It is a passionate story, not just from the great Christian spirit of the protagonist and his travel companions.
That of Monsignor Joseph Alexander, here in Kenya known to everyone just as Joe, is a human affair that has a lot to teach and which raises red dust from the streets and villages of Kenya's most remote, harder to live and under continual blackmail Islamic Integrity.
Now Joe's story is a book, an "instant book" published by Velar and Marna in the "Faces of Hope" necklace and distributed by Santina Foundation.
They were Muslims, but surely more bandits than fanatics, the Shifta who in 1993 attacked Joe along with two other prelates on the way to Lamu, between Witu and Mpeketoni. It was years when it was really dangerous to go over a hundred kilometers from Malindi.
In Joe's tale, the moments of fear after the bullets, but I never disagree.
"The shifta around us ordered us to go straight away from the car: but my femur was shattered, I could not go down alone and help volunteers. We were continually under the threat of bandits with their shotguns against our backs. " "They asked for money, I told them I did not and took everything they could take away: glasses, watch, belt, shoes, even socks ... then, they disappeared and I was left there in the most complete silence. I tried to crawl more slowly than I could, with the little force I had left and moved with difficulty to reach a point where I could see the road. I could not stand up and felt the blood flow from the wound. I continued to wait and pray to God "
They were Muslims and certainly fanatical terrorists those who most recently massacred 148 Christian students in Garissa.
In the same book of Joe's book, there is also the story of Janet, one of Kenyon girls killed in the university.
In the book of the Maltese Bishop, written with Monsignor Luigi Ginami, the sensations of arrival in Kenya are reminiscent, but there is no mention of the tumultuous retreat to Watamu or Msabaha's mission (which is still operative today), of the roads that become Dangers, children in the midst of snakes, almost deadly off-piste tracks, roads that do not lead to Garsen and the first sight of Garissa, because as Joe says, "Africa does not count the miles, it's the way to go."
Obviously a good part of the book is devoted to Daadab's accounts, where the brave evangelization of Bishop Alessandro clashes with human vicissitudes at the limit of endurance, drought, disease and faction within the largest refugee camp in the Black Continent.
When asked "why did you return to Kenya after what happened to you?" Joe responds with the facts, with his work of solidarity that still gives hopes to innocent mothers and children who feel abandoned by their God and are threatened by that of others. That hope, which is well explained in the preface of the book, Monsignor Dario Viganò: "Knowing that God continues to love those who reject Him is an unlimited source of trust and inspiration for the mission. No dirty hand can prevent God from putting in that hand The Life that wants to give us. "To this love, he delivered his life to Bishop Joe when he was attacked, fired and so began his" via crucis "from which sprouting forgiveness for those who did it Of evil. "