Uganda: A School To Born Again
Matteo Severgnini belongs to the Memores Domini Lay Association and, since 2012, has been working in Uganda as a teacher and coordinator at the ‘Luigi Giussani High School’ in Kampala. Matteo used to teach history and philosophy for six years at a beautiful school in the province of Bergamo: "I said yes immediately thanks to the experience of fullness and satisfaction that I was living in Italy," he explains. "It sounds like a paradox, but the joy in my heart made me immediately available. In addition, the proposal came from people who are my friends and who have educated me to recognize that the first mission is always the heart, where the Mystery plays the great game of reconquering myself at every moment. The curiosity and desire to confirm everything that I had received did the rest."
It was not particularly difficult to leave Italy: "It was like leaving home to go home. Everything was, and is, an opportunity to regain the essential reason for my departure and to be in Uganda: Christ. I remember Julian Carron's words before leaving: "We live and go out to know more about our vocation because our fellow men only need to see one saying his own Yes and respond to Him, and that's all. In your vocation you are responding to Him, whom the human heart, at every latitude and longitude, desires. Up to the point of being able to say, as Giussani stated: ‘Christ, the life of my life’".
Running a school in Uganda means first and foremost training teachers, and in 2017 the ‘Luigi Giussani High School’ was considered the 76th best school out of 1,652 schools in all of Uganda. This school has a unique history: it was built by the mothers of the children who attend it, mothers who are mostly victims of dehumanized violence, persecution, horrors of war and HIV. Making huge sacrifices, they started in 2001 to create necklaces from recycled colored paper - strips rolled like beads, then sealed with enamel - and they sold 48,000 of them.
The school continues to exist and operate. "The motto that the teachers have given themselves is, ‘teaching is the adult way to learn,’" Severgnini explains. "This truly reflects the heart of the educational work I am pursuing: in fact, one cannot educate without being educated. At the ‘Luigi Giussani High School,’ you do not get beaten up. It is not just a school policy, but it comes from the new awareness that man has an irreducible dignity, and if everyone discovers this for himself, he will also treat those in front of him with the same love and respect. For this reason, when our students were asked the question in a questionnaire, ‘What do you like best about your school?’, 89% of them answered: ‘The relationship I have with the teachers. They always make me feel at home.’"