Fr Mario Pérez, Rector of Don Bosco Ngangi spoke about the work being carried out by the Salesians and their lay collaborators, including some VIS volunteers. Prior to that a video, again produced by Don Bosco Missions-Media Centre in Turin, was shown: “Goma, from darkness to light.” The video opens with the desperate cry of a mother a refugee in the Mugunga camp: “I want to go back to Sake, my village, here we are reduced to hunger, I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday,” which sums up the whole tragic situation which has deteriorated in recent months in the area of North Kivu.
The Centre, which was opened in 1988, over the years has been transformed into one of the most important reception and rehabilitation centres for children at risk in the whole region. To the numbers of children and youngsters from Ngangi or nearby villages, since 1998, following the intensification in the fighting, have been added children and youngsters belonging to all the tribes and also coming from long distant places, fleeing or displaced after having seen their families killed or carried off.
Nowadays children and youngsters found unaccompanied, undernourished, struggling along the roads are taken in, together with child soldiers refugees, and all sorts of poor, marginalised and exploited children. The services provided by the Salesians and other helpers in Ngangi-Goma are of all kinds: responding to their most urgent needs, respecting and promoting their dignity and human rights, offering an appropriate all-round education.
The youngsters are given the chance to study and follow vocational training courses, suited to their age and ability. A team of social workers is engaged in the work of identification, in finding and drawing up the right projects in order to enable the youngsters in the care of the Centre to make their own way in the future.
To ensure the long-term prospects of the youngster placed in a family situation a project is developed which considers the needs of the whole family group.
“The aim is to reintroduce children into society,” Fr Mario Perez says, “and to give them back their rights. When they don’t have family, we act as their family, but we should remember that in the future these children will want to create their own families. To help them with their independence we offer them a home. If a child is older, and comes from a family where there is an older sibling, or an aunt or uncle who can take care of them, but they don’t have anywhere to live, we give them a home. Those who benefit from this sort of help can pay something back by working, even if it is a form of micro-credit. They have to give something back, so they can say it really belongs to them. This is a way of making people feel proud of themselves.”
It was, in fact, through the visit of the people from Don Bosco Mission Media Centre in Turin and through VIS, who made the video, that the attention of the Italian media was drawn to the tragedy in Goma by means of a well-organised media campaign.
Published 14/01/2009
