The future of the boys in Nebbi starts also with you!!

Being a child in Uganda, as in most African countries, means to live each day with the hope to survive. When arriving in countries like these, you are immediately touched by the manoeuvres, the glances, the smiles, the handshakes of the children representing the present, but also their hope for a better future… Today, the average age expectation for a person in Uganda is 45.
Every single day, thousands of young children die from famine, lack of water and sanitary help, suffering diseases such as malaria and AIDS.
Lots of them become orphans; they become marginal and have no opportunity to go to school and to get appropriate education, enabling them to live a dignified and better life then the ones before them. Up until today, still too many children are being deprived of a “child’s life”. To lots of them “a life” is being denied.

What are these children in Uganda missing? All that we simply consider acquired, to them it does not exist and it represents a daily struggle to achieve it. Water, the source of life and a daily need is the luxury of a few people only, the ones that live close to a spring, strewed about in the area at kilometres’ distance.

The first morning trip is dedicated to the provision of water… one can see roads with lines of women, children, also small children, 7, 8 years old, under a burning sun, barefoot and with wearing four cloths, walking for kilometres and kilometres back to their village these heavy water tanks. Besides getting the water, these women and children also have to gather wood to make a fire, indispensable for cooking the few things that they can grow or amass from nature: polenta made of matocko, chicken- or goat meat, milk from the few goats or from the skinny cows that they possess and where one may wonder how much milk they can still produce.

Food is a gift of nature, each area with different products that go from bananas to papaya, mango or other fruits unknown to us… and everything is distributed, nothing being left over. But even food is a luxury because it depends on the rainfall that may vary from year to year…
These children have little time to play… nevertheless they always know how to offer you a smiling face.

To me, this has been a beautiful sensation, knowing how to read in every single face a desire, a different dream. These faces, these glances and these eyes that know how to look at you with an absolute profoundness… they all have a specific message: they ask for our attention, our help, and our affection. I would never have stopped making pictures… each and every time it brought a new message and, I did not want to lose a single one of them.
In order to understand this experience, one simply needs to live it.
Until today I only saw such scenes on TV, but they never brought the same sensation that one experiences when face to face…

Visiting the Nutritional and paediatric division of the hospital of Angal, guided by a person that is so deeply devoted to these children and to their future, Claudia Marsaj, made me understand how distant this reality is from us, from our sons and daughters that live in a world that offers EVERYTHING and where yet it never seems to be enough. Many times over again I have been listening to the stories of Mario and Claudia, both living this experience for many years already. However, the emotion caused by seeing it all with my own eyes has been quite different to imagining it all.
Believe me, it would happen to all of you… and as such I’m asking you not to be indifferent but to open your eyes, your ears and above all to open your heart to this sad and cruel reality.
To quote Maria Teresa, if we all contribute with one single drop, together we could create the ocean and make the difference for many of these manoeuvres, these little hands that are crying for help and comfort.
Even without words, looks can talk…
I hope that my words can catch your interest and open your heart.

Thanks for having listened to me…
Antonella