Sierra Leone – The country where Don Bosco is synonymous with young lives saved

(ANS – Freetown) – Fr Luca Barone continues to recount significant moments from his first missionary trip as President of Missioni Don Bosco, the Salesian Mission Office in Turin. Following his stop in Liberia, his expedition last month took him to Sierra Leone, one of the African states with the highest population density and the highest infant mortality rates on the planet. In the capital, Freetown – a city in a constant state of chaos – the number of boys and girls living on the streets, enslaved in the world of prostitution and blackmail, is staggering.

“Four Salesian communities are working in truly frontier contexts to help these young people experience the beauty of moving from ‘blackmail’ to ‘redemption’: welcoming, working on the streets and in prisons, in schools, parishes, oratories and youth centres… Here, Don Bosco is synonymous with young people saved,” he testifies.

“The days are flying by; we are working hard during these days of meetings,” continues Fr Barone. “We see, touch and feel what benefactors, through their generosity, enable Salesian missionaries to achieve. “It is clear to me that the funds allocated to the missions have names, faces, stories, medical care, education, support, successful births for young girls who became pregnant following violence and abuse, and the dreams of street children who want to make it.”

At the end of the trip, in the mind and heart of the President of Missioni Don Bosco, “three imprssions remain that have transformed me”.

“The first is a name: Idrissa, 17 years old, three of which he spent on the streets. Then came his encounter with Don Bosco, his salvation, a home with people who care for him. He is learning car mechanics, dreams of becoming a mechanical engineer and plays football with the vigour of life. But it is not this that I hold in my memory, but rather the way in which he never loses sight of a gesture or a word from Fr Piotr Wojnarowski, the missionary who is now the Director of the great and precious Don Bosco – Fambul Centre in Freetown. He is his hero, the one who took him in and saved him, and has become the role model for his own journey into adulthood; he is the father to look up to and learn from.”

“When I grow up, I’d like to be a man like him,” the young man confirms to Fr Barone.

Second impression: the reassembled statue of the Holy Family standing in the Fambul Therapeutic Centre. It had arrived thanks to Polish volunteers in October 2025: eagerly awaited, upon unpacking it was discovered that it had shattered during the journey. “There was widespread sadness, but then one of the boys at the Centre had an idea,” Fr Barone continues, “saying: ‘This statue is like our family, and like our story: in pieces, but we can put it back together!’ And so the challenge was accepted: the volunteers and the young people decided to glue the statue back together and restore it.

It was very hard work, but now it is a masterpiece in which the scars and missing pieces are not hidden, but stand out in front of the grotto where, every evening before going to sleep, the young people gather to entrust their story, their lives, and the generous hands of those who allow them to put it back together.”

Third impression: the last Mass celebrated before leaving the town of Lungi. During the celebration, in the extreme heat of the day, Fr Barone felt as though the stole he was wearing “was ‘sticking’ to my skin. I realised that the Lord was reminding me, right here in Africa, that my priesthood is precisely this: to let people and their situations stick to my skin and to entrust them to his altar so that his story of salvation may also become theirs, even through me”.

For this reason, at the conclusion of his journey, the President of the Salesian Mission Office in Turin can sum it up thus: “In the end, the journey sends you back, but you are no longer the same. The journey teaches you not to stop, because what you must and can change, improve, and decide regarding yourself and the world is infinitely vaster than you think, and the good that exists and that you can do makes no noise, but sustains the universe. And every life saved is a victory of good over evil!”.

For further information, visit the website: www.missionidonbosco.org