- Stop crying Giada, please. Your mentor will be back really soon - I tell her.

Giada doesn't stop. She hugs Carla, greets her, stops crying, hugs her again, cries, greets her again but then she throws her arms around her neck again.

I wanted to start my report on the experience of the project "Mentoring, I found a friend at school" with this imagine which has been before my eyes and is more explanatory and meaningful than words.

And what about Karim, who any time we meet at school he asks "Is there Mentoring today? No – I reply – it is finished, you know that Karim" "What a pity!" and then the day after he asks it to me again hoping that his words could become magical and as a kind of magic making it continues. "Is it going to be next year? When is it going to start?" he says to me thus showing his desire.

But also Ramona, simpler and more direct, says to me she is disappointed that Mentoring has finished. She would have had it to last another month, perhaps until the end of school.

How can I forget Amal who argued all the time with his grandmother because he did not want to leave school and wanted to use each minute, and even more, of the precious time he spent with us at school.

Those and other children have participated right away with regularity, but someone else has started with a bit of distrust, and I had to make sure that they came, in fact some of them skipped our meeting at the beginning. At halfway through their resistance fell and, especially in Bingfang, I noticed a change and the joy to come to class, punctuality in the timetable and impatience of waiting for his mentor.

Those who could not regularly attend the project or interrupted it, they did it because of commitments of their parents and distance from school. For this reason, some of them, to guarantee the afternoon attendance, I offered to stop at school at the end of the lesson and have lunch with me. Others "found out" it and have "boldly" asked me to stay. How could I say no? So I found myself together with 9-10 children having lunch at school.

It was another magic moment of the day for them which they could have spent setting the tables, sharing food, tidying up the classroom and then preparing for group or board games or simply preparing for the meeting with their mentors drawing an object to give to him or her.

The mentees have always been happy of meeting with their mentors, but they will never forget the last day out to eat an ice cream offered by mentors, as well as they will never forget (as a point of reference) the moment in which they worked to create their "book of memories", a real and long lasting evidence of their friendship.

And what about me? I surely learned more than them, I enriched professionally and personally, especially thanks to the help of the psychologist dr. Oddo, who has showed us some situations or behaviors from another perspective: that one of the children. Indeed, we often forget that in our "difficult" classroom, apart from the group, there is the single person: we need to be watchful and give them the space they need and if in that moment it is not possible, it's better not to leave the question open but to go over it in a more peaceful moment to not disappoint the student because of our carelessness.

Rosa Picone, teacher