A crazy adventure called ASCS began 20 years ago, the brainchild of Fr. Benjamin. At the time I was already there, I was part of the first group of young volunteers who were being trained to volunteer abroad. I never imagined that choice would change the course of my entire life, but let’s go in order.

My name is Emanuele Selleri, I am 41 years old and I have spent exactly half of my life together with ASCS. Way back in 2004-at the start of the first international volunteer training course-I was one of the youngest participants, studying educational sciences and my goal was to graduate and leave for mission experience and then return to Italy and start my working life. But I hadn’t really factored in all that was ahead of me-that it would totally change my life!

In 2006, a watershed year in my life, I left for Cúcuta, on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, where special traveling companions were waiting for me, who became life masters and great friends. Having arrived to provide a service to others, I soon realized that I was the one who had received help and support at a time when my hitherto firm certainties proved instead to be very fragile. After a few months, I returned to Italy with the desire to return to Cùcuta, because that experience-which from before seemed too long-had actually turned out to be very short. So the following year I was able to leave again, but this time for Bolivia, where I stayed for six years.

Those were crazy years, full of excitement, adventures and experiences of closeness with migrants and refugees. During those years we opened and managed various projects for ASCS, from the educational project Apthapi to the migrant house in La Paz to the project Fronteras Solidarias.

In 2015 I returned to Italy where, together with other ASCS workers, we opened the Casa Scalabrini 634 project in Rome. A home where we try to include all the “ingredients” and “values” dear to ASCS, such as welcoming, innovation, respect, dialogue, listening and hope.

Since 2021, I have been coordinating this large and wonderful family, which never ceases to surprise me and remind me that if you leave room for new things, encounters, new insights and ideas, you can come out more enriched. To talk about ASCS and the anecdotes of the last 20 years of my life would require a whole book; there are faces and stories that have made my life so full that I never thought it was possible. Over these 20 years I have cultivated the most important friendships and met my wife. I am grateful because in the end it was not me who chose my work but life and the encounters I made led me to follow this adventure that still knows how to light me up and surprise me in my daily life.

Thanks to ASCS I have had much more than I could ever hope to receive, I have discovered and had the opportunity to create and offer opportunities to those who for a thousand reasons (injustice, violence, poverty etc.) could not have them.

My wish for ASCS for these 20 years is to always seek Certainty. The certainty of doing things well, the certainty of being alongside the most fragile people in the places where there is the greatest need, the certainty of being on the right side of history by always putting people’s lives at the center, without falling into the pursuit of security, of comfort zones, which would extinguish the sacred fire of the ASCS mission.