Simone,
do you want to go to Mozambique??
by Simone CANOVA
It is an ordinary day, in the heart of Umbria, at the Libera Università di Alcatraz (Free University of Alcatraz).
I have been working here for several years, I deal with good news, as I always answer to those who ask me what I do. Ah, I forgot… my name is Simone Canova.
I run across Jacopo Fo, who is the master at the Libera Università di Alcatraz; greeting rituals, then the destabilizing phrase of the day: “Simone, do you want to go to Mozambique?”.
Here, this is how the adventure of the Theater So Good started for me, the author of this travel diary.
To tell the truth, now and then the name of Mozambique had come up for some time. There were rumors about presumed theater courses in the African country to promote healthcare and health and good nutrition.
Indeed, during the previous months it happened a couple of times that Jacopo talked to me about this project … but for me it was one of the 15,837 ideas that we could carry out one day, perhaps … And today, suddenly, this question!
I rush in my brain to open the “James speaks to me of Mozambique” drawer and collect the little information that I remember: yes, it has to do with theater courses for Mozambican actors, all related to a project for the promotion of health, particularly of mothers and children. It was all I knew, all that the “boss” had told me and that I had stored as simple ideas, mere hypotheses. Therefore, there is little information I can dig out from the memory, but thousands of questions that need answers. Does that request make it all official now?
Have we found the partners for the project? Which project?!? Who is going, who is coming? When am I leaving?
IBut I just answer: “Yes, of course!”
Because if Jacopo asks you whether you want to go to Mozambique you just answer yes, the rest are insignificant details! Besides, I know Africa a little bit, Jacopo cannot have asked me that question by chance.
I participated in an international cooperation project in a village in Burkina Faso for four years, where we built a well and vegetable gardens, chicken coops and barns for animals in an abandoned and uncultivated field.
There I lived and worked in very close contact with the Burkinabé, perhaps the poorest of the poor. We registered more than 150 children from three villages for elementary school and planted about a hundred of new trees. And we distributed farming tools … and how many cases of cured malaria! This experience profoundly changed me, dramatically modifying the order of my priorities.
But Jacopo escapes, he has other commitments. “Can we talk about it?” I ask him. “Yes, sure, meanwhile just start to think about it…”
