This story–which opened the 2025 Rimini Meeting–would appear to be one of failure. Last January, in Tel Aviv, Kuchinate (“crochet”, in Tigrinya), a women’s cooperative that for twelve years had been employing and supporting the lives of over 450 African women who had escaped human trafficking, closed its doors. Though strongly supported by Azezet Habtezghi Kidane, known as Sister Aziza (sixty-seven years old, Eritrean by birth but now a British citizen), and by an Israeli psychologist friend of hers, Diddy Mymin Kahn, it could not withstand the economic blows inflicted by the pandemic and the war between Hamas and Israel. “It was no longer economically sustainable to pay the salaries and the rent for the building, given that all the sales in the shops, in our studio, and in the kibbutzim of handicrafts handmade by our women stopped and never resumed. Many of them have had to leave, once again, everything, taking flights to Canada or northern Europe.”

Sister Azezet also left her country, Eritrea, in her early twenties, as a missionary after taking the habit of the Comboni nuns. In fact, when she was young, she left her city, Massawa, because of the war, in order to go to another city in Eritrea that was safer. There, while she was studying, she met some disciples of St. Daniel Comboni, who one day showed her a video of a hospital for lepers that the congregation had opened in southern Sudan. “Near my house there was a leprosy colony too. Leprosy patients marked my childhood. I come from a Christian family. I have always wanted to be able to serve the sick and those sisters did it with joy. Challenging my parents, who had hoped for an arranged marriage for me, I decided to verify my vocation, or rather my ‘double vocation’: that of a nun and that of a nurse.” And the Lord, she says, has not failed to show her the path that–in these forty years–has led her to Ethiopia, Sudan, London, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, as well as today in Italy, in Brescia, where the diocese’s missionary and migrant ministry began serving a few months ago.

The fourteen years she spent in the Holy Land touched her deeply. There she worked on two fronts: coordinating numerous educational and training activities with the Bedouin Muslim communities scattered in the West Bank desert and working as a nurse with the thousands of African migrants who since 2007, because of the closure of the Libyan route, have poured into the Sinai region, ending up in the hands of criminal gangs. “An organization that operates in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, operated two clinics, a mobile clinic and an open clinic, and called me to act as an interpreter and cultural mediator for refugees. At the time we had no idea what we were going to discover, but I didn’t believe much in the rumors of torture of migrants. I was forced to change my mind.” The mobile clinics, she explained, are a useful experiment in part because they operate in the West Bank and give many Israeli doctors the opportunity to become aware of the conditions in which Palestinians often live.

But in those months between 2009 and 2010 it was the phenomenon of human trafficking that prevailed. Drama within drama. Men, women, and children, almost all of African origin, were illegally detained in the desert in about fifteen prison camps. “We soon learned to recognize which camp they came from by their wounds and torture. Burns on their backs with burning plastic, cuts, scars, dehydration, and rape were a mark of the jailers who held those people until they or their families were able to repay the debt incurred for the journey.”

Sister Aziza is the only one who speaks their language. She gave voice to almost sixteen hundred migrants and soon became aware of a phenomenon that had been invisible until then: that of women who had become pregnant by their tormentors. “They had fled from South Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia and in the desert they had experienced a hell that was much worse. Some asked for an abortion, but many decided to keep the baby because the love for life was and is greater for them than any wrong suffered. The ability to welcome and the capacity for self-giving and feminine resilience, was embodied for me in them. Despite everything, they chose life. Some then opted to give their children up for adoption, but most kept them with them. With sorrow I denounced that horror publicly, with press conferences and interviews where I told of the chain of human trafficking that involved so many countries. The world had to know.” Perhaps this is also why today Sister Aziza is considered “persona non grata” in her homeland. But she never took a step back. Not even when things got difficult.

The first hurdle was to enter into dialogue with abused migrants. “They were psychologically destroyed, taciturn; they didn’t get out of bed, they cried, they couldn’t have stable emotional relationships anymore. And the babies who were born remained apathetic, attached to the breasts of these mothers, perhaps without crawling or walking even until they were two years old. What could we do?” An idea came from her friendship with Diddy, a Jewish psychologist who works in one of the centers to which Sister Aziza refers women who have received first aid. In order to snatch them from depression it is necessary to start with the children.

“We decided to open a nursery school where the little ones could play, do activities, develop that creativity and playfulness typical of childhood. Their liveliness soon spread to their mothers. Seeing their children so alive, they began to want to get out of bed, then to leave the room and even to learn the skills for a job, to be able to be reintegrated into society.” In 2011, the Kuchinate Center was born, and was designed to provide economic and psychosocial support to the most vulnerable segment of the African community seeking asylum. Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish women work there.

“We were a diverse group of women. All different, but together. Each brought as a gift to the others the laborious creativity acquired in her country of origin. Some stuffed chairs, some created dolls, some wove objects of everyday use, all products of the highest quality. A virtuous circle was generated, because we managed to give them a salary and, at the same time, while they worked with each other they supported each other, and in the evening, when they returned home, each of them knew they were no longer alone.” That’s why at the beginning we said it was a story about what appears to be a failure on the surface. Because even though the center has been closed, at the core there is a whole web of friendships and relationships that not even failure has been able to bring down.

Sister Aziza shows both photos and videos of the dinners she organized to rebuild marriages in crisis, the children playing, moments of work at Kuchinate, and images of video calls with one of the women who–after she emigrated to Canada–opened a sister center to give back some of the good she received in Tel Aviv. In order not to forget anything, the nun has collected everything in a book, Oltre i confini [Beyond the borders], written with the journalist Alessandra Buzzetti, which the Vatican Publishing House will publish in September with a preface by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa.

“The incredible thing for me is the gaze of these women,” said Sister Kidane. “I have never met people so close to God. I am consecrated; I have made a precise choice for a relationship with Him. But the total abandonment that they have always had–in their gestures and words–I had to learn by watching them. I can’t say if my faith has grown, but I know that I have asked myself even more questions and that God has become even more familiar to me for this reason. Even when the cooperative was struggling, they were the ones who consoled me, reminding me that Providence acts much better than we would be able to. I want to be as genuine as they are in their relationship with God.”

As she speaks, the nun touches her veil, from which rebellious curls sprout. On her forehead, above her clear and bright eyes, we can see a tattooed cross, almost faded, greenish. It was the work of an Ethiopian neighbor who wanted to bless her. “There is always femininity at the origin of everything. Women give life, care for and protect. Femininity, by its nature welcoming, is always ready to generate, to always start again. For this reason, the Madonna remains the most beautiful figure for us to look up to. She cradled and guarded the salvation of the world. We have tried and try to do this in our little place where we are called on mission. The Holy Land has fallen to me, but it will be your turn wherever you are.” Someone has called her a heroine, an ante-litteram feminist. But she, her friend Diddy, the gynecologists she met in the mobile clinics, and the women of the Kuchinate community do not like labels–because they are much more.