#beyondhate

Beyond the growing hate towards migrants reaching the shores of Italy, beyond the numerous right wing parties that are gaining power in Europe and the episodes of terror and violence, there are a few rays of hope.

All over Italy, a country which has been and still is the reaching point of so far more than 100.000 migrants from Northern Africa, there are people who didn’t surrender to fear and hate, wrapped their minds around the fact that we are dealing with human beings like us, and started helping out as they could. This led to 14 official permanent refugee welcoming centers, where they are identified and registered, as well as 1.861 temporary shelters all over the peninsula, ready to welcome and provide the migrants with what they need.

These centers are controlled by the ministry of internal affairs and are supported by a big network of volunteers, people who work in another place and devolve their free time to the migrants who reached their country.

After arriving and being identified in one of these centers, the migrants are sent to one of the many refugee shelters in Italy, where they are provided food and shelter as well as basic needs, a community that supports them, volunteer work opportunities, education and Italian lessons.

Around 200 of the migrants that reached the shores of Italy in the past two years now live in a town in the North called Bergamo.

 Bergamo is a town in Lombardy, a region known for the extreme right politicians, who in fact rule the regional government.

However, refugees and migrants in this town, mostly male and aged between 17 and 40, have a place to stay and people who believe in them so much that they decided to get to work and help them.

I am one of them.

I started volunteering in three of the refugee shelters in my town when I met some of the refugees in a volunteering activity organized by an environmental organization. I saw how willing they were to work and connect with us, the citizens of the town where they are staying, and I wanted to help them.

So I contacted the main organization helping migrants in Bergamo, and I asked them what kind of help they needed.

The answer was easy and understandable: Italian lessons and help with the homework.

 The refugees in this center were all male and aged between 17 and 35, they fled violence, poverty and persecution hoping for a stable job and peace in Italy. However, their education doesn’t have any value in my country and so they had to start school again.

They were 25 years old and they were in middle school.

Learning Italian was the main goal of the school, as well as getting a diploma that would finally enable them to work – as they couldn’t before, without an education recognized by the State.

So I put together a small number of volunteers, six of my friends, all aged 16 and 17, and we started going there once a week for two hours helping them with Italian, Math and Grammar.

The progress they were making and the effort they put was outstanding and working with them was a joy. The willingness they have to learn and be useful, the determination to be worth the help they are receiving and to gain economic independence is the reason why I believe in them.

 Of course hate is still here, you can hear it when people talk about them, calling them “extracomunitari” which means “out of the community”, you can feel it and they can feel it.

You can watch it on TV, when politicians try to fuel the fear and the hate in people.

You can see it outside of the church next to my house, that is hosting four refugees from Northern Africa, when exponents of the right wing party Northern League try to blame every problem on these four human beings and the community that is hosting them.