You Have an Infinite Value: The World of Rose Busingye
One of the episodes that strikes me most from the life of Rose Busingye is what happened to her when she tried to respond to the need of some Ugandan women who were sick with AIDS. She was a nurse in Kampala and had made attempts to help these women, which she explained like this:
We brought medication to the sick, set them up with treatments. We made charts for them, and they filled them out. But the day after you returned to them, the medicines would be thrown in the trash. And yet they knew what those medicines were for . . . I thought: “How is this possible? You are sick, you are dying, I bring you medicine that can save your life and you throw it away?”
It was then that something changed in her perception of reality: “I recognized more and more that what I thought was enough was not enough.”
This fact did not leave her indifferent. Rather, upon seeing her attempts to help people crumble, for which she had studied and had planned everything she was doing, she was thrown into a profound crisis. “Every day, I saw people die . . . I got to the point where I wanted to escape. Really: I wanted to go away to a desert island where there were no people. Only insects.”
At that moment, she received a phone call from Father Giussani, whom she had met a few years earlier: “Shut down everything and come to Italy.” She resisted, but in the end, she gave in and came to Milan, where she spent months visiting Father Giussani frequently. He did nothing but share with her his experience, what he had learned from history.
One day he said to me: “You know, Rose, a little after the movement started, everyone left. I was alone in the dark, in a tunnel. But at a certain point something happened: I began to say ‘I.’ And it was as if a little light started to shine out . . . I came out, and at the end of the tunnel, I found three other friends. With those three, the movement started again.”
Rose comments: “While he was speaking about the darkness, it was like a replay of my life.”
During those weeks in Italy, she discovered Father Giussani: his way of living, of being in reality, of facing daily circumstances. And little by little, Rose observes, sharing life with him “makes you discover yourself.” In front of this new awareness of herself, one of the pillars of Father Giussani’s human position came to Rose: “The solution to the problems that life poses each day ‘does not happen by confronting the problems directly, but by going deeper into the nature of the subject who faces them.’ In other words, ‘the particular resolves itself by deepening the essential.’”[1] Often, in fact, we take for granted the nature of the subject, and without recognizing it we approach problems according to “a method that in some way reassumes, reabsorbs the cultural tendencies of the world”—that is, in a merely reactive way, a way that lacks cultural originality.
The newness that those months spent with Father Giussani introduced into her way of living soon became clear, as Rose herself remembers:
I began to live and to work when I knew concretely how to respond to the question “Whose am I?” . . . I became free, great because someone had awakened what I am. It was evident that I wasn’t nothing; instead I felt embraced and wanted. It was as if his gaze told me: “You . . . have an infinite value.” From that gaze everything was born. In that gaze, in fact, I discovered that I am not defined by my limits but that the personal relationship with which God makes me exist places in me an infinite desire for him. That gaze of belonging to Christ and to the Church . . . established the content and the method of my work: to communicate the feeling for the unlimited greatness of the existence of each person and to offer the same companionship toward destiny that embraces my life.
How many times has Rose reminded us of this over the years! “Father Giussani made me discover my value.” And she describes very precisely the reverberation of that gaze on herself: “I felt for the first time an attraction, a love for myself, as if I had never truly looked at myself before. I was taken over by a great tenderness, for me and for everything. I wanted to show to everyone that life has a meaning, that there is a meaning in everything: even in sleeping, in suffering, in dying . . . There is a meaning.”
It was the discovery of a new world, so much so that it makes her speak about a true and proper “transformation of life: it is you, but it is no longer you. You are something else, something important. If you know it, you treat yourself in a different way.” What is more: “You treat things in a different way.” Everything is invested with that discovery, as Romano Guardini reminds us: “In the experience of a great love . . . everything that happens becomes an event in its sphere.”[2]
And so, we return to the episode of Rose with her women, to the judgment that opened a new way of relating to them: “I understood what was not working in the women, why they did not take their medication.” They had not understood their personal value. But in order to discover this for themselves, an explanation, however correct, was not enough. Something else was needed, and she finally understood it: “Giussani continually returned me to my value. He made me discover that. You cannot wait for others to understand it: I am the one who has to discover it. I have to discover Christ the life of my life, in flesh and bones. To discover Jesus within me.”
Giussani always pushed her, making her advance step by step, without stopping. And in this emerged his educative genius. She kept putting the problems of her work on the table, and he continually surprised her:
“Don’t worry. If your vocation is true, the work will even come out of the rocks.” You remember when Jesus goes to Jerusalem and the Pharisees tell him: “Make them be quiet, they are causing problems,” and he: “Even if I made them be quiet, the rocks themselves would cry out”? It was just like that. Giussani told me: “Let it go, if you are true with your vocation, even if you are shut in a cage, the rocks will begin to sing.”
Rose observes:
Letting go in that case was very difficult: I had my motives, my ideas, my projects. . . . If it were to have happened before those six months with him, I don’t know if I would have done it. But after, it was like this: I had nothing but my vocation, the only richness I had in the world. I left that Meeting Point and something else was born, starting from scratch. And to think that after all that I ended up exactly in a place where they break the rocks and sing.
Everything seemed to take its normal course, and yet everything had changed because Rose had changed; her gaze had opened, and her reason broadened. She speaks about herself without reticence: “The things that I said [to the women] were not very different from those I said before. Even before I spoke to the women about their worth, of the importance of what they had around them. I explained to them all the good reasons they had to take care of themselves. But they were explanations. Maybe deep down they were not truly mine.” But they became hers.
In time, the difference that she had found surprised the others, to the point that they desired it for themselves. One of her women, raped by rebels from the North, “at a certain point told me: ‘For the others I am only a pile of problems; they come and ask me what they did to me, where they took me. . . . But who am I? I am like a bucket where people throw their trash; but I, as Lucy, who am I?’” Giving her a hug, Rose told her: “Yes, you are all this drama, this disfigured face. But you have an even greater value. You may seem to be only this, but you are worth infinitely more to me.” Lucy began to show up at the Meeting Point. “One day she told me: ‘Rose, I want to live because you are here. You have given value to my life.’ And I answered her: ‘No, your value was given to you by Another. Another wants you to exist.’” An authentic cultural revolution had begun for her and for all those who were around her.
But the story does not end here, and Rose will have to yield again to a reality that is always, stubbornly, greater than her. In order to face the illness of the women, she thinks about opening a hospital. What was a more obvious thing to do? But now the women are the ones to push her, the same ones who were depending on her for their daily needs. They have other priorities: the schools their children attend. “[In those schools] they did not look at our children like human beings. We wanted places that would help them to recognize their value. This is how Rose educated us.”
For this reason, in front of Rose’s proposal, after a moment of silence, the women who are sick with AIDS respond decisively: “No, not a hospital. We want a school.” The priority for them is not a hospital where they can receive care but a school for their children. This new judgment touches on their children, about whom they speak in this way:
We needed to understand who we are, and we needed to be educated to do it, because it is not revealed automatically. It is for this reason that we have our schools. Even if you get a PhD, in the end you need this awareness of your value. And if while you were studying, they did not teach you this, what use is your PhD? Are you somehow different from the one who stopped at elementary school? We are all equals. There are many people who have everything, have money, live well, have beautiful houses, live in skyscrapers, but are not happy. Because they do not know who they are.
Here is a different gaze, one that reaches everyone. One of Rose’s closest collaborators was discouraged because, when she arrived at the nursery school, she found the toys that were bought the day before destroyed. “How does this happen? They are vandals.” And Rose: “It is clear that you still have not understood anything. The problem here is not ‘rich or poor, black or white.’ Teach them that they have value. Here, no one says this to anyone. If they discover that they have a value, you will see that they will know how to value even their toys, their teachers, their classmates. . . .” This new gaze is directed even to the instruments they use. “All this—the projects, the food, anything we use—is the instrument to say to the person: ‘You are great, you are greater than you can imagine, you are responsible.’ And the projects that we do are like offering a hand to support someone, so that they can take responsibility. We do not say: ‘You are nothing, I will feed you, I will do everything for you.’”
Clearly, this is not only a place to get assistance, but a place that makes the self-awareness of the person grow. The sign of change is in the women’s perception of themselves as protagonists. At the beginning, they did not speak to anyone; they had their heads down, without ever raising their eyes, a sign of a total lack of respect for themselves. In time, they begin to dance, to sing, “Now I’m free,” to say, “we are here, we have a face.”
This freedom penetrates the deepest wounds in their lives. “Many of them,” explains Rose,
Have undergone and are undergoing injustices: from their husbands, from the rebels . . . But you see them free. So it means that with everything they have lived—many have been violated, many treated badly and are still treated badly—they have found a justice that is even more just than what we have in mind. They are not imprisoned by their problems, by their poverty, by their illness. Do you remember the woman we came across this morning? That small woman who is always happy . . . ? When I came into her room, the first time, I said to myself: “O God, she really sleeps here?” She lived in a hole. I asked: Where do your children sleep? “Here, on the mat.” And she laughed, she didn’t complain. But while she said it, I was dying inside . . . I said to myself: all the complaints that I make are unjust . . . When it rains, it flows right into their house. And yet she is free, even from injustice. How is this possible?”
Irreducible: this is what Rose and her women are. But in them there is the effort to live up to the situation. Their security is in something else, in something that no one can cause to crumble. Not even the conditions that they have had to face because of COVID have confused them. Rose is certain of it: “One of them, at a certain point, said: ‘I realized that if I was hungry I could ask my neighbors for a cup of beans; if I was thirsty there was someone who would give me a glass of water. . . . But life? From whom do I ask for life?’” We have all lived the provocation of the pandemic, but how many of us have been able to ask a question like this? Paradoxically, COVID did not reveal only what was lacking for these people but above all the growth that has happened over these years—if it truly had happened. In Rose’s women, it did happen: they did grow, so much so that the newness they experience surprises them first of all. Like the teachers who were challenged by Rose not to lose the best of what happened to them: “You must understand what moved your heart to go and seek out the students. If you lose what happened in your heart, all that you do, all the solutions to these problems, will only last a little while.” What gratitude for this African “flower” that has grown in the field plowed by Father Giussani!
The story told by Davide Perillo, in Your Names Are Written in Heaven, seems to me a cheerful testimony of the “Church that goes out,” that Pope Francis never tires of indicating, as the way to respond with life to the unlimited need of people today, who are so in need of the Gospel. Who would not desire to have people like Rose and her women constantly next to them, to go to the ends of the earth and shout to everyone, through the materiality of their own existence, “you have an infinite value”?
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from the introduction to Your Names Are Written in Heaven: The World of Rose Busingye by Davide Perillo (Slant Books, 2025). All rights reserved.