Mediterranean Hope – Newsletter August 2015
Scapegoating immigrants
By Paolo Naso – It was the summer of “the illegals”. In a summer devoid of resounding crime news, gossip columns and discounted weather recriminations on climate, more and more volatile and hostile even in the temperate zones, the major topic was the “illegals”, the “disembarked”, the “invasion of immigrants” of which people have had enough. Continue reading
If the rescued at sea grow weak…
By Marta Bernardini and Francesco Piobbichi – You die there or you die elsewhere. From Ceuta to Zwuara you die, you die suffocated in suitcases, along the tracks, in boats that sink, you die closed in the holds. The summer of 2015 is very harsh, which has followed a spring that seemed to see less deaths at sea. Last night dozens of survivors from the last shipwreck off Libya arrived in Lampedusa: women and men exhausted with wounds and fractures, in shock; a mother whom in the days past had been looking desperately for her little girl of 5 months old, never to be seen again, swallowed by the sea. Contiunue reading
Slightly More Complex Than Despair.
By Osvaldo Costantini.* Dreams, hopes, family conflicts, disappointments: none of these feeling are taken into consideration. We tend to simplify immigrants’ conditions. We label them as desperate, fleeing from war and famine, or as illegal who came here to steal our jobs. The xenophobic right-wing position, when not openly supporting shipwrecks, aims at representing immigrants as a threat to Italy’s economic social and cultural (!) stability. Continue reading
Aquilante (Federation of the Protestant Churches in Italy, FCEI): “We all bear responsibilities for a predictable disaster. We need new policies to open humanitarian corridors.”
“Every immigrants’ massacre in the Mediterranean is a predictable massacre: we are all responsible.” This is what Massimo Aquilante, president of FCEI, said on the death for asphyxia of about 40 immigrants who were trapped under deck on an overcrowded boat that left Libya towards Europe. Continue reading
The welcoming refugees and the arrogance to a lesson in humanity on docks of Lampedusa
By Alessandra Ballerini – Given the general atmosphere of sultriness, crisis and uncertainty, I was thinking of combating the glumness with a simple story that has a happy ending. And I had found a perfect (though very personal) one: the adventure of my “bitch” Sofia, lost and then found after about an hour with the help of a number of good people. Moreover, I had already started work on digging up every detail worthy of note from my recent memories so as to write it all down later on. But then I went to Lampedusa, and all that lightheartedness vanished. Continue reading
Drawings from the border
By Adele Manassero, Vie di fuga – What words cannot express, a picture can tell it better. Discovering the drawing blog by Francesco Piobbichi. We announce the new blog “DISEGNIDALLAFRONTIERA” by Francesco Piobbichi, lodged in Lampedusa for the project Mediterranean Hope of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI) financed with the Eight for Thousand funds of the Waldensian and Methodist Churches. Continue reading