…just tonight, I take possession of this blog for personal purposes.
Today is Elisabetta’s birthday: let me wish her all the best.
Let me tell also: “happy Birthday Ely, this is your gift.But now it belong to us”.
This is your present.
A small post in a blog, written from Kampala City because here is where we are now, the last stop for the Agritools project – of course waiting for the next one.
This gift is sharing the same raw materials that brought you here.
A deep deal with things around, passion and strength through everything. The cryptic need to tell it all.
Our daily life, here, is crossed by small fights and big discussions between us, is a war of language and perceptions. We converted ourselves in that field of meanings that we wish to catch, observe, analyze, and that is now catching, observing, analyzing us.
I followed you in this project because I felt there must be something deep, related with the words of “innovation”, “Africa” and “agriculture”. The roots and the future of the human being, but also a natural meeting point for all those forces which are pushing up and pulling down our contemporary experience as human beings. The idea of “development”, a continent left behind, some centuries of colonizations which are still existing in our heads, the relationship with “la terra”, which in Italian means both “earth” and “land”. But also the fascinating attraction of technologies, their dark power through our minds, the huge concept of “change”, which can take any direction, and all of them at the same time.
We got the opportunity to travel through all this in the best way. With a strong independence of action and feeling, a condition which at the same time is a big challenge: the responsibility of being here to understand, and to give back our outcomes and results.
I admire the way you’re facing this big challenge. I admire you when I switch off the camera and you are just going to start your passionate discussion with our counterparts. I dream that your insight – agriculture can really become a new, cool opportunity for millions of young people and not only in Africa – will be stronger than a certain way of though that for too long has characterized the action of some old NGOs.
So this is your gift, and it belong to us. Is a opportunity to tell you “thanks for this”. I’m doing it through ICTs, like we are getting used to. So from tomorrow we can start to fight again, deeply involved in a task which is bigger than us, a task which is your present to us.
Sandro B., Kampala, 1st of march 015.
