“A month in Malawi changes your life”
One month in Malawi. Chiara Giovannini, the volunteer nurse of San Marino for children, the association that has been on the front line for Africa for fifteen years thanks to six schools that have guaranteed an education to around 12,000 children. An adventure poised between the areas of Matumba and Balaka, the one experienced by Chiara, who returned to Titano last December.
«I left animated by the desire to do volunteer work, putting my professional skills into play». Even if she is not new to spartan and authentic travel, the 26-year-old was deeply struck by the “poverty and dignity” of a people, forced to live “in precarious shacks, in villages that rely on dirt roads that become torrents in the rainy season full”.
Screw uphill
To move her “the hospital run with great professionalism, despite the almost total lack of resources, but above all the strength of the women of Malawi who, accustomed to a life of hardship, do not complain even in the sufferings of childbirth or in the face of the death of their child”. It was difficult and at the same time intense for her to work as a healthcare professional, but beyond the language barriers – Chiara continues – I met people «capable of gratitude and joy for the little things, as well as infinite acceptance, given that she was “the different”, the only white one together with one of the Poverelle nuns of Bergamo who hosted her in a hospital in the village», before she went to supervise the work in the schools located in an even more remote area.
Authentic joys
Among the images, outside the usual tourist routes, which he will carry with him forever, there are the men “who carried huge piles of wood, balanced on old bikes”, ready to grind kilometers in the dark of night, to sell the goods escaping to the prohibitions and controls imposed after the deforestation of many areas. Unforgettable, continues Chiara, also «the women who rolled in the water with joy, shouting and dancing, during the inauguration of some wells equipped with hand pumps. Water is life and it is precisely the women who seek it by traveling kilometers and kilometers with a vase on their heads. So you go home with a strong teaching, whether you like it or not», underlines the nurse, highlighting lives crushed by daily sacrifice «where nothing is taken for granted», primarily due to still primitive agriculture. And although they are the bedrock of the family, women have no rights. We, being born on the other side of the world, take too many things for granted».