L like “leggere” (read)

What language do missionaries “speak”? Theirs is an alphabet of mercy, with letters that breathe life back into words and generate works

Warning: this alphabet follows Italian words, but we urge readers to consider the concept rather than the consonant or vowel with which they begin

If you go into an African primary (primary) school, especially in the first class, you will hear the teacher making the children repeat the letters she writes on the blackboard. She writes “A” and everyone in chorus repeats “A.” And so on.

Kind of like what happened to us fifty or more years ago.

Maybe we were a little luckier because, for each letter, there was a colorful poster board with different names beginning with that letter
of the alphabet.

Distant memories that come back, walking in among those children, all close together on boards that look like benches and tables that look like distant relatives of desks. This is all the school equipment, besides the blackboard, painted black.

Yet you hear them repeat in chorus. There are sixty-seventy or more of them.

They want to learn to read, because they know that without that, they won’t get very far. Those strange marks that they then bring back in the notebook or on the blackboards or even in the sand, open up a new world to them, unknown, but part of.

And day after day, they put them together and they become words.

With patience they transcribe them and begin to make completed sentences and so the years go by, so many new things come into their minds.

When they go through high school, they feel the need to have a place where they can learn more about what is going on in the world.

And that’s why in many missions, they try to open libraries, where they can read, study even late, because there is electric light.

They start to ask questions. Why does anyone have more things than us, why is there more freedom in other countries than in ours, why? Why? Why?

Then you stand next to them, listen to them and try to calmly explain the story, but to find the answer to the whys is not easy, because maybe you should give answers that they don’t like, that make them suffer.

But you cannot abandon them. You have to help them to grow up, to take responsibility, and above all not to consider their parents (who often cannot read and write, but who can do math well, when they go to the market to sell and buy…) as people
backward, who do not understand anything.

They did not have the opportunities that their children now have, and they are proud that they can learn so many things. The world for them had stopped at the village or sometimes the big city.

Now their children are starting to hang out with new people, use new tools to learn (even social media), and wonder if all this will bring prosperity to their families as well.

Then, maybe listening to the radio, they hear some news about war, hunger, disease, and then they wonder if it is really true that so-called progress is a good thing. The children say that this is the price to pay for a new world, but mother, when she has time, takes some of them in her arms and starts asking them questions.

“And then, after you’ve studied so much, are you going to go off to Europe or America and leave us alone? How will we live, without you?” And here the answer takes a long time.

Promises are made, promises are said that they are always in the heart, but that the children, like the arrow shot from the bow, must go far away, that one day they will come back and bring many gifts, that they will write from time to time (but who will read the letters to the parents?).

One world slowly goes away and a new world begins. So it is written in books, in newspapers, on television–but how do those who remain know that they must now retire in good order?

Source

• Father Oliviero Ferro

Image

• Image digitally created by spazio + spadoni