At this point you know the journey: Maputo, Johannesburg, Frankfurt, Milan. The journey lasts 25-26 hours, 30 if you count the train from Milan to Alcatraz in Umbria. I pass the time sleeping mostly, uncomfortably, but sleeping. The return journey proclaims the end of the mission, this time we were here for 17 days, and Tiredness with a capital T falls on us.

I didn’t speak for two days after returning the first time!

In a few weeks, when the actors arrive in Italy and the training period begins, I will see all my travelling companions, Bruno, Jacopo, the boys of the video troupe.

We all have plenty of things to do!

I was a river in flood with Jacopo Fo. I reported on the mission, looking at him face to face, one beside the other, no longer on Skype with a few thousand kilometres of distance between us.

I finally told it all, from the theatre performances that we saw to the intrinsic difficulty of the project. There were moments of hesitation and moments of tension. Sometimes, between us Italians, we didn’t beat about the bush.

Then you sleep on it, you eat on it and everything passes. And you start working again, so you’re there…

The mission was a success. On the word of Jacopo Fo, who gives me the point of view of a person who sees things from afar. We have gathered lots and lots of information. I let him see the video of some pieces of the performances of the people who were selected.

“He’s Agostinho, she’s Ana Bela, look at her smile! Safina! Safina dreams about being a singer, she’s the only one who spoke about a dream!”

He asks me about comical theatre, about Harlequin.

No, I didn’t find Harlequin in Mozambique. I took note of almost all the scenes when the audience laughed.

“Look, he tells her that if they get together they can talk on Facebook and Whatsapp, the audience started laughing, understand? Facebook and Whatsapp!!!”

We also speak about the health structures.

Yes, I asked a lot of people what they thought about the new Health centre in Palma, or the peripheral centres for the villages, I asked what the relationship between modern and traditional medicine was like, I asked the Cuamm doctors and also the normal inhabitants about that, to have all the different points of view.

There are difficulties and fear: difficulties in reaching the Health Centres, above all the one in Palma which is a true hospital for emergencies with operating rooms; fear of imagining that a pregnant woman has to distance herself from her family to stay at the Casa de Espera and be monitored during the last stages of the pregnancy. There’s diffidence towards the doctors and towards medicine. It’s true that there has been collaboration and also meetings between traditional doctors, here known as curandeiros, and Western doctors, but the process is long, it should be followed constantly.

During the first mission in Mozambique, Dor Iara, who is still head of the Palma Health Centre, told us that the problem was communication. “We speak different languages” (the doctors speak Portuguese, the patients one of the local dialects: Swahili, Macua, Makonde).

We should use a simple, understandable language during the performance, the message must be clear and simple, direct.

Otherwise we’ll be just another unsuccessful experiment on international cooperation.