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I feel totally powerless as I sit in the armchair and his mother shows me the bruises on her right arm. Yesterday he grabbed her and twisted her arms. As she tells me about it, he stands up and goes to her and very gently, with tears in his eyes, tells her, “Ma, I will not do it again, I am sorry. I love you. I want to change myself. I want to stay with you. I do not want them to lock me up.”
His mother, also with tears in her eyes, holds his hand gently and rubs it tenderly. “I know you do not want to hurt me. I know you love me. I know you are trying to change. I know, I know.”
He is in his late twenties. He has grown tall since I saw him as a teenager when his parents used to call me to discuss his progress, or rather the total lack of it, at the special school he used to attend. He is mentally disabled. His mother tells me that he often cries and tells her “Why can’t I be like the other young men? Will I ever be like them?”
I also notice that he has put on a lot of weight. He is taking a lot of pills. His mother explains that the doctor ordered them after the young man started punching electric switches and she was afraid that he would electrocute himself.
I asked her if he ever goes out. “He has no friends. And since his father, my husband, died a year ago, he is more alone and isolated. He goes to a centre for a few hours twice a week, where they give him colouring books for four-year-olds to fill in with crayons. No one is teaching him any life skills. No one has ever taught him any. He would like to learn how to use money and to know the time. But no one is teaching him anything. He would also like to go to the gym.”
He used to go to an adult training centre but, surrounded by older persons in wheelchairs, he became very depressed and told his mother he was afraid that he would also end up in a wheelchair, head bowed, not doing anything except for sometimes looking up and staring vacantly in the emptiness in front of him.
Locked up at home, pacing up and down, full of unhappiness, anger and frustration, and unable to express his energy in any other way, he turns against his mother. He is wearing her out. But she still wants to do all she can to help him, somehow, but all her hopes have been shattered so far.
As he sees me taking down notes in my diary he becomes afraid and anxious and he comes over to me, squeezes my hand and looks at me imploringly: “Help me. I love my mother. I don’t want to hurt her. I want to change.”
Whenever his mother has asked for the help of social workers, psychologists and other therapists, she has been met with cynical responses: “What for? Make sure he takes the pills.”
Rambling as a way of life
All his life he has been involved in sport as a player, coach and administrator. And he is not giving up now that his hair has turned grey and white. His eyes have a lovely shine. The skin of his face shows that he is a healthy man and enjoys the open air. No wonder! Lino Bugeja is the president of the Ramblers Association of Malta (RAM).
“We want to promote rambling for all‚ as a means of a healthy lifestyle in a country where obesity is a national malaise and where outdoor activity like hiking, camping, trekking, backpacking and outdoor pursuits are not given the importance they deserve.”
Lino does not doubt that “future generations will judge us not only by the number of hospitals we have built, but whether in the process we have ensured to keep them empty by promoting a healthy lifestyle for our people living in a small island state.”
But there is also a spiritual side to rambling. “The mystic English poet William Blake wrote about seeing “heaven in a wild flower”, in which case an endless paradise awaits the Maltese rambler in the autumn and winter months. Well, “what is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare‚” (W.H. Davies) at the architectural, archaeological, historical and natural beauty of the Maltese islands in the form of ancient cart-ruts, dolmens, silos, old defensive walls, sundials, folk art, votive offerings, majestic cliffs, idyllic valleys, and notarial deeds inscribed on granite scattered in the Maltese islands?
He regrets that “very few Maltese have savoured these magical experiences. You always meet foreigners in these remote localities as Ras il-Wardija away from the madding crowds” trekking their way to enjoy a majestic sunset.
Lino explains that RAM, with 520 registered members, is committed to educating by means of talks, lectures, slogans on the importance of rambling which in turn “compels ramblers to ensure and urge the conservation and preservation of our natural heritage and that includes garigue, coastal zones and foreshore in collaboration with similar organisation with common objectives.”
They can be contacted via email on ramblersmalta@jointcomms.com.
But Lino is very concerned about the future. “Unfortunately, the Maltese countryside is vanishing at an accelerated rate and unless immediate steps are taken it will be gone and lost for ever.”
Over the last 40 years things have gone from bad to worse. “I personally have to admit that since the departure of the British, and with the military land returned to our administrators, we have made a mess of it. We are a nation without any long-term planning. For example, the Maghtab eyesore that sticks out like a festering sore thumb on Malta’s Costa Azzurra, could in eight years’ time, with proper planning, be turned into a first-class tailored golf course with scenic beauty all around, and oriented in consideration of the prevailing winds.”
Lino says that in the Middle Ages the viceroy of Sicily often sent his men to defend the Maltese against the greedy land barons who frequently usurped common land. “Presently a sovereign state is impotently watching the present land sharks, some of them foreigners with dubious title, grabbing for keeps, dispossessing land that belongs to us all, with the arrogance and defiance that have made a mockery of our much vaunted democracy. It is high time to stop this high-jacking of our most precious possession – our native land.”
Lino wants to save the rising generations. “We recommend more importance to physical recreation in our schools, to make such activities a way of life from the cradle to the grave.”
evaristbartolo@hotmail.com
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