Who Are We?

(this was written in January 2015, and will not be updated)

Hi folks, if you don't know us (how on earth have you ended up reading this, then?), we’re originally from Italy, and from a Catholic background, but seven years in Clonakilty (West Cork, undoubtedly the best corner in Ireland) made us Irish at heart and, above all, the welcoming of Clon’s congregation drew us into Methodism, which was how God shaped our recent life, first renewing our faith and then calling us to serve as a family of Mission Partners, which we feel as a real blessing.

We live in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, the “land of a thousand hills”, with a terrible past (the 1994 genocide), an apparently stable and peaceful present and a very lively Free Methodist Church, headed by the humble and dedicated Bishop Samuel.

Elena, an experienced physiotherapist, works with disabled children in a special needs school run by the Church and is going to start other community projects (especially early intervention); Mattia, a language teacher, is here to train teachers of primary and secondary Methodist schools (the country recently switched from French to English) and various other groups, from pastors to University students and possibly street-children. Michele (7) and Sam (5) are settling in their very good school and will surely gain much from this experience, just like their parents!

A BIT OF HISTORY

From Padua to Cancun, from Clon to Kigali

Mattia is 37 and studied languages and literature (English and Spanish) at the University of Padova, Italy (one of the oldest in the world); Elena is 33, with a degree in physiotherapy from the same University; Michele, now 7, was only 4 months-old when he moved to Ireland with mom&dad; Sam is 5 and was born in Cork. 

Mattia and Elena have been married for 10 years and after living together for 2 years and a half in their home town of Padova, they left Italy for Mexico, to work as missionaries in the poorest outskirts of Cancun; when a new member of the family started growing inside mummy, they realised the conditions there would not allow them to balance well their activities and the new situation (basically after 3 months they didn't have a fixed place to live yet...), so in February 2007 they packed their things and flew back to Italy, where they welcomed Michele and dedicated themselves to the joys (?!?) of parenthood. But restless-dad was not happy at all in the place where he had lived for 30 years, choking with smog, oppressed by traffic, sick of seeing blocks of flat rising all around, and without any satisfying job on the horizon, so in October, with Elena in maternity leave, he started looking for work abroad to finally use in earnest the languages he'd learnt and after two weeks he was living in the "idyllic, small but lovely sea-side town" of Clonakilty, working as a customer service agent for an international communication company. "Clon" proved to be as good as they hoped, a more human-sized town in a wonderful location, a perfect place where to raise a child, in a welcoming and lively community, so after two months the family was all happily settled in Ireland. 

The rest is all well known to the locals: Mattia started playing Gaelic Football, joined the local Amnesty International Group and fell in love with storytelling; Elena began practising as a Chartered Physio and kept her love for singing alive thanks to a few choirs, while Michele enjoyed his toddlers group, play-school and then "big school"; in December 2009 Sam came to enlarge the lions' pride, which immediately afterwards moved to their first house, with a garden and a room for the best physio in town, who was soon working so well and so much as to allow daddy to joyfully quit his by-then awfully boring job and dedicate himself to cycle-taxing the two rascals to school and around town, to taking care of the house and to teaching, mostly privately, not one, not two but three languages. Elena's career as a miracle-worker was overshadowed only by the rise of her sublime voice, employed both in the best local choirs and as a soloist in the amazingly good musical scene of Clon. In 2014, when his teaching, his uphill cycling, his sporadic gaelic football, his constantly pushing the local Amnesty Group to do more and more, and his master-category athletics races seemed to him too little, Mattia came up with the Shakespeare Festival, just not to let Elena take all the artistic honours. 

However, despite all their success and the kids' love for all their friends, the activities they were involved in and all the nature trips around West Cork which filled weekdays and weekends, it was now time to turn page and move to the next adventure: God's voice had managed at last to make itself heard once more and the call to mission had been ringing loudly in their souls once again, so Mattia and Elena contacted the Methodist Mission Society and after long assessment and discernment they were appointed as Mission Partners and assigned to the Free Methodist Church of Rwanda, in the capital, Kigali. The rest is history... well, at least in the making, on this blog!