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Italy – Salesians for Social APS: #Noicis(t)iamo

26 March 2020

(ANS - Rome) – Covid-19 is putting everyone to the test. "Ci siamo" – we're here for you - is the commitment that "Salesians for Social APS" manifests via its many presences throughout the nation. "Ci stiamo" – we're here, let's take up the challenge - is the educational commitment with those who struggle the most, which continues now as before, only in different ways, making greater use of the reservoirs of creativity and tenacity. Here are just a few examples that come from the many educational outposts that the Salesian organization manages throughout Italy.

In Prato, the association "La lunga domenica, the long Sunday" of the Salesian Social Network, provides distance-learning support to its children and their families with individual tutoring via Skype or WhatsApp and offers a "good night" message on Facebook. Furthermore, with the project "Una mano spesa bene, a hand well spent", the young animators make themselves available to the elderly - the most fragile in this moment of emergency - for their groceries: "For us young people, helping them is a civic duty."

In the Salesian office for the Social APS of Corigliano-Rossano, at the Salesian foster family home "Il Timone, the Rudder", the children's days were turned upside down. They no longer go to school, but they still study, since many teachers are using the form of virtual study. Living in a Salesian oratory, it can be said that the children have become the masters of Don Bosco's playgrounds; not dozens and dozens of kids to liven it up these days, but only them, 13 kids who have fun playing football, skateboarding, improvising flash mobs, singing with the educators, and talking in the evening.

The same happens in the "Mamma Margherita" foster family home in Cagliari. Those responsible testify:  "Special days are lived with the children and young people welcomed here: there is homework, recreation and imagination to always find new games. Who better than them can look us in the eye and tell us that everything will go well, or #tuttoandràbene?"

Until a few days ago, in the "Peppino Brancati" community of Torre Annunziata, Rosaria did her volunteer Civil Service. Now that she has had to suspend it, she has understood how much those fragile and needy children have entered her heart, and she says: "I would like the State to think of them as people, as well as members of a community ... I would like to give them a voice. I wish I could stimulate their intelligence ... I would like many things, but most of all I would like this pandemic to pass quickly so that I can enter the house shouting, make fun of them and in the joking around, to embrace them again."

 

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