A race for life

Mahmoud Lufti Ghuniem is Lebanese, but he fled his country in 2006: first Greece welcomed him, then the far north of Norway and finally landed in Italy. After spending a few years in Foggia (from 2012 to 2019), he arrived in Turin, where he now works as a rider.

 

La di lui is the story of a successful integration because "Italy - as he himself tells us - is a country that has opened its arms for me; I eat, work, live here and I feel I have to do something for this country, to give back what I have received ».

 

 

 

"Responsibility" is a word that he often repeats and precisely this value prompted him, during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, to donate to the Red Cross of Turin (where, among other things, he is a volunteer) masks. "But that's nothing, I only did what was in my responsibility," he says. In fact, not a small gift, not the superfluous of a rich entrepreneur, but half of what Mahmoud earns in a month between one delivery and the next, in a life that is always in a rush.

 

This gesture of great generosity prompted the President of the Republic to include him among the 57 knights of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic who have distinguished themselves in the fight against the pandemic. He, Mahmoud, a foreigner still without legal citizenship but with a great civic sense; a boy with a past as a nurse left among the bombs of Lebanon, but also with great impetus for the future: "I would like to start being a health worker and then I have the plan to enter university and study nursing".

 

Above all - and this is what matters most of all - a man who, living in the present moment, is able to notice others and meet their needs. This story teaches us that we should all be more responsible and more guardian than each other in order to intensify - together with Mahmoud and many Italians and foreigners like him - our race for life, especially in times like this, when darkness seems a lot. dense.