mamme at school. The basic belief is that when we nurture a mother, the whole community around her sprouts and reserves her fruits for all. It is with this thought in mind that twenty years ago, in a Milanese school in via Mac Mahon, a handful of visionary volunteers gave shape to a project that wanted to take immigrant mothers by the hand just arrived in the city. To put it simply, they set up an Italian school: women, in fact, arrived in Italy – the majority to be reunited with their husbands – and in an instant they collided with the wall of an incomprehensible language that ended up locking them up, frightened, in their homes.
Those volunteers began to convince them, one by one, to leave and go to their school. But the school, and here comes the real beauty of this story, was not just a school. It was a sort of other house, custom built for mothers, a house open to the world, free, where indeed who he went there to learn to speak and read Italian, he also learned to relate to the services and schools of his childrento find one’s bearings in a supermarket, to walk in an unfamiliar city regaining self-esteem.
The volunteers had understood that learning Italian didn’t just mean learning the right words to insert one after the other, but building one’s own way towards integration with a certain protagonism. And not only: they knew that foreign mothers would be of tremendous value to the entire citybecause by integrating they would also have encouraged their children, their families and communities to do so, thus preventing – in everyone’s interest – social unease and cultural uprooting, which when they flare up are then very difficult to repair.
That project is called “Moms at school” and today it is a non-profit organizationone of the gems of the Milanese Third Sector, which the municipal administration owns awarded in 2020 with the Civic Merit as part of the Ambrogino d’Oro, the award given to those who leave a special mark on this city. In the headquarters in via Varesina, in a space named after the courageous Lea Garofalo – killed in Milan, after having become a witness to justice against the ‘Ndrangheta because she wanted to change things – one can breathe the enthusiasm to carry on the social change inaugurated twenty years ago, but also the difficulty of doing it with very, very few funds. Certainly, Mamme a scuola lives thanks to women – but there are also some fathers – who are very courageous: they are activists, teachers, collaborators, whose stories of change are intertwined with those of the immigrant women for whom they become compasses.
Know how to tune in
Daniela Cattana, retired a few months ago after 36 years as a manager in multinationals and part of the Professional Volunteering group of ManagerItalia, has been the president of the non-profit organization since December and will aim to intercept new initiatives, new support, new tenders. “It all happened suddenly, last December, but when they asked me to join the board, I was immediately enthusiastic about it,” she says. «Teachers and activists have extraordinary skills, a profound seriousness in acting, enormous hearts. Of them, I was immediately impressed by their ability to get in tune with the needs of people in extremely complex situations».
Nancy Boktour, 49, is well aware of the linguistic difficulties that affect anyone arriving in Italy from a foreign country, because 24 years ago she left Egypt for Italy. «When you arrive it is as if you suddenly find yourself deaf and dumb. Language immediately proves to be a formidable obstacle. Consequently, the grocery store is scary, your children’s school is an incomprehensible dimension from which you feel cut off, the relationship with health care facilities is a puzzle. Personally, I found myself pregnant with Lorenza, my first daughter, who was here recently: I made visits to the hospital with a paper dictionary in my hands, sticking words here and there, in conversations that were very difficult. When I arrived in Italy, I thought that speaking French would save me, but I was wrong». In Egypt Nancy Boktour was, in fact, a French teacher: here, once she learned Italian right on Mamme’s desks at school, Nancy became the cultural mediator who, together with a young Chinese immigrant, accompanied her adventure from the beginning. Today it is a pivot of the non-profit organization.
«A foreign mother who is unable to communicate with her child’s teachers ends up feeling like an inadequate mother and who has suddenly lost the educational and relational power she had in her country of origin. It is a mother who often disqualifies and humiliates her son, because she is considered not up to par; after all, foreign children and teenagers, once they enter the school curriculum, learn Italian rather quickly, thus not forgiving their mothers for not knowing how to do the same. On these wounds, many families end up falling apart. Mamme a scuola, which is therefore not just an Italian school, helps these women to repair their self-esteem, to recover their value, to rebuild their educational role”.
Mothers are an important hub
«If we support a foreign mother in her parental role, we prevent her children from social hardship» remarks Giuseppe Strazzeri, editorial manager of a well-known publishing house and for six years on the board of the Milanese non-profit organization. «These mothers therefore represent an integration hub of inestimable value on the territory of our city. They are, in fact, highly motivated to integrate for themselves and their children, bearers of peaceful and positive demands in the neighbourhoods, almost always in the suburbs, where they live with their families, concrete embodiments of the possibility of having in their children, tomorrow, bilingual citizens harmoniously integrated with the urban context». Since its foundation, around 5,000 women have been intercepted and supported by Mamme a Scuola. “However, there are literally thousands of mothers in the city of Milan with regular residence permits who find themselves in the situation of having to reach a sufficient level of language as soon as possible, not only to allow them to integrate into society, but more simply to meet the requirements of the residence permit duly received, without this possibility being given by the same institutions that formally accepted them» continues Strazzeri.
Words come when you become aware of yourself
The Italian lessons are held in the headquarters in via Varesinaas well as in spaces made available by schools or by the Municipality, in the districts of Quarto Oggiaro, Dergano, San Siro and viale Bodio: they last two hours each, are biweekly, are divided into several levels of learning. About fifteen or so female students per class, many are Egyptian, there are some Moroccans, and then Bengalis, Sri Lankans, Nigerians. Some are refugees and come from Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia.
«Maybe the first time they arrive in class completely closed in their overcoats, with their purse clutched in their hand: how do you open a woman like that? So, we stand in the center, we move a little, so they have to take off their overcoat. Then comes the challenge of creating the group and, with respect to this, we women, all of us, know generate a language of feelings and experiences that goes beyond the verbal: so, slowly the students get involved, they look into each other’s eyes, and after a few lessons they no longer know where the overcoat is.
I have a class of illiterates, who don’t even read or write their native language. In class, with the help of wool and buttons, they drew themselves as they are seen; then, only then, did the words come: mouth, hair, big eyes… You have to feel things first so that, later, you can name them». To tell is Alessandra Bonetti, today a teacher and coordinator of the courses – with a Master’s in Glottodidactics -, yesterday a journalist for a large publishing house.
Moms at school: the challenge of creating a group
«Through Mamme a scuola I make a restitution of what I had in a beautiful life and, in the classroom, in the eyes of the female students I read how useful a job can be, an experience so rare in our lives. The important point is to create a single body where the teacher does not sit in the chair, but acts as a facilitator: after some time, in class they no longer speak only to the teacher, but to the partner they trust, perhaps after asking her what puppy means, because they heard an Italian mother say it to their son» says Bonetti.
And goes on: “To teach Italian to these fragile women, skills, techniques and specific knowledge are needed: if you don’t have it, they get very little and, therefore, after a few weeks you’ll be left with an empty class, and it seems right to me. For us, testing success is asking ourselves: are there still, the students, after a month? Instead, the widespread thought in many schools for foreigners is to do something because “anyway, it’s always better than nothing”. Well, that “rather than nothing” risks creating crazy cracks, because if these women convince themselves that they won’t be able to learn Italian, we’ve all lost».
The paradox of the new tenders
Ornella Sanfilippo has been the locomotive of Mamme a scuola for twenty years, given that she was part of the founding nucleus. There are many initiatives that she has taken the lead of but, of all of them, she proudly talks about her the spaces for the very young from zero to three years that are set up wherever Italian classes are organised, so the mothers are calm while they study and the children are looked after by a specialized team. Today the founder returns in full the success of an experience now rooted in the city, but weakened by Covid and, above all, by the emergencies of arrivals, by the lack of funds, by the absence of realistic public strategies.
«In Milan, suburbs such as San Siro, Corvetto, Giambellino, Quarto Oggiaro are bursting, schools are put under stress by the arrival of immigrants, early school leaving in the city has now shocking numbers». He explains: “Public funds intended for immigrants are now diverted to stop emergencies, who have also bypassed the organization of emergency reception. Those designed for teaching Italian to adults support standardized courses that are not considered favorably by immigrant mothers – because perhaps they have minor children that no one can look after if they went to school -, nor by 16-17 year olds who simply do not they go there.
On the other hand, the European tenders against early school leaving and youth discomfort are aimed at adolescents, but we know from experience that family fractures are generated earlier so, rather, prevention work should be done which, moreover, costs less. I would add that the new tenders finance innovation and experimentation, which is also useful, but we are an already established, tested and positively operational service and, therefore, paradoxically, we risk being left out. It is increasingly difficult for us to act and, certainly, the volunteer who puts his soul into it is no longer enough. We navigate on sight: after a year we don’t know if we will have another one and this risks marking the fate of Mamme a scuola». (To offer a financial contribution or make yourself available as a volunteer: mammaascuola.it ).
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