"In Chad, in the 1970s, relations between Christians and Muslims were excellent. The Islamic faithful were very open to dialogue and made their children attend Catholic schools. Mixed marriages were routine, as it was working together in peace. Then, this serene climate has been compromised by a civil war and the intervention of Arab countries: in recent years, emissaries of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries have arrived here in the northern region of the Country. They are fundamentalists, who preach a closed Islam, want to sow division, hinder mixed marriages and all forms of collaboration between Muslims and Christians, which they call “impure”. So father Franco Martellozzo, a 79-year-old Jesuit, begins his story. He arrived in Chad in 1963, and lives in Mongo, in the north of the country, in an area between the Sahel and Sahara. In the territory of the diocese - where seven priests work, of whom three are Jesuits (including the bishop) - the vast majority of the population professes the Islamic faith: Christians (Catholics and Protestants) are only 3%. Father Franco leads as parish priest small communities spread over an area as large as northern Italy.
Where God is
"Foreign preachers’ statements have had different effects - he says - in some villages, the Christian and Muslim communities have moved away and, for example, have stopped celebrating their respective religious events together. In many other places, however, it was the Muslim communities themselves who sent the emissaries away after expressing their intention to continue to live together with Christians. I remember an emblematic episode: some emissaries from the Arab countries of the Gulf who had reached a small town, told the Muslim faithful to avoid any contact with Christians. The faithful replied that Christians were good friends from whom – at the time of need - they had received decisive and selfless help. I still remember their words: they said, “where there is a gratuitous gesture of help, there is God”. And they drove out the fundamentalists."
Working Alliance
“These foreign preachers are currently losing ground - Father Franco points out - “I am convinced that this is largely due to the impressive network of activities that the Catholic Church has set up in recent decades, involving the entire population. Peaceful and serene coexistence between Christians and Muslims is not built sitting at the table, discussing theology: it is built by addressing and resolving together day-to-day problems, taking care of people’s basic needs: food, water, school, health. I’m saying this with Europe’s current situation in mind: fear does not solve anything: if we missionaries and our small communities had been afraid of Muslims, we would have remained closed in our world: instead, choosing to approach all with goodwill, we have built a new horizon that allows the population to live peacefully”.
Cereal banks
When Father Franco arrived in this territory he discovered that many people, during the periods of severe drought, in order to get food, turned to usurers and, indebted heavily, ending up almost as slaves working in the fields of their creditors. To solve the problem, together with a Spanish confrere, he invented the “cereal banks”. “The system is simple”, he explains, “The bank owns, stocks, bags of cereals (especially millet) and in drought periods people can ask for the cereal with the commitment to repay the loan after the next harvest. In this way, families no longer run up debts with the usurers, who are in fact disappearing. Currently there are 350 cereal banks (one in each village): they are managed directly by Christian and Muslim inhabitants and some 600,000 people benefit from them."
Vegetable Gardens and dams
In order to ensure food self-sufficiency to families, Father Franco, together with his team, also promotes community gardens, which are run by Christian and Muslim women together, “To each village women have organized themselves to create one of these gardens, we offer money (about 5,000 euros) for a cement water well. It is the inhabitants themselves who build it. Today there are 150 vegetables gardens and the demand for wells is constantly increasing. We have also involved the female population in another activity: the construction of small dams, necessary for providing water to the underground aquifers."
Community Schools
In this area of Chad, where the state schools are few in number, Father Franco, with his collaborators, has also promoted community schools, which today are forty. In the villages, Christian and Muslim parents who wish to educate their children must set up a cooperative and submit an application to the Catholic Church, which provides building materials. It is then the members of the cooperative that build the school, seek and pay for the teachers who are trained by the Church.
“By conceiving all these works (which also include health facilities) and entrusting their management to the locals, we had a threefold objective: to empower the population, to encourage families to stay in this territory, avoiding painful emigrations, and to encourage the active alliance between Christians and Muslims. As I said, if in many villages the message of a radical Islam has failed to make its way, it is due to the collaboration that unites the faithful of the two religions. And also thanks to a recently conceived project, which will make the relationship even stronger”.
Trees to stay united
The project involves Christian and Muslim children of the community schools, who are periodically invited to plant dozens of trees together to counteract the desertification process, “With this simple and symbolic gesture, we get them used to working together for the common good of the country, conveying to them the sense of community, explaining the importance of steady cooperation to counter whatever damages people. These words obviously refer not only to the desert but also to the fundamentalist emissaries," Father Franco says and adds, “The Muslim village leaders are very happy because they feel helped in their effort to resist the pressure of foreign preachers. Also the civil authorities, who have great esteem for the Catholic Church, are on our side. Chad is a secular state, every form of aggressive preaching, which threatens the unity of the nation, is not seen with a good eye."
Muslim friend
Among Father Franco’s friends there is Khadam Daouro: 41 years old, Muslim, married and father of 5 children, he lives in Mongo and is a teacher who is very happy with his work. "In the vast majority of cases - he says - relations between Christians and Muslims are excellent, characterized by mutual respect. Within the same families there are faithful of the two religions who live together in fraternity. I think that our way of life could be used as a model for other countries that unfortunately have problems because of religion. Certainly, there are small groups of fundamentalists who consider “haram”, impure, all the customs of the Westerners, of the “whites”, but they - in my opinion and in the opinion of most of us - misrepresent the Koran”.
The good of the country
Khadam has Christian relatives and friends and serves as a volunteer in an association suggested to him by Father Franco, in which Christians and Muslims follow together the construction of wells and the reforestation project. "I very much like to provide service in this association because it promotes a project of self-development that eradicates the passive mentality of the population, allows the inhabitants of poor villages to defeat poverty and makes them realize that the promotion of development is not a confessional activity, linked to the Catholic Church, but a work for the common good”. Reflecting on his country, he observes, “Chad needs the contribution of all its citizens, without making any distinction which could eventually trigger religious or ethnic conflicts. The example of the Catholic religious, who know how to work together, is essential to involve those who are refractory to this movement aimed at strengthening social cohesion. I am convinced that religions must create active fraternity, not division, which is a cause of underdevelopment".
