"Take My Hands!"
Debbie Meroff
When Herta Walter’s 47-year marriage ended with her husband’s death in the autumn of 2006, she looked around for a way to fill her empty days. She was contemplating service on an OM ship when she heard of the need for volunteers at the new centre OM Italy was building in the northewest. Bobbio Pellice “happened” to be about ten kilometres away from the youth camp where she had met the man who became her husband. After a lifetime of raising four fine sons with him, Herta decided to return to the beautiful Pellice valley to give her heart and hands to God. An experienced seamstress, Herta packed up her sewing machine at home in Heilbronn, Germany, and attended OM’s January 2007 GO conference in Mosbach. The fact that most of her fellow recruits were forty and fifty years younger than herself didn’t daunt her. Herta arrived in Bobbio intending to stay three months. Eighteen months later she is still there, cooking and caring for volunteers and willing to remain as long as she is needed.
Herta was provided with an apartment next to the construction site, but with a view of the Italian Alps. Though she spoke no Italian and only a smattering of English, she soon made herself indispensible by cooking and caring for dozens of volunteer workers. She also met Laura, another widow in the local church whose husband had also died of pancreatic cancer within months of her own husband. During the next five weeks the two worked side by side making two hundred pairs of terracotta curtains for the center, called Forterocca.
“God must love this project very much to bring us both together here, to make curtains!” Herta told her, laughing.
Herta now speaks very passable Italian. She will turn seventy in December this year. Although she has returned home several times to see her family, she says she finds her apartment empty with nothing to do. She knows she will miss Forterocca when the project finishes, and is sure she will want to return to the valley each summer to visit.
“OM has been good for me.--God has given me another family!” She smiles, adding, “Coming here has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
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© 2008
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