Lorenzo peluso
Ed. Graus
pp. 144
"Leaving is hope of finding, knowing, knowing. Leaving is the desire to discover. Leaving is also an awareness of being able to return, to then find what you have left and that, however, you will live with other eyes ... To leave is to change. On the return nothing will be the same as before, maybe better or maybe worse, for sure it will be something else. So start ... the metaphor of living". It is with this metaphor that "As-salāmu 'alaykum" begins, the story of Lorenzo Peluso and his experience as a journalist embedded in the operational theaters of Afghanistan, Kosovo and Lebanon.
A book born from the need to put faces, thoughts and emotions in black and white that haven't found space in the pages of newspapers. A diary made of meetings and stories, people, but above all stories. That of Sima Pazhman, director of the Herat prison, the symbolic structure of what the Italian ISAF contingent has managed to produce over the years of activity in Afghanistan; that of Maria Bashir, attorney general of Herat or that of Suraya Pakzad, who since 2001 operates through "Voice of Women" in support of oppressed Afghan women.
Afghanistan, a land where the projects that the PRT - are beyond 1250 Provincial Reconstruction Team - has achieved in his years of activity in Herat and where the Italian Armed Forces have contributed building schools, roads, bridges, irrigation canals and wells. And again, the Pediatric Hospital of Herat, the library and the "Women's Garden". The land of kites, the one in which 53 Italian soldiers were killed, but where, in the face of what has been done, their memory is alive, as Father Mariano Asunis says "the spilled blood makes the land fertile".
Stories made of desires and hopes: like those for the children of the village of Bec, in Kosovo. Children who live the lives of adults even before having lived the life of children. A life of hardship, hunger and disease, amid the indifference of many, but not of Italians. Human value, solidarity and generosity are traits that have always characterized Italy and the military give proof of this by bringing food and comfort materials to these lands.
To recount experiences in the field must be experienced: this is the reason that leads the author to tell Radio Alfa, the life of the Italian military engaged in the Leonte mission in Lebanon, where, for the second time in a few years, the United Nations has entrusted to Italy the command of the UNIFIL mission. The meetings and interviews conducted in the country of the cedars close the diary.
An intense book, a testimony that highlights how much Italian troops do to guarantee a state of lasting peace, an exciting alternation of words and images: those of local people, but above all of soldiers, men and women who, far from their affections , believe in a different world, a possible world.
Anita Fiaschetti
