Br. Luca Perletti and Fr. Samuel Cuarto, who are about to leave for Makeni in Sierra Leone, share with us some of their expectations, projects and hopes that will accompany them and sustain them during the demanding service that awaits them at the Holy Spirit Hospital. They will be dealing with the emergency produced in that land particularly afflicted by the scourge of Ebola where men and women – already severely put to the test by an endemic poverty – are now tormented in body, in health, in the spirit and the most complete indigence by Ebola as well.

Being near to 2 February, when we engage in a living memory of the four hundred and fortieth anniversary of the conversion of St. Camillus, from the well of the heart there can but emerge an extraordinary part of our Camillian history: “Stop! Where are you going? There is the plague in Milan!” This is how some peasants of the countryside of Pavia during the winter of 1594 tried to stop a group of men who were riding towards the Dukedom of Milan. After learning about the outbreak of the plague, Fr. Camillus had brought together half a dozen of his companions in Genoa and had left in all haste to bring help. “That is exactly why we are going there!”, he answered, without slowing down at all.

   It is our task to cultivate a sense of esteem and friendship and a spirit of prayer so that God supports and performs the good initiatives of these friends and religious brothers of ours and why not…putting hands on wallets to ‘take out two silver pieces’ (Lk 10:35) as the Good Samaritan did, perhaps by adhering to the ‘Brothers of Ebola’ subscription.

   ‘To heal the sick’, wrote Giovanni Papini, ‘medicines are not enough, you need love, that is to say the high temperature of the soul. Fever against fever, spirit against flesh. This is what St. Camillus did’.