For several years groups and young Italians from the Sant’Egidio community have been spending several days in Elbasan, working with the mentally ill patients of the Elbasan Regional Hospital.
We got to know them and created a good relationship with them by going inside the hospital to try to get to know the patients and call them by name.
It was proposed to the managers that we do the Peace Prayer in the different pavilions or outdoors, identifying – always with the consent of the competent authorities – which of the guests could also go outside, naturally supervised by their managers and psychologists.
We accompanied them to the Elena Gjika School for the training of nurses and currently Our Lady of Good Counsel University. With the animators, we turned the classes into workshops of different interests, while the young volunteers animated the different groups, trying to understand and meet the needs of the guests.
The group of about 30 young people, from Genoa, who have been participating for a few years now, also includes some Albanian girls who have studied in Italy and who act as interpreters for the not easy Albanian language.
We Sisters have always been present, also because every day the staff prepared lunch for more than thirty ‘sick people’ and for the young people who in turn served at the table, prepared the dishes, took those in need to the bathroom and after lunch danced with them or played the guitar for them to sing. Albanian folk music and songs invited everyone to dance.
The experience usually lasts fifteen days in the summer and five days in the Christmas holidays.
Hosting these groups even to sleep makes us realise how prophetic the structure can become. Having broad horizons also helps the community to open up to new forms of service to the poor. It makes us realise that many young guests are ‘lost’ to drugs, alcohol, gambling and many other addictions. There are also those whose families can’t or no longer want to take care of them. The young volunteers easily empathise with the few patients entrusted to them, they care in all aspects.
Sant’Egidio & Sisters of St. Jeanne Antide Thouret, Elbasan Albania
Sant’Egidio is a Christian community, born in 1968, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, in a high school in the centre of Rome. Over the years it has become a network of communities that, in more than 70 countries around the world, with a special focus on the peripheries and the outlying areas, gathers men and women of all ages and conditions, united by a bond of fraternity in listening to the Gospel and in voluntary and free commitment to the poor and to peace.
Prayer, the poor and peace are its fundamental references.
