(ANS – Turin) – Guatemala? Yes. Papua New Guinea? Also. Sudan? The same. “It is easier to list the countries where I have not been,” smiles Bro. Antonio Saglia, speaking from his office in Valdocco. A Salesian Brother, professed in 1957 and formerly a teacher of graphic arts, he is now 87 years old and has traveled the world documenting life in Salesian missions inspired by Don Bosco. His “career” began almost by chance.

“It was 1970,” he recalls. “A Salesian living in Brazil knew about my passion for cameras and asked me to go and document the missions in the Amazon.”

An Adventure in the Amazon

The adventure began under very challenging conditions. “After landing in Manaus, I boarded a boat where they handed me a roll I had never seen before: it was a hammock,” he recounts. At night, he unrolled it to sleep on board. “For lunch and dinner we ate whatever was caught, even turtles,” he says.

Antonio carried a Paillard spring-driven camera with three optical lenses, which he used to film the life of the Yanomami people. “They lived almost completely naked in huts in the forest. At first they ran away from the camera, but then I took some Polaroids and showed them to the children—they were fascinated and kept touching them in disbelief.”

In the Amazon, he also experienced one of the most unusual moments of his life. “I was ill and they gave me a traditional drink served in a coconut shell,” he recalls. “Later I discovered that among the ingredients were powdered bones of a deceased Yanomami and banana.”

Among the Leper Colonies of India

At first, he traveled only during the summer, when school was closed. Later, in the mid-1990s, after retiring, Antonio visited even more missions. “I must have made about seventy documentaries,” he says. Most have been digitized and are now preserved at the Experimental Center of Cinematography – National Archive of Industrial Cinema in Ivrea.

He traveled throughout Africa, “without ever contracting malaria,” and was captivated by the tribal dances of peoples in brightly colored clothing. Yet the most powerful experience came in India, when he entered leper colonies. “Seeing those looks and those disfigured faces was terrible. Perhaps the most moving scene of all my journeys.”

Shipwreck in Papua New Guinea

There is hardly a corner of the planet, however remote, where Bro. Saglia has not been. He even ventured into towns controlled by drug traffickers in Colombia. “The soldiers warned us not to go, but missionaries were respected even by criminals.”

During his travels, he witnessed breathtaking natural landscapes: “Above all, crossing the Strait of Magellan in Tierra del Fuego between Chile and Argentina. But also the island of the lemurs in Madagascar—I have never seen such crystal-clear waters.”

Of course, in forty-five years of travel there were also misadventures. One of the most dramatic occurred in Papua New Guinea. “The engine of the boat broke down and we had no phones to send an alarm. After a night drifting at sea, some Papuans rescued us, but they could not find our island. We reached it many hours later, after quite a bit of anxiety.”

Unexpected Romantic Advances

Like all Salesian coadjutor brothers—the lay Salesians desired by Don Bosco—Antonio Saglia made vows of chastity and poverty. This did not prevent him from receiving romantic advances during his travels, which he always declined.

The boldest occurred in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, when a young woman near a river smiled at him and said: “I would really like to have a child with you.” In South Korea, courtship came during a traditional dance. “A young woman slipped a music box with her photo inside my jacket pocket,” he recalls with a smile. Later, the Korean girl began writing him letters that he translated: “Between the paragraphs there was often the word ‘Censored,’” he adds jokingly.

The Last Journey and the Lesson Learned

In 2015, forty-five years after his first mission trip, his final journey took place: a tour of several missions in Africa. In those lands, he learned optimism and still treasures the smiles of children.

“They have nothing and yet they are happy, while we lose ourselves in a thousand trivial things, always looking down at our smartphones.”

Source: La Stampa