EXCHANGE PROGRAM FOR HUMAN SERVICE WORKERS

ROME CONFERENCE 2001

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          Maria Stefani  

          C.I.F.  Italia President

     WELCOME AND CONFERENCE'S PRESENTATION

 I think that at any conference what makes the difference are the participants, they are the most important component of any congress. So first of all I have to warmly express my thanks to all the CIP/CIF members and accompanying persons who devoted some of their time and moneys to take part to the Italian CIF conference.  We were 220 from 28 countries, a good representative of the world, and a good representative of the CIP/CIF family as Gisela Senssfelder, Nicole de Cacqueray, Gunvor Brettsschneider, Carl Henry Guste and others  who have been deeply involved in the time and who made a big contribution to the CIF development.

The Italian conference has been the first conference where  Martha Ollendorf was not present at, nor was Paul Hunger  and other people less known who have been promoting the CIF spirit in the years. Let me nominate my close friend Hans Forsell from Sweden who has been the Magazine Editor for a while and use to participate to all the CIF Conferences until he got ill. We, my generation, the CIP people who had the privilege of meeting Henry Ollendorf,  have to face the changing of the generations and we have the responsibility of transferring our experience to the new generations.

The world is getting smaller and smaller but there are big differences in opportunities, and now I am afraid things will get worse. People coming from Turkey, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania Argentina need a personal invitation in order to get the visa to allowed them to come to Italy.  We have been sending the invitations, phoning to the Embassies and in some cases we succeeded in allowed them to get the visas. I am very sad that I have not been able to help those people from Nigeria and Ghana who strongly wanted to come, they have paid their fees but they didn’t succeed in getting their visas. The Italian Embassies in those countries didn’t trust them because they fear that they will not go back. Of course I don’t know about their attitude, but we have in Italy hundred people coming illegally because it is not possible to protect our boards, and our Embassy fear for few  workers of helping professions. Only two boys from Ghana were able to come just at the end of the conference. Fortunately they have been hosted in Munich from a German CIF participant Jacob Braun, and they had the opportunity to make a good use of their coming to Europe.

The Italian conference has been the first conference organised by e-mail. It is a fantastic tool. The use of electronic communication made the organisation easier. Now we are updating  our web site www.cifitalia.it with materials from the conference so the participants can remember it and people who were not able to come, will be able to know what has been going on. I think  we have to improve the use of  the web site to help the branches in their activities.

The purpose we had in planning the conference was to offer an emotional involving experience, an experience that would involve completely, as usual CIF conference do. We wanted to give the opportunity to the participants to have a real picture of the Italian culture deeper than the one given to the tourists.

Italian culture is known as a family culture as a matter of fact we can prove it. My husband Ugo has been very much involved in receiving the registration papers and the fees before and during the conference, Marco Mimmo's son has been helping during the conference and with his friends has been plying  music last evening. 

The theme of diversity, which we have chosen, is something, which Italian social workers have been reflecting to in many ways and we tough it is a theme quite closed to the CIF spirit. As usual the Conference program is a combination between 3 factors: professional contents, association duties, tourism and leisure activities.

The handicapped singers "I ladri di carrozzelle" (the wheel chairs thieves) who have opened the conference helped all of us to find and to share the CIF spirit of solidarity.      Our experts have been presenting different approaches of diversity: diversity in opportunities, in health, in culture, in education, in art.

The professional contents have been developed by lectures and group work, and we appreciated the availability of all the experts who came. The lecture of Carla Collicelli was a wide presentation of the Italian society today, of course from the point of view of a sociologist involved in the changing to a better society, to the society that can fit the need of all his all citizens. It was the clue lecture and  the HBO memorial lecture because to face the society and find out new way to better it is the goal that HBO has fulfilled all his life. Clara Sereni  has contributed to presentation of the Italian society pointing out some problems and experiences toward building way of life in which everyone will be able to live the best life he can, no matter how much self contained he/she is or if he/she is handicapped.

Roberto Ghirardelli psychiatrist has illustrated the Italian experience of facing the mental illness in the community, without the psychiatric hospital, which has been the choice we made implementing the law on 1978 and we still work on it. Fiora Izzi,  social worker,  presented the problems of the immigrants in Italy. In last century our country faced a huge changing from a country based on poor agriculture, where people have to migrate from to Germany, USA, Latin America and so on, as you already know, we became because of the industrialisation a rich country where people are looking to come to.  Silvia Gavuzzo Steward  has presented the Campidoglio and the surroundings from the history and art point of view  art .  In Campidoglio we saw a theatre performance from Eduardo De Filippo, well known Italian theatre writer. The performance was one of the activities of the Day Centre for people with mental illness, they have been prepared the show just for the conference and they have been very proud of our invitation. It was very hot and the performance was in Italian, so I know it took some effort to stay there till the end, as mostly did.

In the last lecture, which landed us to the conclusion, Sergio Tavassi  gave us a  reflection on children upbringing to diversity.

The group work and the agency visits gave the opportunities to know more about Italian welfare. 

The auction, the bingo, the serenade and all the fund raising matters has been a great success, the CIP/CIF people have been very generous.

Finally I have to point out how many gifts I myself have got; we have been enjoying many different flavours coming from other countries.

Is not me that  can say if we really succeeded in our tools, we have been working hard but we had fun in doing it, and we had the hope, the hope we need very much now, that we made a small contribution to the human understanding and to peace.