What prompted you to write the letter of mission availability to the Rector Major?
After a two-year internship experience in a missionary context, in North Africa, I discovered the richness of missionary life and of abandoning oneself totally to God, and especially the passion in proclaiming the Good News to others. This experience also allowed me to deepen and meditate on the testimonies of sober and dedicated lives of missionaries working in my country.
How did your internship help you discern your missionary vocation?
That experience was really the foundation of discerning my missionary vocation. I was able to discover that you can live and bear witness to Christ anywhere, even in countries with a Christian minority, and I was also able to purify many of my prejudices.
Blessed and soon-to-be Saint Zatti was a great evangelizer, full of missionary spirit. Do you consider yourself passionate in this respect as well?
It is an immense grace that our missionary sending coincides with the canonization of a Salesian full of missionary zeal, who knew how to evangelize with his whole daily life and with the service of his profession as a nurse. Like him, I too feel passionate about the same desire to evangelize the people to whom I will be sent through my bearing witness of daily life.
Do you have any fears or doubts about your destination, culture, and people? How are you preparing to be a missionary in Albania?
It is normal to have fears and perhaps even prejudices when going to a new place. Personally, I would not say that I have fear or dread, but maybe some doubts about the new environment and its culture. The most important thing, though, is to be open to welcoming others and ready to be welcomed, relying on God's grace.
Do you have any great missionaries whose lifestyle you want to follow as role models in mind?
I would say that if anything, I have many models of missionaries, people who have been able to give themselves totally to their mission; but it is also true that everyone has their own style. Of course, this will not prevent me, however, from taking this or that aspect from the missionaries I have met in my vocational journey. And for me, Don Bosco remains the model par excellence, because he was always a tireless missionary.
What message would you like to send to young people about the missionary vocation?
I would like to tell them that the missionary vocation is a gift of self to others: every time we do good to others, every time we make someone happy, we are performing a missionary act, and that is why we should never be afraid or fearful of going out to meet others, to make them happy or to give them a hand.
