averian Father Victor Bongiovanni is definitely a man with "attitude." There he was, with a gun pressed against his head and equally up-close-and-personal death threats pounding into his ears. Through it all he managed to reduce his assailant to sputtering rage.
"I'm going to kill you. Why are you not afraid?" the gunman fumed at him repeatedly, grinding the gun deeper into his skull, and playing more menacingly with the trigger after each futile attempt to get the priest to obey his orders. "I am not afraid," Father Bongiovanni told him, "because my life is in God's hands. It is not in your gun."
That was back in June 1997, in Sierra Leone, the West African country where civil war has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths since 1991, a wrecked economy and more than a million refugees.
Italian native Father Bongiovanni, who was ordained in 1968, served five years in Vicenza, Italy and then three in England, where he learned English, the official language of Sierra Leone. It is a former British colony, which became independent in 1961 and has a population that is 60 percent Sunni Muslim, with 30 percent practicing local beliefs, six percent Protestant and two percent Catholic.
He has been a missionary there for 26 years, the first 10 "in the bush" working in villages to build small Christian communities, then 16 as director of the Makeni diocese's pastoral center, preparing catechists and organizing materials for "our schools."
After some urging from Father Frank Grappoli, the Xaverians' provincial treasurer and mission procurator, he recently recalled his run-in with one of the rebel gunmen. The recollection came in an interview during a brief visit to his order's provincialate on Helene Court here before he headed that day for a stopover with members of his congregation in Holliston, MA and then was to move on to Chicago to share his mission experiences and "formative" lessons with other Xaverians and their supporters.
The gun-to-the-head incident occurred, Father Bongiovanni said, when a group of armed rebel fighters came to commandeer the pickup truck at the mission compound where he was. On hearing that "I had no keys," the group's officer had ordered him to "sit down on the sand."
Such an order, according to the native culture, it was explained, was an exercise in total humiliation, for by obeying it, a person was surrendering all dignity and rights, even giving permission to be killed by the one in control.
No way was he going to sit down, Father Bongiovanni assured, for he knew if he did he could be shot with no qualms and die in what was considered to be a humiliating way, so he refused to go along with the order. Facing the priest's faith-based defiance, eventually the frustrated assailant gave up trying to change his mind.
"He ordered me to get into the house and I did," Father Bongiovanni said, noting, however, that he walked backwards to the door, taking no chances on what he knew was the odds, on certainty that he would be shot in the back. He also related what happened in June 1997, "the very first day" he saw the 1,500 strong "Northern Jungle" rebel force come "out of the bush" to take on government troops in the town of Makeni.
That is the seat of the Diocese of Makeni, headed by his fellow Xaverian, Bishop George Biguzzi (who in an earlier Beacon interview at the provincial house had described having been taken prisoner twice by rebels in 1999. Father Bongiovanni was one of two priests captured with the bishop at that time, according to Catholic News Service reports.)
Father Bongiovanni said his 1997 meeting with a rebel group happened while they were eating, and he was challenged as a "white man" to explain why they only had food "fit for pigs," which he considered himself too good to eat. Father Bongiovanni's response, he said, with a fine Mediterranean shrug, was to ask them for some of what they were eating.
"One of them took the spoon out of his mouth and I ate two or three mouthfuls of their food with it," he said with a grin, offering no comment on the fare, but clearly none the worse for the experience, which apparently impressed the rebels.
Father Bongiovanni's major concern about what he experienced in Sierra Leone, however, was not for himself, but for the 250 "child soldiers, girls and boys, from primary to middle school" who had been abducted from their villages and families to be a part of the ragtag contingent that had come out of the bush into Maken” on that June Thursday almost seven years ago.
"They all carried guns, but they were so young, so little," he recalled, "that they had the belts across their heads, because if they wore them around their waists, the guns would have been dragging on the ground." The next day, Father Bongiovanni recalled, Bishop Biguzzi called a meeting because he had "decided something must be done for the children."
The bishop, he said, met with a rebel officer, a Colonel Isaac, a Liberian and "a terrible man," and got permission for someone to go to the barracks that housed both the children and adult fighters. "I came there wearing a white cassock and carrying a new football (a soccer ball) and a referee's whistle," Father Bongiovanni said, recalling how the children were all lined up and responding snappily to the "marching orders" being barked at them.
One girl in a back row, though, was not performing well, seemed to be almost falling down, he said, and he asked what was wrong with her. “She gave birth last night," he was informed matter-of-factly.
It was explained that the drill included three shouted commands to the children: "Remember you are a soldier," "Don't be afraid to be a soldier," and "Behave like a soldier." Further verbal instruction to the ragged, shoeless youngsters included directions to "act like Rambos," Father Bongiovanni said almost wonderingly.
When he could, he put the soccer ball in play, throwing it at a little boy in the front row. "He caught it and said it is four years that I don't touch a football," Father Bongiovanni said. “He was eight, which meant he had been only four when he was taken by the rebels. They took them as young as two." The children's initial training, it was explained, included giving them sticks with which to beat rebel captives and "forcing them to watch when hands were being cut off."
The rebel commander granted his request to "take away all their guns," and Father Bongiovanni would comeback with community volunteers to spend time with and help the children. On the first such visit, said Father Bongiovanni, he and his people brought cartons of clothes, T-shirts and shorts for both boys and girls and eventually, football teams were started for the boys, volleyball teams for the girls.
But they were very weak; he said, and it was discovered that they were living on just two glasses of "bulgur" a day, the latter described as a liquid made up of water and the grain soaked in it. "I went to Bishop Biguzzi and said, ‘Help my children become children again’,” Father Bongiovanni said. The episcopal deal with the rebels that followed, involved the commander giving permission for the children to go to school, an essential part of restoring the childhood that had been hijacked from them, it was felt on the promise of food.
In return, Father Bongiovanni, at the direction of the Bishop, would drive wounded rebels to the hospital every day "and pay for their medical treatment." His own quite personal rehabilitation effort was to talk to the children about their parents and encourage them to remember "beautiful things" in their lives "Things they had enjoyed doing, the food their Mama had cooked."
In the school, he said, the youngsters were divided into three groups, "little, middle and high,” but he noted that it was not easy to turn some of them from under-aged gunslingers into willing students of traditional academic subjects. Which is why the bishop directed vocational classes be organized to train some of the children in skills they could use when they went back home using the tools and methods that would be available to them there.
The school was also an opportunity to learn and make lists of the children's names
and the names of the villages from which they had been taken, so that "our volunteers could be sent out to search for their families.”
"We were able to return 225 out of the 250 to their parents or extended families," Father Bongiovanni reported, happily describing scenes of reunion and immediate, ecstatic maternal recognition of children missing for years. The families of the 225 "were always ready to take them back” and if there were no surviving family members, the chief of the town got other families to take them in."
Twenty-five didn't want to return, he said, either because they had come from families already broken, they were afraid they would be punished if they went home, or, in some cases, the elder of the village had refused to accept them because they "had chosen to go with the rebels." When asked by Father Bongiovanni why children had been rounded up and trained as fighters, the rebel commander explained: "We wanted them to become the rebels of tomorrow." He shrugged off the Xaverian's response that "you reach people by ideas, not by force."
The brief interview with Father Bongiovanni produced enough material for a thick book far more than for a newspaper article. That article cannot end, though, without recording his answers to two some perhaps obvious questions: Why do you stay in such a dangerous place? "Because I enjoy it. I have discovered the greatness of the people. Even when they are forced to run away from their homes, they ask permission to start small Christian communities. I stay because I believe that while evil is powerful, love and God are more powerful."
Were you really not afraid with that gun at your head? “I tell people that in those moments and others like them, that I have experienced the truth of Jesus' promise to be with us always. I can honestly say that in those moments I experienced peace of mind and peace of heart." Then, with a grin, he said: "I only started getting afraid after everything was over."
Father Bongiovanni made a final request: "Thank all the people who pray for the missions.”
(From "The Beacon", Newspaper of the Diocese of Paterson, NJ)