On Saturday 3 June over 2000 Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim children celebrated the end of the school year with a jamboree in the centre of Tirana. News of the event is reported by the Fides international press agency. Coming from schools all over Albania, accompanied by their teachers, the children received as a gift a missionary pencil produced for the occasion thanks to the collaboration of the Italian Secretariat of the Pontifical Society of missionary childhood, which authorised the production of the pencils for Albania: an identical copy of those that the Italian Secretariat has been producing over the last three years for the missionary children of Italy. The celebration, in which personalities of the Albanian political world also participated, was attended by an Italian delegation formed of Stefania Bascapé, national Secretary of the Pontifical Society, and the missionary children of the choir “Le Matite Colorate” (the coloured pencils). The festival ended with a procession to the Bell of Peace, national symbol of peaceful co-existence among peoples and faiths: here the Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta was commemorated. She was fond of repeating the phrase: “I am nothing but a small pencil in the hands of God”.
