EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 20

January 2000

AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HELPING DRUG ADDICTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

Edges Magazine makes contact with people who have been helped by the Cenacle. A community for Drug Addicts, which was, set up by Sister Elvira an Italian nun who was the daughter of an alcoholic. It is based on love care and work. There are cenacles in different parts of the world. The daily programme is centred round prayer, work and caring for each other. At the moment the nearest community is based in Spain.

Corrado Fenoqlio

My name is Corrado, I'm 25 and I've been at the Cenacolo Community for over two and a half years. How did I get here? Certainly not through my own efforts, in fact, before coming here, I didn't believe in Community at all. I had many reasons for that, it's only now that I realise that they were linked to my rebellion.

Somebody believed for me and cut away all my props. At that point I was left with nothing and the Community was my last chance. The true friendship I've found here has helped me cope with the many times I've wanted to give up completely, I couldn't fail again and I didn't want to.

It's taken me a long time to understand and accept that the Community had a lot to teach me, that it could give me what I've always been looking for: 'the joy of living'. Once again I had to set my own ideas aside and trust another person, Elvira, who, after making me bend my stiff-necked pride, made me kneel down and taught me to pray, to ask for help. She made me feel truly poor. It wasn't easy, but I found the strength to do it thanks to the example of lads who'd had the courage to choose life before I did.

Nevertheless all these values I struggled with helped me in the end to make a decision: to be able to stand alone at last and say my personal 'yes' to this new life. In fact, after going back home for a while, I felt the need to come back to the Community which is now my family.

Only now do I understand that my rebellion against everything and everyone had even made me reject the One who created me, the One to whom I owe my life, the One who sent me all those people who wanted to help me because they still believed in me.

I ask You, Lord, to repay them with your love.

Donato de Leonardis

My name is Donato, and I've been living in the Community for almost three years.

For eight years I lived a disorderly life and I realise the harm I spread about me by living in despair. I stole, I cheated, I pretended to be what I was not, I did all the things that are usual in a street-life.

After working briefly for the carabinieri I went back to the friends with whom I'd begun to smoke cannabis and then on to heroin. Even now I don't know why I became an addict, but I can tell you that I was discontented, I wanted to escape from the normal world that I couldn't understand and seek new ways of being happy. So I decided to leave my family, certain that I could get a job, a house, and be responsible. But all my self-confidence only made me make bigger and bigger mistakes until I was forced to realise that my life was going downhill. I didn't trust anybody any more. In my selfishness I thought only of my heroin supply, I didn't care about anything else.

My parents made various efforts to help me, but in the end I found real help through the Community, who told my parents to throw me out of the house. So, after touching rock bottom, I decided to join them. In the beginning the impact was enormous, there were so many things I didn't understand and had to do because all the lads who'd been there for a long time gave me advice and example.

Sacrifice, renunciation, friendship and the hope of a better life, my conscience speaking to me and so many other values which I have discovered by kneeling in prayer have made me understand day by day that resurrection comes from God, the Father of us all. Thanks to Elvira who is making it possible for me to rebuild myself in the school of real life, thanks to so much I have done in the Community and the experiences I have lived through, I have been given the great privilege of being one of the seven lads who have opened the old people's home at S. Venanzo. There I, poor as I am, have felt the joy of serving people poorer than myself, than any of us.

Thank you, Elvira, for all you have done and continue to do for me.

Fedele Paqano

My name is Fedele, I come from Turin and I was a drug addict for about eight years. I began by trying it a few times and got worse and worse. I think the cause of all this was that I was living a solitary life despite the love of my family and those around me. I wanted to hide my difficulties for the sake of pride. I never asked anyone for help when I felt down and I never lowered myself to listen to advice from anyone. When I realised all this it was too late and I no longer had the strength to pull myself out of it. Like so many of us I was very good at hiding what I was. In the police, where I worked for five years, \I lived a life of lies and compromise until the day I was arrested.

Everything went on the same for three years. I managed to trick my family again and my girl-friend until, reduced to a skeleton, I asked my parents for help for the first time. They sent me to the Community. Here I met people who have been close to me right from the first day. Sister Elvira and the lads have always spoken truthfully to me, making me realise who Fedele really was. Now I know all the harm I did to myself and all those around me. I thank Sister Elvira and the Community for this new life of mine.

Ferrero Domenico

Looking back my life seems to have been nothing but loneliness and I think that has had a marked effect.

I spent my childhood far from my parents for various reasons. First I was brought up by my mother's parents, then from six years old until I was ten I spent in a boarding school. At ten I began to live with my family. I remember the happiness of going back home, but I soon discovered that I was deluding myself. My parents thought of nothing but work and had little time for us children. I found that my father was a man who liked drinking, he would get very violent and take his anger out on us. I remember some terrifying times at home with him. Soon I wanted to escape from this reality I couldn't live with.

At first I escaped by staying in my room listening to music and drinking. As the years passed I tried to stay away from the house as much as possible, that was how I got to know other young people who, like me, were looking for something different. With them I tried the first drugs and, when I was twenty, the first injection; I had no idea that I was going towards destruction. I went to prison, but even that didn't open my eyes. I was lost in a maze and I couldn't get out.

Loneliness, anguish, used to living dangerously, I became colder and harder towards others. I even dragged my sister along the same road. I was addicted to heroin for nine years. Finally, through one of the few friends I had left, I got to know about the Community. I realised that it was the only alternative to death. So I accepted help.

The beginning was hard and weary, but little by little I felt that something inside me was changing. I am discovering the great joy that is friendship, sharing my life, my fears, my hopes, the battles won and the small everyday joys with other lads. In a few months I will complete my time in the community, but I know that my journey isn't over. The community is a gym of life; I have to try living outside with the values I have rediscovered here: honesty, truth, loyalty, fairness, sacrifice, conquest and, above all, love.

I have decided I want to live every day walking the road that the Lord has shown me through His teaching: the road of goodness.

Dario Mastria

At twenty I learnt about drugs during the military service. In that same year a girl gave birth to our son. That was the beginning of my time of darkness.

For four years I wandered in the dark, away from my family and refusing to get married, because the lady heroin had come into my life. I had my own hairdresser's shop, so I didn't lack money. I never trusted anyone; I always wanted to be top, the best. So I got to know people who weren't up to much and made the first really great mistakes - until the greatest of them all, as husband and father. For a long time I wasn't truthful with myself, I made excuses for myself. "I'm not an addict like the rest of them, I don't use a needle, I only sniff, the Community isn't for me." I went on telling myself these things. Nothing changed my mind: not my parents going on at me, not my debts, not being deserted by everybody. But one day, after I'd been in prison, my wife and son went away. That was a time of great loneliness. The Lord says that in the darkest hour a light can appear, and that's what happened while I was thinking alone.

In February 1990 I decided to go into the Cenacolo, a Community where Christ is the only therapy and here, in Saluzzo, I came through suffering as Christ did. I can do all this because so many lads have suffered with me; they've had the courage to teach me about truth and friendship. For someone as proud as I am, it's been very hard accepting all this, in fact, for a while, I tried to stay on the fence and only choose Jesus when it suited me. But the community sent me to Medjugorje where I learnt the kindness of Our Lady, and She, Herself, told me that in life I must be totally in Christ.

It's not enough for me now just to be an ex-addict. I want to go back to being a really good person this time, because what Jesus and Mary have done for me is truly great. If I had to thank by name all those who've helped me I wouldn't stop writing. I thank you Elvira because you are my Jesus on earth.

Massimiliano Baia

I was about sixteen when I first tried drugs, more than anything else I didn't want to say no to cannabis in front of others, I didn't want to seem less than they were. Then I had the opportunity of smoking various types of drug during the first holiday I spent without my parents.

There were lots of things that I thought were great, like wearing my hair long, fashionable trousers, knowing girls who were easy. These things were all I wanted from life.

Like everyone else I began by sniffing, then as my curiosity grew I too became addicted to the syringe. The lowest point came when I was arrested. After my sentence was over I was forced to choose a Community to live in, so I found the Community of Sister Elvira who is still, after almost three years, welcoming me and teaching me how to live.

I am very attached to it now. We learn so much here every day that the whole of my life won't be enough to take it all in. I can't blame anyone else for my addiction, but I'm happy to have ended up here and to be learning how to live from all of you.

Thank you.

Paolo Picco

I thing that, even if these messages seem to be all the same, for so many lads, their families and friends, they are strong messages of hope. Apart from that, for those who live in the Community, they help us greatly in our belief that what we are doing has saved, is saving and will continue to save the lives of many young men.

I, too, at a certain point in my life decided to take drugs. I don't know why. I think I wanted to find something without having to work for it and I thought being 'free' meant doing whatever you wanted. I'm continually learning, after about three years in the Community, that freedom means not being the slave of music or sex or television or any of the other things I once thought I couldn't live without.

About three years ago a wonderful thing happened to me: I was very badly treated. Nobody trusted me anymore, everyone had walked away from me, even my girl-friend and my friends, but when, thanks to my parents, I asked for help, I found someone who didn't say: "These addicts, I'd burn the lot of them". Instead she rolled up her sleeves and helped me... thank you, Elvira.

Nadia V

My story began when I was 11 and smoked my first cigarette. I went on from there to stronger and stronger things until I was a drug addict. All this was because I didn't think my parents loved me and I could not accept myself as a woman. The drugs helped me to live by suffocating all my feelings, both good and bad, for example the relationship between my mother and my three sisters. I suffered particularly from the lack of a father figure, I couldn't talk to my father, I couldn't look him in the eye: I could even say that my wrong choices were sort of a vendetta against him. I wanted to make him suffer because I was suffering and so, apart from my addiction, I did all sorts of other horrible things to make him suffer even more.

It seems absurd, but I actually loved my father a lot, and the more I loved him the more I suffered from his apparent indifference. By choosing the wrong road I was basically trying to make him look at me. Although what I was doing was wrong, I had everything- house, job, boyfriend, but at bottom I wasn't happy because I was dependent on heroin.

In the beginning I didn't admit it to myself and I took this false conviction with me when I went into a community for the first time. After a year I left, telling the others that I didn't need anyone else and thinking I could manage on my own. So I fell even further down until, with the strength of desperation, I asked my parents for help, knowing that I'd have to do what ever they said.

They, thank God, didn't say 'come home', they suggested firmly that I should go into this Community. Today I thank my parents, Sister Elvira and all the people I live with, because through them I am re-discovering the meaning of love and the need to be loved. Everyday I want to remove all the evil that was in me, so that I can become a real woman and build a real family. I want to be free, not to depend on anything, to live in serenity. I know I still need the Community so that I can learn to love and to be loved, because it's still difficult for me and I often behave falsely to mask my fear of suffering and of being myself.

I thank God for the way I have changed. I remember when I first came to the Community that I complained all the time, found everything and everyone negative. But today I'm much kinder and my heart is learning to accept and welcome people as they are. My attitude to prayer is changing to, I've discovered it's a lot more efficacious than anything I used to say or do or that was said to me. I'm beginning to see the fruits of prayer, both in myself and in my relationships with my family, particularly my father. I'm often amazed at all the lovely things that are happening in my life. I used to envy the rich. Today I'm finding that money doesn't bring happiness, it is something born in the heart that conquers the heart. With all my heart I want to stay in the Community, because I want all that is beautiful within me to emerge, I want to learn to be myself and to live properly wherever I am.

Angelo

My name is Angelo, and in these painful days I feel very near you all because I've had so many letters from you. It's sad, after four years in the Community, to find yourself in prison again paying for evil committed during the dark drug-filled years. In this place letters are very important: it's moving to watch every morning when the post arrives. There's an indescribable ferment of happy and disappointed faces, hard men are undone by reading a letter for a few minutes. The greatest gift I've received from the community is feeling that I'm loved. I've always struggled and suffered to become good, I've wept so often from despair during my years of indifference. Today, thanks to all of you I'm a new man. I understand that within me there's no longer any wish to lord it over others through either force or intelligence, I only want to be myself and to give, even if it's only a smile or a word of comfort, and I assure you that in this place there's a great need of love. Today I'm called to face this great trial: I feel weak and poor, I who was so sure of myself, So certain that I had reached the winning post. In the beginning this suffering shut me in on myself and I wouldn't even eat during the first few days. Then, thanks to my brothers who brought me food they had finished themselves, I got hold of myself. Even here there is solidarity in suffering, shown more by deeds than words. I realised that I was acting from pride. In the community I understood how easy it is to be open and available when you are well, but real humility comes as a natural response to pain. I've always asked the Lord what he wants of me, that's why I've never made any plans for the future. I live in the present with hope and trust that all this has a meaning in God's plan. In my part of the prison, among all those serving long sentences, I've had to face some very hard situations. Here violence is an essential part of life and I've found myself face to face with it. I've asked myself what I could do about it: certainly not preach, but to bear witness coherently in silence. When anyone comes to me and talks about the past and drugs I refuse to listen, I don't cut him out of my life but try to make him understand my resurrection from that culture of death. I'd like to hear how things are in the Fraternity at Borogo, because I miss all the lads who walked with me on my road through the Community, and how was the expedition? I hope it was a message of hope for lots of people. Forgive me for unburdening myself a bit. You are all in my heart. I remember you in my prayers, that's the best way for me to feel you all near to me.
A big hug for Sister Elvira, I love her.


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THOMAS is an integral part of Catholic Welfare Societies, Registered Charity number 503102