I am Francesco Guarano, and have been employed for more than 30 years at the Istituto di Riabilitazione psichiatrica e neuromotoria San Giovanni di Dio FATEBENEFRATELLI at Genzano di Roma. In my present post I am the Rehabilitation and Educational Activities Coordinator, in my capacity as a professional Educationalist. Throughout these long years I have learned that no profession can compare with caring for other people, in terms of emotion, drama, victory and defeat. I do not think that I joined this profession because there was no alternative, because I had a “safe job” of the kind that so many people crave for, by the age of 20. Neither do I think that I can talk about a ‘Road to Damascus experience’, because my engagement in the social field was something that emerged as a teenager. I could quite easily have continued working in my routine job by becoming involved with social work and volunteerism as I had always done outside my working environment, with so many cards to be stamped and forms to be filled in, and other bureaucratic problems to be addessed. In short, for several years I saw people passing by me in the course of my work who I seemed not to see and not to hear. People passing by like ghosts, while I spent so many hours a day in an environment in which I was surrounded by people with impaired minds and bodies, without hardly noticing them. And yet one of the authors with which I was familiar was Franco Basaglia, a man, a luminary, and above all an enlightened writer who restored dignity to those who had spent her lives being denied it. My commitment in the  social and cultural fields continued outside my own working environment (in the early 80s I had other functions and duties at work), as if the days and hours spent in the Institute did not belong to me, and as if those men did not exist. I spent so many years living with “diversity” and I had never understood that being different, in some cases, is also a source of enrichment. Over the years I studied Humanities and graduated as an Educationalist, a social/health care worker responsible for the daily care of psychiatric patients to enable them to nurture relations and develop the ability to be self-reliant. Over the past 15 years I have also been responsible for coordinating in-house courses for individuals and groups coming from other institutes akin to our own. This brought has me into personal contact throughout the year with so many secondary school students (from high schools, vocational training colleges, secular and Catholic voluntary associations) as well as with the young people gaining experience on School Camps organised for the occasion by our Institute, to bring them into direct contact with our patients (coordinated by a member of the Order of the Brothers of Saint John of God). It is on these occasions that we are able to explain in what it means to be a Brother of Saint John of God, their History and above all their Charism which has been deployed throughout the centuries at the service of the most fragile people, the sick, the least of the earth, as our Founder taught us more than 500 years ago. I personally believe that I found my Lay vocation in that daily dimension with my close contact every day with the mentally ill, their ‘madness’, and their inability to express themselves meaningfully, while being bearers of a primordial humanity increasingly distant from our minds and hearts.