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Diary of Agnese – 5

I am tired and I’ve had enough.
It’s still etched in my mind, the coexistence between life and destruction: the lit-up and modern shops on the ground floor of dilapidated and crumbling buildings.
They still leave a mark, the words of W. when she brings me to see her home, completely destroyed:
“It wasn’t enemies who reduced my home to this. It was the government...mine”.
It’s still etched, how the evil that man is capable of is in front of everyone’s eyes...walking through destruction you see every day how far the madness of war can go.
It’s still etched, the feeling that after all war did not completely win, because it’s not the end.
Hope is in the air.

It still grips me, the wish of the group of Doves to be a small building block of this hope, or rather just a strut, one of those you put in crumbling buildings after an earthquake, to hold them up. Where there are life and a chance, we act as struts to hold everything up. We do not know how many people will be willing to leave their jobs, wages and commodities to be part of the Dove here, and to invest in hope, something much more intangible than the projects that build wells (necessary) or something else.
Yet I clearly feel that it was, and it is, important to be here: having accompanied the Syrians home, monitoring this return to daily life, laying down the groundwork for existence, whatever may happen and whichever direction the situation may take, not leaving these faraway places that have already suffered the unimaginable, alone.
As Francesco Gesualdi says: “after all our greatest aspiration is to become useless”...I
kind of wish that for myself, I kind of fear it won’t come to be.