Help the poor in the shanty town

Nadia de Monari – fifty years old of Vicenza ancestry – died in Peru after being attacked a few days earlier while sleeping at her home in Nuevo Chimbote, on the country’s north-central coast: the woman in the South American country has been a secular missionary since 1995. She was one of the volunteers for Operation Mato Grosso: She ran six kindergartens and an elementary school in a slum. According to what was reported by the country’s media, and as Avvenir confirmed, Nadia de Munari was brutally assaulted last Wednesday, April 20, while she was asleep: There were other women in the house with her, but they heard nothing because they were in another ward. After only a few hours, noticing that the Italian had not yet woken up, they sounded the alarm and called for an ambulance. Nadia de Monari was still alive, but she was in critical condition: she was taken to the nearest hospital for first treatment and then transferred to Lima, where she underwent a laparoscopic operation. The operation was successful, but the woman later suffered a heart attack and died.

The Peruvian police defined the crime as inexplicable: Nadia, in fact She was known and respected even if the slums she works in are very dangerous. In Nuevo Chimbote, women were mainly interested in training teachers. The sender – Avvenir recalls – holds a master’s degree from the Canossian Sisters’ Educational Institute in Schio, and a nursery school teaching qualification. In recent months, those of the pandemic, he’s been supporting teachers by sending programs over the phone to children who have been unable to go to school due to the lockdown. Rosanna Stephanie, the friend of the fifty-year-old, does not understand what happened. “In forty years of activity, that is, since Don Hugo de Sensei founded our movement, we have never seen attacks inside our homes.”