As soon as I landed back from Nepal, with all the setbacks arising from Everest evacuation due to the spread of COVID, my head needed a radical change. A change that will transform a personal project into a joint project. A project that my colleagues from EKI foundation were going to carry out and which I wanted to join instantly. Nothing more and nothing less than to fly to Sierra Leone to collaborate in the installation of photovoltaic stations and thus bring light to remote areas.
But the trip became, as it almost always happens, into a cluster of events, sensations, emotions and experiences that remain marked for life in your retina. An unknown Africa where the landscapes are intense green and the sunsets turn golden after big downpours.The unbearable mosquitoes that I don’t get used to, boys and girls with perpetual smiles, friendly and hospitable people who offer what they have for nothing. It has been a real adventure.
We met Father Victor, who has lived in Sierra Leone for 48 years and who experienced the civil war seeing atrocities that would make anyone return to his country immediately, and who, far from taking that step, has spent half his life giving food to starving children, risking his life on more than one occasion by sending child soldiers back to their hometowns.
I have been lucky enough to travel a lot in my life and I have met incredible people, but the days spent in Sierra Leone with EKI Foundation left me speechless. If there is something that impressed me about this trip, it was the slums of Freetown, we saw girls as young as 9 years practicing prostitution, fights that ended in tragedy and in the middle of that panorama, an Argentine Salesian father who cares for about 2,000 children a year.
Undoubtedly a country that has not left me indifferent and full of contrasts. Beautiful landscapes and people with an infinite smile in front of a very harsh social reality where violence is very present. The crude reality
