How were your years of study?
First I was a bricklayer, like my father. At the age of 15 I entered the seminary, then I studied philosophy in my parents’ land, Slovenia, and finished theology in Paris.
How do you remember that journey?
There were years of going towards people. During the holidays I was going to hitchhike through Europe without money. I slept in the stations with people who are outside of society, brothers and sisters.
Did that prepare you for what was to come?
No, I lived in the jungle of Madagascar for fifteen years sharing life with the poorest people in the world, but what human wealth! The bad thing is that they were dying, and I didn’t go there to bury them but to help them get back on their feet, but I also got malaria and all kinds of parasites.
¿Grave?
They had to transfer me to the capital for treatment. By chance one day I passed by a large garbage dump where I saw hundreds of children fighting for a piece of food with pigs and dogs. I was speechless.
I’m not surprised.
I said: “Here I have no right to speak, here we have to act.” That night I couldn’t sleep, I got on my knees and begged God: “Help me do something for these people.”
You were and are a white among blacks.
I represented the figure of domination, but I had taken my two passions to Africa, a soccer ball and my will to help. And also my bricklayer’s hands and my people skills.
Describe the base spill to me.
25 hectares, 600 tons of daily garbage and 800 families who lived off the garbage in plastic and cardboard houses. Children died like flies, what do you say to a mother?
What did he say?
“If you are willing to work, I will help you.” In 1990, I founded Akamasoa (good friends in Malagasy), on the outskirts of Antananarivo, and 35 years later what was a garbage dump is today a worthy city.
With more than 4,000 houses.
22 neighborhoods and infrastructure to house 30,000 people, with water networks, schools of all levels, hospitals, daycare centers, museums, sports fields, green spaces, libraries, food banks…
Cheers.
We should not help without there being a counterpart for the help we receive, otherwise we fall into welfare, which implies a lack of respect for the dignity of the person because they are made dependent on others and are not free.
Tell me what you have learned.
That life is a struggle, that what makes a person human is their spirit, that divine spark that we have in our hearts and that must be discovered. I know that the word spirit is beginning to be something strange in the West.
Why do you think this is so?
Indifference and individualism have distanced us from the spirit, it is a contagious disease, everyone takes care of themselves.
They call him a bricklayer of God, an apostle of garbage, Mother Teresa in pants.
I am a servant, I believe that we are born to serve and to do good. The more I have shared, the more they have helped me.
How have you done it, from absolute misery to a functioning city?
You have to have passion, faith, perseverance. You have to suffer and cry, bite your lips to avoid saying violent things. I firmly believe that love is stronger than violence and after 35 years on a landfill I tell you that during the day the truth is light, it is visible, the community has flourished.
And at night?
People change, violent instincts arise, Healing wounds takes time. There are people who have fallen into drugs, alcohol, prostitution, but the community is there to get up again and again, ask for forgiveness and pay for their faults with community work.
Do you officiate mass?
Every Sunday before 10,000 people, most of them young people. The tourists cry with emotion, they tell me that if the masses were this joyful in Europe and the US they would be full.
We may need you here, father.
You see, the poorest, those who were excluded and despised are today apostles, they speak to the hearts of the rich in the West, they show them their joy in receiving them, in living, in existing… it cannot be described, it is lived.
How did you get 4,000 houses to appear out of nowhere?
My dear journalist sister, we are talking about two different worlds, you are in the world of ideas, but there we have to act, work, there you survive. My father taught me to work with my hands, and wherever I look I see work.
It has become a sturdy baobab.
In Akamasoa we are 3,000 workers who work in a quarry breaking stone. I am one more; and an ant that goes up to the north to look for funds and takes them to the south.
