Hajja Salesjana

various students, including the son of his landlady, Lucia Mattia, in exchange for room and board. At the same time, he honed his carpentry skills by working in the wood shop of the Barzocchino brothers. Besides the embarrassment of being years older than his classmates in public school, John had to work late into the night to pay his way through school. Indeed, the burden of the boy would become the blessing of the young priest. Immediately after his arrival at the Convitto Ecclesiastico (1841), Don Bosco began doing prison visits where he encountered boys, as young as ten years of age, crammed into small, dark, putrid cells, covered in lice, their eyes grey with depression, locked up with hardened criminals. The sight was so wrenching that it made Don Bosco nauseous. But as providence would have it, this horror became an opening for divine inspiration; laden with burdens. But God transformed these burdens into blessings. At twelve years of age, Johnny had to leave home to avoid domestic violence at the hands of his half-brother Antonio, breaking his heart and his mother’s. At the Moglia homestead where he was welcomed, he learned shoe making, vine dressing, basic carpentry and other skills to pay his keep. As a fifteen year old, John spent a year at Castelnuovo’s public school, a 5km walk from Becchi. Walking to school in the morning, returning home for lunch, walking back to school for the afternoon only to return home at the end of the day meant walking 20 km a day… a bit much even for an energetic boy like John. So he sought room and board in Castelnuovo with the local tailor, Giovanni Roberto, from whom he learns basic tailoring. As a sixteen year old in Chieri, John developed his teaching skills by tutored 23 Ottubru-Diċembru 2024 hajja