How were your years of study?
I was a mason, like my father. At the age of 15 I entered the seminary, then studied Philosophy in my parents’ country, Slovenia, and finished Theology in Paris.
How do you remember that journey?
It was years of going to the people. During the holidays he traveled Europe on his own and without money. He slept in the stations with people who are outside society, brothers and sisters.
Did that prepare him 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 worst thing is that people were dying, and I didn’t go there to bury them but to help them move on, but I also got malaria and all kinds of parasites.
Hard?
They had to move me to the capital to treat me. By chance one day I passed near a large garbage dump where I saw hundreds of children fighting for a piece of food with the pigs and dogs. I was speechless.
That does not surprise me.
I said: “Here I have no right to speak, here action must be taken”. That night I couldn’t sleep, I fell 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 to Africa my two passions, a soccer ball and my desire to help. And also my mason’s hands and my gift of people.
Describe the garbage dump to me.
25 hectares, 600 tons of garbage per day and 800 families living off the garbage in cardboard houses. The children were dying like flies, what do you say to a mother?
What did he tell them?
“If you are willing to work, I will help you.” In 1990 I founded Akamasoa (good friends in the Malagasy language), on the outskirts of Antananarivo, and 35 years later what had been a landfill is now a decent city.
With more than 4,000 houses.
22 neighborhoods and infrastructure to accommodate 30,000 people, with water networks, schools of all levels, hospitals, nurseries, museums, sports fields, green spaces, libraries, food banks…
congratulations
Help should not be given without a counterpart to the help received, if we do not fall into welfareism, which implies a lack of respect for the dignity of the person because it is made dependent on others and is not free
Tell me what you learned.
That life is a struggle, that what makes us human is the spirit, that divine spark that we have in our hearts and that needs to be discovered. I know that the word spirit is becoming a strange thing 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 God’s shovel, apostle of garbage, Mother Teresa in pants.
I am a servant, I believe we are born to serve and to do good. The more I shared, the more they helped me.
How did he do it, from absolute misery to a functioning city?
You have to have passion, faith, perseverance. You have to suffer and cry, bite your lips not to say violent things. I firmly believe that love is stronger than violence and after 35 years on a landfill I know that by day the truth is light, it is in sight, the community has blossomed.
And at night?
People change, violent instincts arise. Healing wounds takes time. There are those who fall into drugs, alcohol, prostitution, but there is the community so that they get up again and again, ask for forgiveness and pay for their mistakes with community work.
Do you officiate mass?
Every Sunday for 10,000 people, mostly young people. The tourists cry with emotion, they tell me that if the masses were this joyful in Europe and the USA they would be full.
We might need him here, Dad.
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 to receive them, to live, to exist… it is not can describe, this is experienced.
How was it done so that 4,000 houses appeared out of nowhere?
Dear journalist sister, we are talking about two different worlds, you live in the world of ideas, but there we have to act, work, survive there. My father taught me to work with my hands, and wherever I look I see work.
It has become a robust baobab.
In Akamasoa we are 3,000 workers who work in a quarry grinding stone. I am one more; and an ant that goes up to the north to look for funds and brings them to the south.
