Class III F of the institute including Toniolo di Pisa (branch office) – Chronicle
“There is a class, in Italy, full of empty desks. For the rest it resembles another class of any school in our country: with the chair, the blackboard, posters on the walls and in the middle some untidy rows of desks “But those desks are empty. Always empty “. Working on the book” The class of empty benches “by Luigi Ciotti, we discovered that children are often victims of unjust cruelty for which, at times, they lose their lives. Many die from the mafia: because they are children or relatives of repentants or because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their stories represent the life of children like us, their passions, immersed in their soul, which has been brutally ripped away with everyday life. Kidnapped children, hit by bullets for I’m wrong, dissolved in acid. Without mercy. Like Caterina, just 50 days old, perhaps the youngest victim of the Mafia, who died in 1993 from an attack in the center of Florence. Like Benedetto, 13, killed for committing a nonsense: often he was absent from school and went out with older boys; he was involved in a theft against a boss’s mother and this mistake cost him his life. In a child-friendly world it should mean having the right to be wrong. Children, recruited for war purposes in over ¾ of armed soldiers, removed from their families, manipulated to hate and kill. Come on Mike, Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was only 11 years old when he was removed from school and taken to a military camp, where he took up his first rifle: “To rape, to loot, to kill: this we were taught”. Shouldn’t a child’s imperative be “play, dream, run”? An upside-down childhood, his. 144. 144 children have died so far as a result of the war, victims of the bombing in Ukraine. Like Kirill, 18 months, wrapped in a blue blanket in his father’s arms. Like Tanya, 6, who died of dehydration under the rubble of a building in Mariupol. In the arms of our parents or within the walls of our own home, do we not have the right to feel protected? We live in a world that seems off-limits to children. If we all talk about the strength and hope of that 11-year-old Ukrainian child, who managed to get to safety, after having walked a thousand kilometers with a backpack on his shoulders and a written telephone number, perhaps we would be able to give an impulse to change the world we live in. Who knows what a child-friendly world would really be like? It would perhaps be a world suitable for everyone.