POST SCRIPTS

After the nursing school in England from 1966-1968, she was appointed to Kenya, where she reached on September 6, 1970. From 1970 to 1983 she served alternately in Consolata Hospital Mathari, Nyeri and Nazareth Hospital, on the northern outskirts of Nairobi. In mid 1983, she started her advanced studies in nursing and in 1985 she became the principal tutor for the school of nursing attached to Nkubu Hospital Meru.

On November 26, 1993 she was elected Regional superior of the Consolata Missionary Sisters in Kenya, a duty she performed for six years. After a sabbatical, in 2001 she spent several months in Mogadishu, Somalia, looking at the possibility of setting up a nursing school in the hospital run by the SOS Village organisation in Somalia. The project became a reality in 2002, and since April 18, 2002, Sister Leonella has been in charge of the nursing school, whose first students graduated only in 2006.

In all this time she has fought a long running battle with various government bureaucracies to assure an internationally recognised diploma for her students. She succeeded in obtaining for them an internationally recognised diploma by the WHO last August. She then came back to Kenya, accompanied by three of her students, two girls and a young man, to have them registered at Medical Training College (MTC) so as to form the bulk of the future tutors at the school in Mogadishu. Having succeeded, after an uphill struggle, to secure them the necessary visa, funding and registration at the school, she started scouting in Uganda for hospitals ready to train other students of hers to work in operating theatres. In the meantime, she had to face the difficulties of having her own re-entry visa to Mogadishu, due to the new rules of the Islamic Courts that now control the region.

She went back to Mogadishu only on September 13, less than one week ago.

On Sunday September 17, 2006 at around 12.00 am (-4 GMT), she was ambushed while crossing the road that separates the SOS hospital from the SOS village where the five Consolata Sisters live. Her two assailants waited her, hidden behind the taxis and kiosks that are found on that stretch of road at the entrance of the hospital. She was shot first in the thigh; when her bodyguard fired back, they shot and killed him, hitting the sister with two extra bullets, one of which entered her back and severed the femoral artery, causing a massive haemorrhage. Taking promptly to the theatre, she died shortly after. Her dying words were uttered in Italian: pardono, pardono (I forgive, I forgive).