Little Oreste was born in 1944 in Arborea, a "Villaggio Mussolini" at the time, a city where his family had been confined by the fascist regime. Yet despite this, positive things arose: “It was there that I met the Salesians, who were exquisite. I was the first Salesian from Arborea, but in total there were 9 Sons of Don Bosco."
After his early Salesian formation and study of Theology in Padua with the Franciscan friars, he returned to his hometown, to accompany the young people at the Salesian Vocational Training Centre in Selargius. "I was shocked the day I attended the first Mass there" he say: "out of 400 young people, only a dozen had gone to receive Holy Communion. Then I understood that something had to change at the pastoral level, and I asked for help from other pastoral workers of other parishes, starting to hold several meetings of young people, from Friday to Sunday."
Slowly that situation changed: during the Christmas period about 30 young people made their First Communion and at Easter everyone else did. "The goal was simply to ensure that those boys, from there, could follow a normal path of sacramental life," he explains.
Also in Cagliari, at the San Paolo work, Fr Valle worked hard, taking care above all of parish life and the catechesis of the little ones who were formed in their hundreds: "Those were the most fruitful years of my priestly life, before leaving for the missions."
It was at that time, in 1981, that his Provincial at the time asked him if he wanted to be involved in the Africa Project. “He asked me right after Mass, but I knew what he wanted as soon as I saw him. I immediately said yes, without even discussing the conditions.”
He learned only later that the challenge was not so simple: "It was about taking a large farm, 126 hectares of land, which was owned by the diocese, to make it a model farm which could also be used for the education of young people, especially a group called ‘young Malagasy Catholics’, very active and very willing to help."
But the first contact was not at all easy: "I found a really disastrous situation, it took three months just to fix the house where we had to live. Then there was no electricity, and for 10 years all we had were candles for light." In addition, neither he nor his two confreres sent with him had the necessary skills to carry out the assigned project.
However, in this circumstance Fr Valle also discovered the value of small Christian communities: "They are a grace of God because they help us to share the reality we live. After six o'clock we would sit down, discuss and pray together.”
Other difficulties arose in the years to come, because at first one of the three Salesians in the community fell ill and then a priest from a nearby community suddenly disappeared. So for Fr Valle and his other brother, it was really a lot of work. But they carried it forward, thus also extending the name of Don Bosco in the area and the prestige of Salesian activity, which at the end of that decade also recovered a pastoral area left by the Jesuits.
Unfortunately, life on mission also left its mark on Fr Valle's health, which he also had to recover from in Italy. But the missionary spirit had not faded, and so in 1991 he left for Albania, which had just become available for evangelisation after the collapse of the communist regime. "Fr Michele Gentile, who was already there, sent us letters so that we could start learning Albanian" recalls this elderly Salesian who was never discouraged. Thus, after a discussion with the then Rector Major, Fr Egidio Viganò, he left for the Land of Eagles. “We went without knowing what we were going to encounter. And things weren't easy this time either. "We arrived and on the first day we didn't even find anything to eat."
Hunger was shared with the population. In this regard, Fr Valle tells a significant anecdote: “Once, on Holy Thursday, a nun told the people that we would celebrate the Lord's Supper. So many thought that there would be something to eat, and a multitude of people came to the church who did not even know what was being celebrated!"
Despite all the initial difficulties, in the end Fr Valle contributed to the full realisation of the project for which the Salesians had been sent to Albania: the opening of two presences in the country, in Tirana and Scutari; and he did even more, because in the spirit of availability that has always distinguished him, he collaborated for six years with the local dioceses for the management of some communities that were changing administration.
