“APOSTLE OF THE POOR”

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28155, 19 December 1956, Page 10

“APOSTLE OF THE POOR”

Italian On Hunger Strike In Palermo

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) PALERMO (SicilyT, December 18.

Danilo Dolci, a 35-year-old Italian “apostle of the poor,” today lay on the floor of a wretched hut on the first day of a week’s hunger strike to draw attention to the “unspeakable poverty” and unemployment in the slums of Palermo. Nineteen sympathisers, including four who had come from France, joined his strike. Dolci and his companions want to obtain work for one-fifth of the city’s half-million people who, he says, “live by activities that do not truly constitute work, activities not worthy of a man, of a father, of a citizen.’ ’

They are also fasting on behalf of one-fifth of the population around the city who live for the most part on weeds, snails and frogs or by collecting firewood or by begging. Dolci, a social worker from Treatie, north-east Italy, went to live at Partinico, a poverty-stricken village near Palermo, four years ago. He married the penniless- widow of a fisherman, mother of three children. Since then they have taken in nine other destitute children.