Operazione Colomba

News

That’s the result: people die in here

When J., our friend who lives in Ritsona camp, video-calls us, we do not immediately understand what she is saying, but we see she is outside the camp with many other people. We hear a big confusion in the background and we perceive from her voice that she is worried.
No doubt: something is happening at the camp and we need to be there; we do not wait longer and immediately take the car.
The police stops us few kilometers from the camp because the way was closed, we leave the car and go forward by foot: our friends are waiting for us and we want to be there with them.
Once we arrive we see many Congolese people outside the camp, especially women; some of them shout, some others cry, some pick up rubber pieces to light a fire: “a guy’s dead, he has four kids”, they say, “it’s just carelessness, this is mere racism”.
They say the evening before they called the ambulance at 5 p.m. but it only came in the morning, when it was too late.
He died in the meantime.
“There’s no food, there’s no water, no international protection, this is the result, people die in here”, women voices keep shouting and saying to Congolese people to come out.

A hug

My eyes bump into a little boy, he should be 15 years old and no older.
He's part of the unaccompanied foreign minors' group who arrived on Cyprus Island.
So he's alone. He's very thin and has a gaunt face.
He doesn't notice me, he doesn't notice anyone even though he's surrounded by people. He frowns, making an expression of pain, and he starts to cry.
He puts his hands on his head, touching his thick black hair, then on his temples. He begins to pull some air out of her lips and bursts into tears that he can't control.
He bangs his fists against an iron pole, making some noises that are choked screams.
He definitely wants to scream but he doesn't: it's the only thing he can control.
But the tears no, he doesn't control them and they fall like waterfalls that wet his face.
I quickly look around and the others don't notice him.

A few questions (and answers) from a tent in a northern refugee camp in Lebanon and from the Poland-Belarus border

We are volunteers of Operazione Colomba, the Nonviolent Peace Corps of the “Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII” Association.
We are writing from the beginning and the end of people’s track to freedom, from a tent of a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon and from the forests of Poland.
We are people like you and we are trying to build an alternative to war, exile and walls.

Why are Syrian refugees (along with Iraqis, Kurds and Yemenis) in Belarus, at the border with Poland?

Thousands of Syrian refugees (and with them many Lebanese citizens) have left Lebanon and Syria for Belarus in recent months, as they want to get to Poland and finally move to Germany. They are fleeing from an endless war and the total lack of a future.
The Belarusian government does not care about the terrible fate of those fleeing the war. On the contrary, it knows that Europe needs to make its borders hermetic, and this is why it has already lavishly financed Turkey and Libya. In addition, the Russian government hiding behind Belarus' choices has understood pretty well how to cause a crisis.

The warehouse of souls

Italy

You know the Amazon department stores with all the packages piled up waiting to be distributed? In Lesbos, a Greek island, the Mavrovouni refugee camp (a sort of 2.0 version of the one in Moria) is like this. It is "the warehouse of souls" crammed into a tiny space in the utter indifference. They have been waiting to be allowed to travel and to reach their destination just like parcels waiting to be delivered, with a single difference: the packages are free to move while the souls are not. They are blocked in the warehouse due to our choices. And they have been remaining crowded for an indefinite time: they know when it begins but not when it will end… In the meantime, the years pass and the hopes die. Hope is the foundation of our way of thinking, it represents the desire for a happy life that pushes us to search new paths to reach it.