The Migrant Diaries by Lynne Jones

Author:Lynne Jones [Jones, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780823297016
Google: cfgZEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 55825996
Publisher: Refuge Press
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Syracuse, Wednesday 9 November

I wake early and turn on the World Service and turn it off again. Perhaps this is a bad dream, and when I wake up the next time, things will be different. Unfortunately not, Trump has been elected as President of the United States. Nothing to be done. My Italian friends seem remarkably sanguine, but then again, they have lived through Berlusconi.

Not all the migrant youths I meet are as happy as Mohammed. The association that runs Sadiq’s home, also runs another in a neighbouring town, and the boys there have been making a protest. Cristina, who is a cultural mediator and works there, takes me with her for her morning shift. It’s a similar set up—friendly apartment with shared bedrooms for twelve boys, but when we arrive, most of them are sitting on the sofas around the unwatched TV in the communal living room, looking bored and disconsolate. Cristina is briefed by the night shift staff while I sit and listen to two Gambian boys:

– These people don’t give us food. They don’t give us money. We don’t have documents here. They say, ‘We are trying, we are trying,’ but I am here five months and still no documents. No one has documents, this camp is no good.

– I think the association is having a problem with getting the money they are owed by the government—I say.

– The problem is not the government; it is the people here. They collect money and don’t give it to us.

In fact, the main problem for a migrant child arriving in Italy is trying to understand the system taking care of them. I have had it explained to me in detail four or five times, and I still have not fully grasped the Kafkaesque series of bureaucratic steps through which a migrant child has to pass in order to stay in this country, or the various arrangements that are made to look after you.

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