Time.news – The presumption of us Westerners has always been to know what is good and what is bad. If we think of colonialism we realize it very well, with all the negative consequences, above all, and positive ones. We know today how much damage it has caused.
This presumption, unwillingly or willingly – it belongs to our DNA – also permeates those who make help to that part of the world on the margins, of those who suffer, a flag.
We still know, even today, what is good and what is bad, not only for us but also for those we presume to help.
So a book, which in its title has the word “learn” – it is already a program – surprises us. And that Don Dante Carraro, at the head of one of the largest Italian and international non-governmental organizations, wrote it, surprises us even more. We are talking about “What we can learn from Africa”, written, in fact, by the director of the NGO Doctors with Africa CUAMM, together with Paolo di Paolo, writer, for the types of Laterza (148 pages, 18 euros).
But what does this book tell about? Carraro himself writes: “Africa teaches us, or at least taught me, that lamentation is of little use; what makes the difference is to go from lamenting to mending. And to find new ways to give value to what seemed lost to us. He taught me to test all fixed patterns, including a certain delusion of Western omnipotence. He taught me that frugality is not a limit, but it can become an opportunity to leverage more on intelligence and study than on money. And not to be afraid of children: they are life, courage, challenge, future, enthusiasm “.
The book tells, in the first person, the story of a boy from the Venetian province, a recent graduate in medicine, who begins to question himself and chooses to become a priest, engaging in suburban churchescoming into contact with difficult social environments.
Then the bishop of Padua sent him to CUAMM, there he met the founder Francesco Canova and the director Luigi Mazzucato. In 1995 his first trip to Africa in Mozambique which has just emerged from the civil war.
It is the beginning of a personal and collective adventure, entirely within the largest Italian organization in Africawhich mainly involves the weakest sections of the population – with treatment and prevention programs, development interventions of health structures, activities dedicated to the sick, training of doctors and nurses, midwives and other professionals and which has built medical facilities in 43 countries .
It is currently present in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Uganda. A stable and structured presence in which – as Carraro writes – there is a lot to do to train self-sufficient doctors and structures, “but there is also a lot to learn. Not only on Africans, for example on their relationship with nature, but also on us Westerners, capable of bringing out unexpected resources when we are confronted with such extreme and distant realities “.
Help them in their home? Don Dante asks himself, “yes, certainly, if we understand that Africa is not that stereotyped monolith we think, but a very diversified reality. And if we are able to get out of an emergency logic to enter into solidarity over time, in the awareness of a common destiny “. In short, not “for Africa”, but “with Africa”.
In the introduction to the book entitled “An epochal birth”, Claudio Magris writes that if “the world makes sense, it is due to people like them and to many others and others no less protagonists in this unequal but relentless and intrepid fight against infamy of pain, of exploitation, of unmentionable violence “.
And then he adds: “They will probably not be able to greatly mitigate the violence and horror of this epochal pregnancy, but just as much or little as they can and will be able to do, and which seems so small on the huge screen of world history, is invaluable. And for the rest, as a priest friend of mine said, may the Eternal Father take responsibility for him once and for all… ”.
A book, therefore, to be read. A book that helps us to get out of the stereotype that we Westerners know what is good and what is bad, not only for us, but also for those we presume to help. It would be an extraordinary paradigm shift.