Kidnapped by an Islamist group in Niger in October 2018, this Italian missionary spent 752 days in captivity in Mali.

For two years he could do absolutely nothing. Since the evening of 17 September 2018, when a gang of mujahidin kidnapped him from his home in the small village of Bomoanga, in Niger, taking him away in his pajamas and slippers, Father Pier Luigi Maccalli has lost, along with his freedom, everything else. Blindfolded, with his wrists tied, he traveled for seven days on motorbikes and pirogues across Burkina Faso, to his first destination, a hideout in the savannah of Mali. There, on a mat and with his ankle chained to a tree, he broke down in tears full of questions. «Why are they doing this to me? And why, Lord, have you abandoned me?”. Father Gigi, originally from Crema, now 61 years old, is a missionary of the Sma, African Mission Society. «Those tears and those questions were immediately my greatest company. They were the rain that irrigated my desert during the time of imprisonment.” And which gave him, as the first sprout, the feeling of freedom, even within a total impediment. After those first days in which the hope that it was a sudden kidnapping gradually weakened, his imprisonment wore on in a perpetual nomadism: given up several times to different groups, he reached the border with Algeria, in Sahara desert, hot during the day and freezing at night. He ate and slept among snakes, mice and cockroaches. Without being able to celebrate Mass anymore, he became attached to the Psalms and the prayer of the Rosary. He found some shells with which he counted the tens and two sticks that he joined together like a cross when no one saw him. Prayer was the space that made him free. And where, like a modern Job, he began to question God.