Merry Christmas and happy new year

Goma, Caracciolini's school children

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all those wonderful people who, in recent years, have wanted to fight my battles along with me. Especially to my son, Alessandro, whose birthday is today. My commitment, training and travel doesn’t always allow me to spend as much time with him as I would like. Nevertheless, despite his young age, he proved to be a little wise man who’s extremely sensitive to the issues I’m promoting, and who has tried to be strong and supportive through all my difficulties. We adults should at least try to make this world better, and sometimes I get the feeling that it is precisely our children who can teach us how to accomplish this.

Father Paolo's children

Merry Christmas and happy new year to the people of Goma and of all the Northern Kivu region, where someone decided that there had to be a war, to those families who do not know their tomorrow, and when it will be possible to find peace and serenity. To those people who live daily with the constant fear of receiving bad news from one moment to another, to those who in practice do not live.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all people with disabilities and to their families, who pay the price of a crisis arising from disregard of legality and from corruption, perpetrated by those who should prevent it. Let’s hope that these families never stop fighting to claim back what has been unjustly taken away from them: the dignity, the right to citizenship.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all researchers, so that they may continue to design more effective prosthetic devices that will allow people with disabilities to live a better life, one that is still too far away from the one they are forced to live.

Merry Christmas and happy new year.
Salvatore Cimmino