The outskirts of the charming city of Paris are a different world compared with the city centre: every now and then, in fact, the banlieues make front page news for the social tension and the violence that is rife there.
Most of the time, these at-risk areas seem to reside on a planet that has been forgotten by public opinion, the media and the authorities. Argenteuil is regarded as the most violent suburb in the outskirts of Paris. It is a commuter town whose landscape is dominated by enormous decaying buildings that are home to 100,000 people, many of whom youngsters. Youths that people fear, that people try to avoid by crossing the pavement.
However, for a while now there have been a few people in Argeneuil that have stood up to them. They call it the new Valdoccò, in the French way with an accent, and it is a bare structure: the evening school (for youngsters of 16-25 years) and day school classrooms (8-16 years) are located in a pre-fab. The rest of the work is carried out on the streets. A team of 30 Salesian educators, assisted by organisers and volunteers, reach out to and educate, in the Don Bosco way, over 600 youngsters. The majority of these children and youths are of Maghreb origin, but there are also Asians and Eastern Europeans. At the centre of the initiative is Father Jean Marie Peticlerc, university lecturer and author of numerous essays on teaching, who lives here on the streets with his ‘lost’ children. For everyone but not for himself. His teaching method is involving and inclusive and he knows that violence – as Don Bosco used to say – “Is the sign that our education has failed”. In the downtrodden periphery of Paris père Jean Mariealso puts into practice the antidote to violence as experimented by the founder of the Valdocco of Turin: “so let’s roll our sleeves up: let’s educate them”.
Safeguarding human rights means teaching people about responsibility and responsible world citizenship. Not just in developing countries, not just in the South American favelas, the African bidonvilles, and the Indian slums, but also here is wealthy and civilised Europe.