During my first missionary trip in Sri Lanka in 1988 with Manuela, whom I eventually married on 4th June 1989, a marvellous wife, mother of our four beautiful boys and since then my companion of so many adventures, something radical happened which was going to completely change my life forever.

Actually, the trip to Sri Lanka is the hardest I have ever endured, as we spent ten days in the jungle living with the aborigenal tribe “Veddah”, without any drinking water or common facilities.
Despite the suffering and the constant pain caused by the extreme heat and the myriads of mosquitoes and flies assaulting us, I began to see and really understand the sufferings and the desperation of a whole population. I was hugely struck by the silent “cries” of those children, men and women considered as outcast by their society and doomed to a slow and painful death.
I had already travelled to several uncorrectly-called ‘third-world nations’ before, without ever being able to fully grasp what was going on around me.

My ears had never heard such terrible cries before! I could never be the same person again.

An unstoppable desire to “cry out” to the world the sufferings of the world itself, was born inside of me that same day..

This is how, in the years to follow, we started answering to these cries.

Cries from the drug-addicts and the abused people in the American ghettos, where Manuela and I gave our contribution at the Buffalo Teen Challenge, NewYork.

Cries all around us from the thousands of Italian people trapped by drugs, forgotten, forsaken and deprived of their joy in the every day life, when my family and I served as volunteers for 15 years at the Comunità del Buon Pastore (‘Good Shepherd Centre’) in Segrate (Mi)

Cries of the Christians who are persecuted in China.

Cries of the Venezuelan and European drug dealers inside the prisons in Venezuela.

Cries of the Hmong women in Vietnam who are also persecuted, rapedand torturedby the regime, guilty of being Christian.

Cries of the Guaranì, Toba and Wichi tribes in the Northern Argentina, forsaken and forgotten by the Argentinian government without any medical or social assistance.

Cries of the people of Myanmar (Burma)deprived of the most elementary human rights.

Cries of the orphans and widowsleft alone in Sri Lanka following the tsunami fury.

Cries of the thousands of orphan girls in Cambodia, inesorably doomed to the Cambodian and Thai brothels.

Cries of the orphans in India who are abandoned by their parents in the main city streets even as a consequence of extreme poverty.

Cries! And more cries!