Annalena was the second oldest of five children, born to Roman Catholic parents; her father was an economist and authority on cooperatives, and her mother was a homemaker. She was a bit of a child prodigy, whose family expected much of her.
At nineteen, she journeyed to America on a scholarship; it was there that she began to suspect that God was calling her to care for the poorest, most abandoned of His children. When she returned to Forli, she spent her free time on the outskirts of the city, caring for the sick: prostitutes, alcoholics, the mentally ill.
She originally trained as a lawyer, received a PhD in law, but most of all, she wanted to go to the developing world. At first, she thought of India, but, in 1969, when a chance came for her to go to East Africa, she went, over her family's great objections.
Qualified to teach, Annalena at first taught English in Kenyan Secondary Schools, and was also a high school teacher in Wajir, a semi-desert region in north-east Kenya, where semi-nomads who were Somalis, herdsmen, lived. Here for the first time Annalena saw those sick with tuberculosis and abandoned for fear of contagion - and she knew very specifically that these were the people she desired to care for above all others.
But the nomads, used to traveling and living outdoors, refused to be cooped up in hospitals, and their nomadic families refused to wait for them during their lengthy cure. The wily Annalena, respecting their way of life, built open-air treatment centers called manyattas, where her patients could stay for their half-year course of treatment. First forty tents went up, then one hundred, then two hundred...She personally kept track of each person's treatment, until he or she got well or died. When someone was cured, she got the word out, and, in a week or two, the patient's family would suddenly appear, ready to pick up their loved one and return to the desert. Meanwhile, she was studying medicine and received a diploma to aid her in her battle against TB.
Annalena never received a salary. Since she was a single laywoman, without the financial support of a religious order, she had no income and never bothered to create a pension plan for herself. Back in Forli, she had established the Committee Against World Hunger of Forli, and they supported her work now, in Africa. In addition, in 1976, she was responsible for a World Health Organization project that treated nomadic people with tuberculosis.
But war broke out on the desert in 1985, when the Kenyan army was sent there to kill members of a local tribe with links to Somali guerrillas in Ethiopia. They killed hundreds of people, and left the wounded to die. Painting a Red Cross on her Toyota, Annalee gathered some friends, and they went out into the desert with water and to pick up the survivors and bring them back to the rehab center. She gave the wife of an American diplomat a list of the dead to be published and known throughout the world. Enraged by the adverse publicity, the government of Kenya expelled her. She knew her life was over there, but she had the satisfaction of knowing that though her actions she had saved thousands of lives and prevented a massacre.
Annalee returned to Italy and got further medical training. Over the years, she received certificates/diplomas in tropical medicines, community medicines, tuberculosis control, and control of leprosy. Next, she went to Somalia. Edwina Gateley and Sandra Mattucci tell of her accomplishments there:
"Her works included a hospital; a school for special education for deaf, blind, and disabled children; a program for the eradication of female genital mutilation; cure and prevention of HIV/AIDS; and aid for outcasts, poor, and orphans. Annalena's care for refugees earned her the Nanasen Refugee Award in 2003, presented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as recognition for her unrelenting service.....Annalena never saw her life as a 'sacrifice.' In her own words, 'There is no sacrifice. It's pure happiness...'." (in "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters."
"As I followed her one day she moved with something beyond the self-preserving patience that clock-watching Westerners adopt to keep from going crazy in the developing world. It was an ability to see individuals at every moment. She refused to carry a radio that would interrupt her.
"As one American aid worker who knew her in Merca said, 'She has time for everybody. She is not easily distracted. It is a very saintly characteristic. '
"She lived with aesthetic simplicity, her chief source of pleasure several children, abandoned by their families, whom she adopted. Them, and the silence of the deep night, when everyone was finally asleep.
"' I was a small child when I felt like this,' she said of her desire to find all she wanted in the service of others.'Many people speak of sacrifice, but for me it was never a sacrifice. I often felt there was nobody on Earth who had such a privilege to live like this....I always feel the Presence of God.'"
At a 2001 Congress at the Vatican organized by the Pontifical Council for sanitary pastoral work, Annalena Tonelli spoke eloquently of her vocation, her personal call from God:
"My name is Annalena Tonelli. I was born in Forli, Italy. I have worked in the sanitation field for over thirty years, but I am not a Doctor. When I was little, I decided to live for others: for the poor, those who suffer, the abandoned, those whom no one loves. I hope to continue doing so until the end of my life.
"I only wanted to follow Jesus. I was not interested in anything else: Christ and the poor in Christ. For Him I decided to live in radical poverty, even though I will never be able to be poor as a true poor person - like those in whose presence I am all day long."
Annalena's life ended two years later. Over the years, she had received numerous threats and was assaulted, often because of her work fighting against the practice of female genital mutlation. She died on October 5, 2003, in Boroma, the day before the completion of a new hospital wing of her hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis. Two shots to her head ended her life. But for years she had been prepared to die. Just months before her death, she had written these words to her friends:
Surely Annalena Tonelli lived and died out of love - God answered her prayer.
In a poem celebrating her, Edwina Gateway writes
" Why aren't you famous, Annalena?
Why doesn't the world know
of your life of amazing love,
courage, and holiness?
Why doesn't the church
preach your name
declare your virtues,
and acknowledge that you,
devout Catholic laywoman,
gave your life
to the most destitute and forgotten
until you were shot
and martyred for your love?....
Burying the massacred dead,
tending the dying,
you risked your life
whilst daring to declare,
'All is grace.'
Discipleship gone mad....
In you, Annalena,
Christianity and Islam
came together
in mutual respect and admiration.
In you, Annalena,
God lived and shone
in the wilderness.
In you, Annalena,
Jesus rose again -
healing, teaching, tending -
making all things one.
You lived 'waiting for God' and
with your murder,
brave and holy woman,
the Cross
was raised again,
and we have an unsung saint,
another woman, to remind us
in our dim seeing
of the brilliance and beauty of love.
May we all be one...."
- in "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters."