I was about two and a half years old when my mother took me to accompany my cousin, her sister’s son, to nursery school. I saw all those children and wanted to stay.
Sister Clementina, who was the teacher, told my mother to leave me there. That’s how I started… I was very frail until I was four years old, and I remember that when I was sick, the nun would wrap me in a blanket and take me to the nuns’ refectory, lay me down on the sofa, and I would stay there all day until my mother came to pick me up.
On Corpus Christi, Sister Clementina dressed all the boys as pages and the girls as angels. Some were dressed as saints, such as St. Francis and St. Jeanne Antide… I was dressed as St. Jeanne Antide.
In those years, girls’ education was entrusted to nuns, while boys’ education was entrusted to lay people, and lessons were held in public schools. We went both in the morning and in the afternoon and stayed at home on Thursdays. We also studied home economics, and I remember that Sister Ancilla and Sister Augusta taught us how to polish and keep wood-burning stoves clean.
The nuns took great care in preparing the girls and boys who had to take the entrance exam for middle school, and Sister Concetta gave Latin lessons to those who had difficulties.
On Sundays, there was the Oratory at the Opera Pia, where the nuns played with us, and afterwards there was the Catholic Action conference.
Each member of Catholic Action had a task. I was the lookout, which meant I had to go and fetch the little girls and take them to Mass, and then we all went to church together for Vespers.
In the summer, we would go embroidering… in the middle of the afternoon, we would eat the snacks we had brought with us and then we would put on a little play.
For the feast of St. Jeanne Antide, we would go to all the houses looking for white flowers to decorate the statue in the parish church, and then we would bring them on the morning of the feast wearing a white apron with a blue bow.
After elementary school, I went to Tortona to board at the San Vicenzo Institute, where I attended middle school and the first year of high school.
The years I spent at the boarding school in Tortona helped me a lot. I had the opportunity to pray a lot and I spent part of my vacations with the orphans, for whom I felt great compassion. I talked to them a lot and, faced with their tragedies, I prayed before the crucifix and then tried to console them.
I spent my middle school and high school years in this way, with all the mischief typical of that age. Then I decided to join the Sisters of Charity.
After years of formation in the Congregation, I went from being a student to a teacher in the nursery school as a Sister of Charity, committing myself to “considering children as sacred deposits entrusted to us by Heaven and as talents placed in our hands to be put to good use” (St. Jeanne Antide).
The seed sown in my heart has borne fruit…
Thanks to this formative journey guided by the Sisters of Charity, I chose to say “YES” to the Lord.
I would give this title to my journey: “It doesn’t matter if you are born in a chicken coop… when you are lucky enough to become a swan.”
Every day I repeat my “yes, here I am!” and live my life as a mystery of love.
This is how it unfolds, even if at times I walk blindly, in the fog. I strive to put the Lord at the center of my heart, living intensely in the present moment and blossoming where I am sent.
I have so much peace in my heart and feel surrounded by many brothers and sisters: children, young people, adults.
