August 14th, 2026
This summer letter once again addresses the question of poverty.
I have recently held a conference on the new planetary times, a subject I have worked on for many years (1988), and it was very complex. The more I tried to decide what to talk about, since NOTHING has ever been more difficult, terrible and chaotic than this time, the more I noticed instead how in some places in India, even though touched by modernity (mobile phones, etc.), the problems are always the same, the same mechanisms, the same actions. The fears of the poor repeat themselves over time… the next meal, illnesses, medicines, the house that falls apart under the monsoons… but nothing in their daily desperation disturbs them all that much – they are so tired, drained and resigned in their daily lives that they often live only for survival.
Wars, tsunamis, conquests, do not touch them, but the URGENT PROBLEM of food, of tomorrow… it is all so SERIOUS… a kind of ENORMOUS contradiction.
So it is in so many villages in India.
Meanwhile the West consumes, and the East consumes too, but what about the poor? Who helps them? Or has our society decided that today suffering people, suffering children, untreated illnesses no longer have any value?
Humanity is becoming ever more inhuman… but my vision, my opinion, has not excluded them, and many people also continue to help us, so some children do make it through. They grow into young people, then grow further and find a job. One in 100? It is always the famous drop in the ocean, but I never stop being amazed at the beauty of the poor; among them one still finds GREAT HEARTS, children with an unshakeable will, some make it through, and some do not, but if they manage to take ONE STEP beyond their condition they remain grateful to life and to those who helped them.
We are currently hosting a very poor family with two children inside the school.
School, lessons, kitchen and home.
Do not imagine a separate apartment from the school, but one set inside the school almost without doors, where an incredible kind of coexistence can nonetheless exist. Hard to imagine here.
As if poverty had such dignity that it can still create HELP and RELIEF, even silent. Small gestures that make life truly worth living, hands reaching out to help one another, acceptance, interconnection between people.
India, ANYHOW, despite all its changes, remains attached to certain values that are almost impossible to find here.
I often ask myself, and I have written it in my letters, what sense it makes to be concerned with the poor on the other side of the world with all the troubles there are in the West, and yet I find that continuing to do so creates a niche of something that has not lost its value and that can continue to be a breath of air. The West believes it knows everything and has everything under control; when there is greater exchange between peoples, we will all be able to benefit from it, and often rejoice in it.
It is a matter of learning, something that gives a deep sense of vitality, an experience that is, at least for me, interesting, astonishing, ALIVE. Learning, which is even stronger when I am there, removes many obstacles and clears the mind.
At Plato, we continue the lessons for the children on the damage caused by mobile phones, social networks, and the sleeping mind; they are all interested and interactive, deeply engaged.
This gives me hope and strength, which I also draw from your support, to be able to still believe in a better world.
Thank you, and all the best to each of you.
The Founder
Valeria Viola Padovani