The story of Beatrice and Frank, a family that has made the encounter between cultures its vocation
There’s a moment in life when everything changes. It doesn’t always arrive with a bang; sometimes it creeps in slowly, on an African afternoon filled with red dust and an open sky, in a look you didn’t expect and can never forget.
For Beatrice, originally from Bovalino, a small seaside town in Calabria (Italy), that moment came in the summer of 2007, during a visit to the Catholic missions in Kenya. She had set out with a group of people from her parish, eager to get involved and filled with a “missionary tension” in her heart just waiting to find its form. It wasn’t a tourist trip. It was something more courageous: a stepping outside herself to encounter others. And it was right there, in Africa, that she met Frank Wainaina.
Frank was born and raised in Nairobi. He had worked for the Consolata Missionaries for years as a graphic designer and photographer, but he never felt like a mere employee. He was, from day one, a lay missionary. He had found his calling in his encounter with Father Gigi Anataloni, who showed him how a passion for images and communication could become a tool for the Gospel.
When Beatrice and Frank met, they were both already immersed in the same river. It was enough to recognize each other.
“For those who have faith,” says Beatrice, “coincidences are never random.” And that encounter, which took place in the context of a mission, had every sign of being awaited by Someone much higher up. It was like finally finding the “treasure” mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew: not an abstract idea, but a real person, with a different history, a different continent, a different language, and the same direction in their hearts.
On September 10, 2010, Beatrice and Frank married. Then came their daughters: Bakhita, a name that carries with it the entire history of an African saint, and Gemma, born in 2016, whose name alone is luminous.
Father Franco Cellana, one of the family’s closest missionaries, affectionately called them “ecumenical chocolates.” And that definition, with tenderness and irony, expresses everything that could be explained in a thousand words: two little girls who are the living synthesis of two worlds, two cultures, two stories that have intertwined without erasing each other.
But what does it really mean to grow up in an intercultural family? What does it mean for Bakhita and Gemma to be the daughters of a Calabrian woman and a Kenyan man?
It means, above all, living in a home where there is no single language of love. Where the kitchen mixes grandmother’s Bovalino sauce with the spicy flavors of East Africa. Where bedtime stories can come from the shores of the Ionian Sea or the savannahs of Kenya. Where celebrations have different roots and are therefore richer, broader, more capable of encompassing worlds.
It also means grappling daily with questions that children from “monocultural” families don’t ask themselves: “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I belong?” Questions that might seem burdensome, but which—if embraced with love—become an extraordinary gift. Bakhita and Gemma don’t have to choose between one identity and the other: they carry both, naturally, like two eyes different in color, but both capable of seeing the world.
Frank, for his part, chose to follow Beatrice to Bovalino, to put down roots in a town in Southern Italy, far from Nairobi, far from his family of origin. A choice that requires daily courage: learning a language, deciphering the codes of a new culture, finding one’s place in a community that is not the one in which one grew up. But Frank knows well: this is precisely the mission. It is “being present among the people,” accompanying, building bridges even when it takes effort.
The encounter between cultures, experienced daily within the confines of a home, isn’t always easy. There are moments of misunderstanding, habits to negotiate, differing expectations about how to raise a child, how to manage conflict, and what “family” means. Beatrice and Frank don’t hide the difficulties: they navigate them. And in this, their faith isn’t a ready-made answer, but a compass that helps them keep their bearings when the road becomes narrow.
The secret—if it can be called a secret—seems to be precisely that: not trying to erase differences, but embracing them. Allowing them to communicate. Discovering that where two traditions meet, something new is born, something that belongs neither to one nor the other but to both, and to the daughters they bear.
Bakhita and Gemma grow up in Bovalino, surrounded by the scent of bergamot and the tales of Kenya. They feel Italian and African. They feel Calabrian and Kenyan. They feel, above all, the daughters of two people who have chosen to love beyond borders: geographical, cultural, and linguistic.
And perhaps this is the most beautiful message a family like Beatrice and Frank’s can convey to the world: that the encounter between cultures does not impoverish anyone. On the contrary, it broadens horizons. It teaches that one can belong to more than one place at the same time. That roots are not chains, but branches, and branches, by their nature, seek the light wherever it is found.
In a small village overlooking the Ionian Sea, a family continues its simplest and greatest mission: living together, every day, as a silent and joyful testimony that borders, when crossed with love, cease to be walls and become doors.
Romina Cardia
