Ugo left Maria and the children with her cousin in the village of Urambo, in the middle of Tanganyika, while he went job-hunting. This was not easy: Italians were not welcome in the country so soon after the war. But eventually she received a telegram from him: ‘Paradise Island awaits you.’

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A Dutch bishop had asked him to go and work in his mission on the village of Kagunguli on island of Ukerewe, in Lake Victoria, and to build a hospital there ‘to replace the existing miserable rural thatch-roofed dispensary’.

Photos of Maria’s arrival show the twenty-two-year-old pushing a pram, a toddler clutching onto the side. She is smiling, but looks bewildered. The priests and nuns at the mission welcomed the young family, but conditions were tough. There was no running water, no electricity, and worst of all, there was no house. Ugo was asked to design his house, and a hospital, and although architecture was not his forte, he made a good job of it.
But in the meantime, they spent the best part of their first year living in two classrooms of the mission school, with no kitchen or toilet, with a corrugated iron roof but no ceiling. At night, kerosene lamps cast enormous shadows on the walls of bats clinging onto the mosquito net of the bed where Maria breastfed the baby. To this day she is not particularly fond of bats, though Ugo assured her that they, too, were mammals who breast-fed their babies.

On the subject of milk, on the island, milk tasted horrible. It took the young couple a while to realise that this was because a small amount of cow’s urine was added to it – perhaps as a preservative. Once they had explained they preferred to drink just plain milk, the problem was solved.

A huge difficulty was the language. Although Tanganyika was an Anglophone territory, the missionaries, whose mother house was in Algiers, spoke French amongst themselves. The only way to communicate with the local population was in Swahili, the lingua franca, or in Kikerewe, the local language. Ugo managed at the start to get by using English. Maria’s only foreign language was French. A local laboratory assistant who had spent many years in a seminary before realising that his priestly vocation had vanished, helped Maria learn English and Swahili through Latin – which, pedagogically speaking, must have been a first.

Ugo was the only doctor for a population of 130,000, half of whom lived on the island and half on the mainland. Just to put this into perspective, in Rome today there is one doctor for every 180 people. Once again, the insecurity he had felt on arrival in Abbateggio as a graduate returned. – he had to face new diseases like malaria, leprosy and bilharzia.

One of the things that struck Ugo most about his new surroundings was the lake. Imagine an ocean of fresh water, just a little under the size of Scotland, just below the Equator, only 300 feet deep, and at an altitude of almost 4000 feet. Another clear image he retains is that of the sun rising at six in the morning and setting at six in the evening, every day of the year. After a day’s work, he would look at the star-studded sky: constellations of both the southern and northern hemispheres stood out clearly.

Although the missionaries had welcomed Ugo, Maria, and the children to the island, Ugo soon became disillusioned, as he witnessed more and more examples of attitudes and behaviour that were so contrary to his idea of Christian charity.