We will remember this year. We say it at the end of every school year and, with the passing of the months and the seasons, effectively that’s the way it is. From every scholastic year were remember the students who enrolled in the school, and a few anecdotes that made that class unique, a one-off.
And every year we are amazed at how this life is rich of everyday occurrences that make each new acquaintance significant.
I don’t believe that what is significant for me will also be for the rest of the staff at the Italian School at Liberi Nantes, but if I am properly interpreting certain smiles and embraces that I saw yesterday during the last day of school, while we were giving out the certificates of attendance to our students, well, yes: for all of us, this school year was significant, a year in which we have tried to give continuity to a didactic project that we embarked upon in November, providing 96 hours of Italian lessons on a voluntary basis, following two distinct groups and trying to make sure that nobody felt left behind.
Because nobody is ever behind when the horizon is always beyond human reach. Nobody is ever behind if, in the struggle for existence the rules of the game chance continually, with the object of ensuring that nobody can take part, and that those on the journey finds themselves reduced to a piece of paper to pass from office to office, that one day sees his name on it and finds a stamp: of delay, of denial, of humanitarian assistance.
What does it mean? What will happen? Yes, what does it mean to receive a denial?
At school, we try to explain it. But most of all we try to explain what needs to be done to not receive one.
Knowledge of Italian, we are told, is a prerequisite: your story, of escaping from war or poverty, you must recount in the Italian language. It’s a language that we love and defend and that today can help save human destinies.
I think this is the only reason that all us volunteers of the Italian School of Liberi Nantes do what we do. We teach that which we learned just by dint of being born, and that doesn’t require any hard work beyond giving up some free time for something we think of as a greater good: the chance that a brother or sister, speaking our language, will no longer fall behind and will be able to reach that horizon where they can feel safe and strong enough to begin constructing a new life.
At the end of every school year I ask myself if what we do is working.
Looking into eyes blacker than the night we seem to read a “thank you”.
Thanks to you.
(Martina Volpe)
English (UK) 
Italiano