Extinguishing the Fire

Mum tells us that the biggest problem is the night, because her child does not sleep, but the day is no joke either. He is afraid of being alone in a room and when it happens he immediately runs to look for someone out of fear; he cannot go to the bathroom without being accompanied, otherwise the poop ends up everywhere and the walls, like the mirror, change colour. Out of nowhere he suddenly starts screaming or howling like a wolf, putting the whole neighbourhood on alert. From his older siblings at home and his classmates at school he has built up a very rich collection of torn T-shirts; their skin is covered with bites and scratches and, if there is no one around, he takes it out on himself, hurting himself. To the father who threatens to send him back to the country they come from, or to the teacher who first orders him and then begs him to stop, he replies that, whenever he wants, he can go to the police and report them for having beaten him, even though it is not true.

These are the shards we gathered a year ago during the interview to enrol in the Felicizia project, from a mother exhausted by her child’s crises and sleepless nights, and it feels like a lifetime has passed. So many things have happened in a year, inside and outside the walls of an Arsenal that every day tries to transform itself into what its small and large guests need, becoming a space of care that promotes physical and mental well-being, welcomes and harmonises fragilities and differences, trying not to leave out precisely those who are worst off and most in need of help. There are small problems and more complex situations, simple volunteers who give their time and presence alongside the weakest, but also professionals who freely give back skills, experience and knowledge at a clinical and academic level, making themselves available, for example, to see these children, meet their families, and speak with their teachers.

Within an integrated pathway together with the interventions of Social Services and the child neuropsychiatry service, a doctor carried out all the necessary assessments for the child’s cognitive and learning evaluation; a pedagogue meets him individually every week, in agreement with the school, in a programme aimed at strengthening the prerequisites underlying learning. This is how the child was able to have a support teacher, while an educator took him to the swimming pool every week, reducing school time, and a volunteer decided to organise his work shifts specifically to stay close to him whenever possible. The mother found a space where she could talk, without shame, about the struggles of a family without feeling judged and, little by little, the fire began to die down: night returned to being the time for sleeping, day the time for getting into trouble and making messes, but always a little less. Now that he is doing better, everyone around him is doing better too; the pain he feels inside is no longer so great as to force him to hurt himself and others, crashing at full speed into all the other children.

The road is still long, because all things need time to happen, and developmental paths follow the laws and rhythms of nature, but these days, when we meet new children full of fear who defend themselves as best they can and new mothers full of courage who love them anyway as if they were the most beautiful of all, we know that sometimes it is extremely difficult, but somehow always possible. There is a little girl who cannot yet speak; the sounds that come out of her mouth are incomprehensible, the marks she makes on a sheet of paper indecipherable; the only word she says is “poop” when she needs to go to the bathroom. She cannot do anything that the other children do, but like them she only wants time and space where she can play, feel well, be herself, feel loved and cherished by someone. And we are here, trying to wear out the wise steps and simply asking for help in order to really help her, to discover new paths again, to invent the time and space that she needs.

Marco Grossetti
NP October 2025