January 28, 1994, early afternoon.
In a courtyard in East Mostar a troupe from the Italian national broadcasting corporation RAI is shooting a documentary in front of a shelter where tens of people are assembled; many of them are children and in fact the special documentary that the journalists from Trieste are making for the national television news channel TG1 is about child-ren as war victims. Suddenly, a mortar shell is fired from the hills around the capital of Herzegovina; it hits the site, killing the three correspondents.
Marco Luchetta, Saša Ota e Dario D’Angelo, three information service operators, pay the highest price to report the atrocities of the war waging just outside our country.
A few weeks later, the city of Trieste mourns another war victim, TV cameraman Miran Hrovatin, murdered in Somalia together with TG3 correspondent, Ilaria Alpi.
Following the will of friends and colleagues a non-profit organization, the "Luchetta, Ota, D'Angelo, Hrovatin Fund for Children War Victims" was founded.
A building owned by the Province of Trieste was refurbished and in 1998 it became a Reception Center for severely ill children and their families, mainly victims of the wars that are bloodstaining the world.
Over the years, the house in Trieste on Via Valussi has been a home to tens of families coming from Georgia, Serbia, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Russia, Albania, Libya, Kossovo. There are no ethnic-religious barriers in those rooms. Life goes on under the common denominator of heartfelt solidarity.
Thanks to the constant support provided by many people, over the years the Fund has managed to increase its range of activitics: from vaccination kits and dia, pers sent to an orphanage in Belgrade to medical drugs and books sent to Afghanistan, from medical dialysis equipment for a medicai center in Prizren, Kossovo, to setting up a new dental care center in Albania, providing also economic support to the people returning to their homeland.
Again, thanks to the support provided by the people, we have been able to increase our reception capacity by renting more flats in the building on via Valussi.