I am Maria Maiolo, born twenty-two years ago in Acquaro, a small town in the Vibonese hinterland.

When I was 17 years old, I left my hometown together with my family to follow my dad, a chef, who managed to find a year-round job in Northern Italy after a long period of seasonal work which was the only employment available in Calabria.

I arrived in Como with a suitcase full of dreams and aspirations convinced of the fact that the place will welcome me and will be up to my dreams.

I spent the first few days meditating on what will be and what has already been in my short but intense life as I prepare to deal with the first day of school in a class already formed and with habits and ways of doing things certainly different from my own, but regardless I felt well prepared to adapt to the group with which I will share the last two years of high school.

The reception is cold, and as the days passed the situation does not change: the desk in the middle of the class is always mine to share with a Sicilian girl who will soon change schools shortly thereafter.

As a good Calabrese, I don't give up and fight to be accepted, but my struggles will soon have a major obstacle to overcome: the teachers, who instead of helping me team up with the rest of the class, push the class to gang up on me. I would swallow bitter mouthfuls then return home and choke back the tears.

I could never cause pain for my parents. I study, just as I have always studied, and the results don't come to the point that I really believe what the teachers say is the truth: school is not my strength. Finally my Christmas vacation, so much desired, arrives, and I let myself be pampered by the love of my family, the hugs of my friends and the warmth of my small town that I retrace in every single corner.

That small village has cheered my childhood and I can't believe that someone who doesn't know the beauty and simplicity of my land would presume to judge it. Christmas brings me Giuseppe, able to love every facet of me, but at the end of the vacation, returning home will mean suffering much more than before. I return to school and the bitter burden from the new separation torments me. If the first time I wasn't aware of what was waiting for me, now I know, and melancholy becomes my only traveling companion.

I spend my days on the phone with Giuseppe who encourages me, to resist and not to give up, but young and by now stripped of every feeling of security, I surrender. I give in to criticism, attacks, sarcastic laughter, meanness and ignorance. I lose the school year and a deep scar remains in me: that of a defeat that I do not accept. One cannot mock someone because of his origins or who simply has an accent different from theirs.

With the help of my family and Giuseppe, I heal every wound and start over stronger than before. After one year I find myself in the halls of the ITC Galileo Galilei Institute in Vibo Valentia.

I have passed the exams of the fourth and fifth year and I am getting ready to enter the classroom to take the high school final exam. I graduate in tourism with a multidisciplinary thesis on the role that criminal organizations have within the world trade, focusing, in one chapter, on the presence of organized crime in Milan, the center of trade.

This is not an attack, but a personal study capable of making me rediscover a tormented land that for years has been the backdrop to an incurable cancer that has made it a victim, but today I face my exam aware of the fact that the difference is subtle but important: organized crime was born in the South, for purely political reasons due to total abandonment by the institutions, but it spreads quickly throughout the world, soon leaving Calabria, which unfortunately has always lacked the wealth that this social scourge seeks.

The paper closes with the testimony of Martino Ceravolo, father of Filippo, innocent victim of the Mafia, demonstrating how these organizations are not only harmful to the economic sphere, but with malice they also manage to touch the deepest part of you. I graduated in spite of those who told me that school wasn't for me and I told my story in a book: THE COURAGE TO CHANGE.

This experience has profoundly changed me, and today I have a passionate love for my land rich in beauty and humility. Certain that together we can improve and that our culture makes us free, and freedom is the most important gift after life. In many school meetings, I have encouraged children of all ages to break away from any attitude or thought that deprives us of one of these values.

The book is being adopted in a number of primary and secondary schools and presented at prominent events in Calabria. Many copies have been sold. I will be selling the last copies available for a fundraiser in support of pediatric hematology- oncology at the hospital "Bianchi Melacrino Morelli" of Reggio Calabria. It is a book which reads fluidly and simple, suitable for all ages, which will give a smile to those who struggle to hold on to the gift of life.

Together and with a smile, every evil hurts less.

(Text written by Maria Maiolo)