Pathways of Peace by Romina Gurashi

Author:Romina Gurashi [Gurashi, Romina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

With the help of some of his Nomadelfia friends and savings from manual labor jobs he purchased two hectares of land just outside the village, in Serro, to build his Borgo di Dio (Village of God). There, with the help of local peasants and fishermen, he built a road to the village and a small house to accommodate himself and the orphans who lived in the old section of Trappeto. The town suffered from chronic underdevelopment and incapacity to change because of the widespread banditry that was especially rife between Partinico and Montelepre.

The death of Benedetto Barretta – one of the orphans – from malnutrition in 1952 deeply affected Dolci. After contacting the local and regional authorities to request funding to meet the town’s basic needs, he began his first hunger strike, lying symbolically in the same bed where Barretta had died (Baldassaro 2015: 101). His fast lasted eight days and was interrupted only when he had also obtained funds to cover the open sewers. In those eight long days there were demonstrations of sympathy and solidarity from all over Italy, even from Aldo Capitini, with whom he later kept up a lively correspondence which inspired his projects and philosophy of nonviolence.

After his nonviolent protest Dolci undertook the systematic job of gathering data and reporting the results describing the terrible living conditions of the local population. His technique of data collection was to meticulously describe, denounce and reflect on the town’s economic and social conditions, and to do interviews outlining the degradation in which the interviewees lived. The result of this work was “Fare presto (e bene) perché si muore,” published in 1954 (translated into English as “To Feed the Hungry”):

You get me: I’m not saying we shouldn’t pray, meditate, etc. etc. What I’m saying is that in this area […] people are dying of hunger and many survive because they make do working in the fields of others. And I want to inject the well-founded suspicion that some are dying because of our indifference and neglect.

(Dolci 1954: 101)

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