda will set the compass on the right course.

 

To know more details about the projects of Costa Family Foundation: https://www.costafoundation.org

 

Photo Credits: Stefano Butturini