Year of grace, 2025. It is Sunday and in the outskirts of Nairobi, in Kahawa Sukari, there is great activity around the parish of St. Joseph guided by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo. Here, in this strongly polarized area, where a wall or a fence is enough to separate the living quarters of those most well-off from those whose lives are most fragile, the presence of the priests of St. Charles is a fixed point for the people of the place. Today in Nairobi there are five priests of the Fraternity. We asked three of them -Fr. Giuliano Imbasciati, Fr. Daniele Bonanni and Fr Mattia Zuliani- to tell us what makes this all possible. They all responded: the discovery, day after day, that only Christ gives meaning to life, in Kenya as in any place.
Fr. Giuliano tells about the beginnings. “Before 1998, there was nothing. It was the inhabitants who desired a place to pray and to gather. They bought a piece of land through their own great sacrifice and built a chapel out of sheet metal, which was entrusted to the Fraternity.” Today, in its place, there is a church that, as Fr. Giuliano explains, welcomes over three thousand persons every Sunday. And after there also came a daycare, a school, a small hospital and now a second chapel. The daycare Emanuela Mazzola and the elementary school, Urafiki Carovana, welcome hundreds of babies and young people. Fr. Mattia Zuliana, director and teacher, explained: “The parents have begun to trust our educative method, which is inspired by that of Fr. Giussani. And it is therefore a proposal that looks at the heart of the child, which valorizes its talents and uniqueness. They choose us because they recognize a goodness that is palpable here.”
We desire sanctity, for us and for those we encounter.
A goodness that, for some years now, has extended to the middle school, with a formational proposal more structured, accessible to all thanks to scholarships. “In our school, there are no placement tests. We invest in resource teachers so that even the children with disabilities can have a place where they feel loved and can grow. And from each one of them, we learn.” An example? “We have a female student who was paralyzed due to an accident, but she is extremely smart. One day, while a new area of the institute was under construction, a bus driver pointed out that there was a step that would have made it impossible for her to enter. No one had realized. We changed the project on the fly because the school is a living organism, where we help each other and correct one another continuously.” The most beautiful sign, he said, “are the alumni who return asking to be able to teach in the school themselves.” But education is not the only heart of this mission. Fr. Daniele Bonanni works in the hospital of St. Joseph, a structure with over 1,200 patients a month, located in the poorest and most densely populated part of the neighborhood. “We seek to guarantee accessible care: a dispensary for medicine, dentist, psychologists, physical therapists, gynecologists. But we do not want it to become welfarism. For example, all of the donations that we receive are used to sustain the charity, not to pay salaries or for medicine. Because our works should be able to operate even without us.” Besides serving those sick with AIDS, there was also a pro-life program born to sustain young women expecting babies, often alone. Another project, Ujachilie, (in Swahili: “Let yourself be made”), is geared towards mothers of children with disabilities. Every week, together with the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles, there is a place for games, prayer and companionship. In addition to medical assistance. “In these years, some of the women have decided to be baptized and to baptize their children. They intuited the origin of the help that they were receiving, which is Christ.” He told us about Jeff, confined to a wheelchair since birth. He participates in the CLU (CL for university students) meetings, in which about thirty young people get together to pray, hang out and do charitable work in the slum of Matare. “One evening, after having seen the film, It’s a Wonderful Life, I asked them if they thought that life was really this way. Jeff responded enthusiastically: ‘Yes! My life is beautiful because I have many friends.’” Fr. Giuliano is grateful for these years of mission. “It has not always been easy; I’ve suffered the departure of certain confreres, but everything has been the occasion for conversion.” Fr. Mattia echoes him: “Why do we do all this? I believe it is to be happy. And because we desire sanctity, for us and for those we encounter.”
