(ANS – Rome) – Two great sporting champions: Danilo Gallinari, the best Italian basket-ball player in the American NBA, and Rino Gattuso a midfield player who has helped write the history of Italian football over the last fifteen years.

As spokesmen for VIS –International  Volunteer Movement for Development together in an appeal – www.volint.it for support for the reconstruction of the Salesian Work and the re-birth of the whole of Haitian society, in a large international Don Bosco Network of which VIS is among the founding members.

The Salesians of Don Bosco have been 80 years in Haiti, with 9 Salesian Houses in Port au Prince and other parts of the country, 25,000 children and youngsters at the Ecole Nationale des Arts et Métiers (ENAM) and other schools in the district who are given breakfast every morning: a roll of bread and a glass of milk and chocolate. A Salesian presence which has proved decisive in the growth and human development of Haitian children and youths, in a country which is extremely poor with serious problems of malnutrition and a high level of early school drop-outs and exploitation of the young.
After 12 January are large part of the Salesian schools and centres were destroyed, 500 children and youngsters and their teachers buried in a common grave beside  the ENAM, 3,500 displaced people welcomed, assisted and fed at the Centre de Formation et de Recréation Don Bosco in Carrefour Thorland.
The response of the whole Salesian world community including VIS and DBN,  was immediate and involved the whole country and it will continue over the next months and years aware that this tragedy could become for the people of Haiti, so tried by endemic poverty, an opportunity to begin a sustainable better future

“The appeal for solidarity and generosity addressed by the Rector Major of the Salesians of Don Bosco, Fr Pascual Chávez Villanueva to the Salesian Family of the whole world has had an immediate choral response from around the world,” Massimo Zortea, President of VIS declared. “From the very start, Salesian centres in so many parts of the world beginning with  Africa, have shown practical signs of solidarity with the sufferings of the people of Haiti. To this choir in unison have been united also the hearts of our two great champions who have personally committed themselves to involve their own fans and all Italians in an important competition: rebuilding the hopes and the lives of Haiti.”

Published 27/01/2009