HUMILYSQUE MYRICAE: Plants that could change the world

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The Tamarisk is a graceful shrub, with fluffy foliage.

It has thousands of properties, and it is often undervalued, but it could change our life on earth. Native from the sandy and brackish areas of India, China and Southern Europe, the Tamarisk is an evergreen plant with small and dense foliage which facilitates resistance from very extreme damaging weather conditions and temperatures, as well as being a very effective atmospheric filter and being aesthetically relevant especially during the flowering period.The name of this plant could come from Latin Tamarix because is supposed to be originated from the Tambre river, formerly called “Tamara” which flows in Galicia,  or could come from the Hebrew Tamaris (broom) because in ancient times its twigs were used as a broom. This plant is often referred to as a “desert shrub”.

Even if you don’t hear much about it, it is actually a plant that has often attracted the interest of writers, as Gabriele D’Annunzio in his poem “The rain in the pine groove”,

Eugenio Montale in “End of childhood”, a poem included in the collection “Ossi di seppia” (Cattlefish Bones) or Giovanni Pascoli in his collection of poems titled “Myricae”, a word which derives from a part of the second verse of Virgil’s IV Bucolica « (Non omnes) arbusta iuvant humilesque Myricae », which could be translated as “not everyone likes shrubs and humble tamarisk trees ” which means that not everyone likes a simple poem.

Pascoli wrote this verse as a metaphor related to his poetry,  which is apparently simple just like the tamarisk wild plants that could grow anywhere and which at first glance may seem like common bushes while actually they are full of hidden properties and benefits. This plant is also known for its very particular characteristic called “sweating”, a sort of evaporation of small drops of clear and extremely salty liquid, which during the day and in the absence of wind seems to generate a real rain, a very fascinating phenomenon which inspired poets and writers. Also used as an ornamental plant for it’s beautiful pink flowers, it is also called  “windbreak plant” which indicate one of its main characteristic which is slowing down the strong currents: useful for the creation of windbreak hedges, resistant to drought but also to brackish water.

Furthermore, it could be used to protect a vegetable garden from the strong winds of the Sahara, as fences for livestock, to delineate boundaries, screen unwanted views or protection from intruders and they could also be used as a tool to face the advancing of the desert or severe climate change. These beautiful plants, in addition to having a strong sound-absorbing capacity, represent a filter from polluting dust and can be a containment tool thanks to their uncommon resistance and therefore be used to stabilise slopes while preserving them from washout or erosion. Tamarisk are also commonly used in the herbal tradition for their bark rich in tannins which can be used as a natural remedy against flu and cold symptoms, its astringent, diuretic, sweat, and eupeptic properties are actually well known.

This wonderful plant also has an elective organotropism for the bone marrow. It stimulates the regular formation of platelets, red blood cells and white blood cells, promotes the absorption of all minerals such as calcium in the bones, magnesium, or silicon. In the development of the project of the Africa Project Foundation the Tamarisk will be largely used, as it will be useful to stop the desert advancing and to create such humidity as to create a humid microclimate even in desert areas where it has not rained for many years.

ARTICOLO REALIZZATO DA: Gaia Favino

DESTINY – story of an immigrant

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I am a young, determined immigrant by the name is Alhassan Jallow. I have been living in Italy for almost seven (7) years. I arrived in Sicilia, Italy the 7th of December 2015, where I was rescued with several others. I lived in the camp with other immigrants for three (3) years, and during these years, I went to school to learn Italian.

I lived a decent and determined life, always trying to make every day that passes count. I got myself a job to support myself to make ends meet. I used to ride 11km to and from on a bicycle through cold winter nights or windy and dusty nights to get to work. Due to these challenging circumstances, I moved into a friend’s apartment, which was much closer to work, and we would split the bills and make things a little less expensive.

Over the years, I have been on a long list of immigrants seeking asylum in Italy since I got here, but the struggle is real. I was once a pool boy, did volunteer work with the social services, was a part-time translator in the court and an operator at the cheese factory. I became an active member of the IOM (The International Organization for Migration) in Italy, November 2018. This organization is where I met other immigrants like me from different countries. I was that one outgoing individual with the impeccable character you would barely miss in the crowd.

Through this organization, I met an influential Senegalese man named Modou Gueye, who runs Sunu Gal’s association. He also owns a center where events, cultural shows, festivals, and other creative art shows occur. I am passionate about photography and videography, and I have a selfie stick called the Gimbal I had with me all the time. During events with the IOM, I usually take nice pictures and videos that I share with the organization. Later, I started making videos for Modou when he had events at the center, and Modou appreciated my work so much.

So, in August 2021, there is a film festival every year called cinema da mare; they have film festivals all over Italy and usually need actors, editors, camera operators etc. Modou saw this opportunity and contacted me to ask if I was interested. After giving it a thought, I decided to give it a shot and applied for it. I was lucky to be part of the chosen ones, and each person was given a chance to come up with one concept to showcase creativity. Having this opportunity to film something, I finally had the opportunity to show the struggles of a real immigrant living in Italy with no papers, a real-life scenario. I came up with the short Film called DESTINY which was inspired by my story and the struggles I have been through. Since I was directing and at the same time acting, Eduard Lemiale offered to be a co-director of my film.

The short film DESTINY is one of those films that will blow your mind away and, at the same time make you feel right in my shoes. The film features how far I have gone, how I settled in Italy, made lots of friends and lived the dream. However, after attempting severally to acquire documents to live in Italy legally, I was denied and asked to leave immediately. The disappointment and the pain of having to leave after 6-7 years had me crying my heart out in agony.

After shooting the short film, that week at the film festival, DESTINY won the best editing award, and then I won the best actor award! In the weekly competition. Destiny gained popularity as months went by; it was nominated for the SFFIE film festival and won the most heart-warming film award. Nikon film festival came up in 2022 in France, which was more significant than the first one. I was contacted by my good friend Aretha Iskandar, who Did the re-editing of the Film and made the proposal that she wanted to use my film Destiny for the Nikon film festival. I was happy to give her the go-ahead, and during the nominations, the film was shown in 20 cinemas across France.

On 22nd April the film won the student award! Though I couldn’t make it to the award night, I was represented by Aretha Iskandar and Eduardo Lemiale. Along with the prize, we won 3 tickets to go and grace the Cannes film festival in France with our presence. This is a starting point in my acting career!

ARTICOLO REALIZZATO DA: Alhassan Jallow

Alessandro and Sasha experience in Tanzania-Africa

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Telling about Africa is like trying to describe a pleasant dream, a memory of a far world, but able to get you close to emotions and sensations almost forgotten and sadly old fashioned. The astonishment, the emotions, the perception of having already lived in an unknown world, different, slower, but more authentic and more kind. And then, the beauty which overwhelm you, those sunsets which look like drawn by God, the smile of people, especially for westerns like us, get used to running to continously search something, and now unable to notice the gaze of those around us.

From Tanzania I brought with me the love of the people for their own land and the unstoppable desire to narrate its beauty, to show it to us through their eyes, trying to let you feel part of a culture based on the perception of slowness – "pole pole" they say – declined in
the highest meaning, like a tool strained to the pursuit of that time almost lost by us, but necessary for a life with a human pace, sustainable and which allows to feel the contact with the people and the environment.

And then, that idea which encompasses that wording known from a very famous animated film: Hakuna Matata. Much more of a simple phrase, but a concept that contains a way of perceiving the life in which is given the proper importance to things we can change, and things that are not depending on us, without any drama.

Our travel to Tanzania, the first in Africa, has given to us a new awareness. The wealth, the wellness and the "development" are not what make a place safer, and less or more welcoming. It is, instead, the kindness and the simplicity of those who live there
which make a unique and unforgettable place.

ARTICOLO REALIZZATO DA: Alessandro Alberti e Sasha D’Orso

Africa in the heart

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My name is Giorgio Casolari and I love Africa. It was 2006 and on a cold winter afternoon in Porto Sant’Elpidio, in the Marche, at the end of a Christian seminar, the speaker proposed distance adoptions through a French NGO in favor of boys in Kinshasa in the DRC, everything was masculine, there was no talk of girls, it almost seemed that the problem of the “street children” that in Kinshasa are the Shégué, was exclusively a male problem.

Beside me were my daughters at the time Rachele, almost 10 years old, and Beatrice, less than 5 years old, whenI asked if it was possible to adopt girls and not boys… but I was given a chilling answer: “an unprotected girl in Kinshasa at 12 is already an experienced prostitute”.

So I decided to do something and in December 2007 I made my first visit to Equatorial Africa. Left
the cold and clean Bologna, I found myself in a moving nightmare, where everything seemed surreal, from the suffocating wet heat, to the lack of electricity and
running water, physical and moral dirt at every level but everything seemed  “nothing” when I listened Maman Hélène (kivuvu.net) who with her white smile and reassuring voice had to convince me that this was normal and not a bad dream!
Maman Hélène is an extraordinary woman who, flanked by other extraordinary women, lives and
struggles with these realities where women are worth little.

For almost a year, I was supporting the mission of Bana Ya Kivuvu at a distance and then I went there to see in person and for the first time, the three orphan girls I was supporting, Lilly, Noella and Flore Enguke, adopted in my heart and before God according to “Roman law” Today Lilly, Noella and Flore Enguke, are three women who I continue to help monthly. Over the years many things have changed and have evolved within the mission of Bana Ya Kivuvu.
Important to say that in 2010 was born the “maison des filles” baptized “Havre de paix” and whose goal is to offer protection to dozens of girls who would end up slaves of someone….

I have always been a dreamer and some dreams have become reality, I never stop dreaming so when I read the project, of the Africa Project Foundation, I returned to dream of a dignified life for Africans on their land with their families, I have known hundreds and helped dozens in the last thirty years, from the detention centers of Ceuta and Melilla where hell is a daily reality, up to reception centers in Calabria where they are killed on “slow fire” forcing them to do nothing for years waiting for a residence permit that is rarely granted to them, to then see, in the daily lives of our beautiful cities, how discrimination often does not give dignity and equal opportunities to many honest African workers, net of too many parasites that are found in all the tribes and nations of the world….

ARTICOLO REALIZZATO DA: Giorgio Adriano Casolari

Rediscovering ancestors: the African mask

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Arte dell’Africa

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“Arte dell’Africa” is the title of the exhibition set up on 14/15/16 May 2004 and curated by the International Institute of Communication at the Abbey of Sant’Andrea in Flumine in Ponzano Romano (RM). After almost 20 years, the president of our foundation, remembers this event as the only occasion in which objects from his private collection, collected from life in Africa, were put on display. To date, these masks, statuettes, paintings, tools, and fabrics are the heritage of the Fondazione Progetto Africa. The exhibition was not limited only to the exhibition but, the International Institute of Communication, proposed laboratory spaces dedicated to the practical realization of objects inspired by the African tradition starting from research of shapes, materials, and colors. In the brochure of presentation of the laboratory it was said “we will help ourselves with sheets, photographs, maps on which we will project, quickly imagining historical scenarios and anthropological demos. For us, painting, photographing, illuminating, and approaching is a way of understanding the distribution of the elements, taking into account the size, proportions, and role they have in the culture of a people. We do not want to faithfully reproduce the original but understand the rules by which it was built…”.

An event attended by the Catholic community and hoping that we can give new prominence to these objects of art and crafts from the African continent, we think of a first work of cataloging and the publication of photographic albums that can serve to the testimony, the dissemination of these arts and anthropological – ethnographic collaborations as loans to museums and universities. The mask as a mere object, in itself, has a double value for what it shows and what it hides, as covering a face affirms its existence. But the mask also has a precise function and not always the same, used for disguise, for protection and to strike terror by deposing its strength even if not worn. It will be because of the anthropomorphic aesthetics or the caricatural aspect of a face but it is certain that this object is among the tools capable of linking the past to the present. Every population between practical and historical needs makes use of it, it is famous the use of this object as bridge between man and divinity during the celebrations with dances and propitiatory rites or in the theater starting from the Greek one.

In the common aesthetic, what appears to us to be endowed with expression is as if it imputes a direct reaction to the acceptance of this image or to its total rejection by placing us in immediate dialogue. Finally, it is important not to forget the apotropaic and literary value present in the abstract side of the object and that is addressed to us universally in a dynamic relationship and adapted to cultures, but to tell its physical structure, are materials such as carving tools, colors and proportions defined by the sensitivity of the craftsman or artist. There are in fact criteria, defined by the merchants, that identify some restrictive parameters for an African tribal object to be art: must be made exclusively for the purposes

Evolutionary and participatory genetic improvement: perspectives for African agriculture

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Climate change and exploitation of resources: a threat to environmental balance

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The Turkana County in Kenya is known as the cradle of mankind thanks to the archeological findings regarding the eldest ancestors of men. There is the Turkana salty water lake, which bathes the shores of Ethiopia too.

Today, the County is in extreme danger, caused by the long droughts. These are produced by the climate change and the hydroelectric and agrobusiness Ethiopian projects that threaten the Turkana Lake, which is the sole water supply for the indigenous communities of the territory. In fact, 300.000 people live along the shores of the lake, fishing and breeding goats and cattle.

The data collected by the Kenya government show a clear tendency in the rise of mean yearly temperatures in the Turkana region, 2 and 3 degrees centigrade in between 1967 and 2012. Even the climate models have changed: precipitations diminished visibly, and the rain season has become shorter and drier.

Human Rights Watch has carried out a research study in the Turkana County in between April 2014 and February 2015 in which political strategies, policies, and development plans for the safeguard of the lake’s ecosystem have been examined.

The prolonged droughts and scarce rainfalls did intensify the difficulty of access to drinkable water, turning each day into a struggle for survival. Women, girls, and kids are responsible for the task of finding water: every day they go for extremely long walks to search for water in the dry riverbeds.

An unavoidable threat factor must be taken into account: industrial development. During the last decades, Ethiopia has promoted numerous plans for the construction of dams, cotton and sugar plantations that need constant water supply for irrigation, drains and many other structures near the lake.

According to predictions, water supply will be more than halved in the future, making some scientists believe in a shocking result: the division of the lake in two parts. The first, in the North, supplied by river Omo; and the second, South, supplied by rivers Kerio and Turkwel.

Were this to happen, the quantity of sweet water will drastically diminish, causing a growth in in the salinity and the water temperature, which in turn will decimate the fish fauna, not capable of reproducing at high temperatures.

The natual consequence would be a food crisis, that could be resolved in a non-peaceful way, bringing conflict among the communities for what concerns the control of the lake area.

Today, the hoarding of water resources is becoming a theft in food security, which is highly in danger for the scarcity of water, threatening the ecosystems’ balance and the good relations among neighboring villages.

 

Photo : 2012 © European Union – ECHO/Malini Morzaria

 

Found Turkana Lake!

 

A little story

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It was a grey morning of a quaint Tunisian winter, and I was leaving Tunis to visit some silicon caves, approximately 140km from the capital. There was a light spring-like drizzle and a magical scenery. Along the way, we encountered a white pick-up truck which had around 20 children, from 4 to 12 years old, in the back; they were on their way to school. Even though they were all wet from the rain, they were singing happily because of where they were going.

 

It was in that moment that I realized that something had to be done to help these children who, despite the cold and wet conditions, were happy to go to school. I kept that image in my mind all day long, while visiting the caves, and those happy children in the pick-up stuck in my head until evening. Then, I was walking through a Tunisian market when I saw the painting and asked the merchant about its meaning. He simply told me: “these are the African women who cry their pain through their songs. It is about the damage that international corporations are making to Africa.”. Those words were a revelation; I immediately bought the painting and, on my way to the hotel, began to think about organizing an auction to buy one or two school buses to donate to the children’s school.

 

The painting was later acquired by the Project Africa Foundation, who donated the money to buy those two buses for the schools of the little Tunisian village which I still don’t know the name of. Up until today, Covid-19 has impeded the process of finding and buying the buses, but some days ago I met an Umbrian gentleman (who has kindly requested to remain anonymous) who offered us the 2 vehicles for a discounted price, more accessible to us (far below the actual value).

Thanks to this, the dream of providing the children with a school bus that will allow them to go to school in any weather while happily singing their songs, will become reality.

Giovanni Maria Bonci

 

AFRICA BUSINESS LAB 2021/22

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The Africa Project Foundation will participate in the “Africa Business Lab” training courses, designed, conceived and promoted by Agenzia ICE in collaboration with SACE and Confindustria Assafrica & Mediterraneo.

Africa Business Lab aims to promote an updated image of the African continent, in step with the economic and social trends already underway (demographic growth, urbanization in progress, regional integration agreements) and invites us to look at today’s Africa as a continent of opportunities and not just of risk.

It is structured in an informative part with four webinars dedicated to the four geographical areas of Africa and a training part divided into three sectoral paths – Agribusiness, Energy, Infrastructure.

  • The project aims to:
  • To know
  • To connect
  • To build

The training with Africa Business Lab will be the President of our foundation Giovanni Maria Bonci and his assistant Andrea Feliciello.