Go, live and become

Today was the beginning of our action in the field through our trustworthy collaboration with the Red Cross. After one week of training, debates and discussions, we have so far really enjoyed the opportunity possibility given to us to deal with the illegal immigration situation.

I. Briefing, packing and acting:

As every day of work with the Red Cross, we planned our actions for the day. Today we worked on the project called “Asentamientos” which deals with delivering the basic food box to the immigrants who are living in the slums.

This box is almost 3kg of weight full of the basics sufficient for 72 hours: milk, rice, pasta, sugar, tissues. We made three stops this morning to different settlements to deliver the boxes to the people who were there (some of them were working). The rule was simple; each immigrant had to give their ID paper or health card to be registered to have a box.
This need of registration is very important because it enables Red Cross to evaluate the needs and the progress of the different communities.
We visited 3 middle sized settlements, all with a different feel:

All are located over what we would call ‘no man’s land’: the “sea of plastic” to describe a landscape full of greenhouses, and shelters made of garbage (plastic, pieces of wood, cardboard and metals). At the first settlement, there were only six immigrants and we met the only three women of the whole afternoon during our delivery of 70 boxes.

The second settlement was a camp of 17 very welcoming North African people, who invited us to drink tea and to come back whenever we wanted. One anecdote: they have a dog called Sarkozy, just to remind us that even in the place of nowhere the French touch could be present, I let you guess how, the animal was a guard dog.

The third camp illustrates well the fact that a trustworthy collaboration between the immigrants and the Red Cross is necessary to implement a dose of humanity in their daily life. In fact, the immigrants are scared about being arrested and sent back to their countries.
For us, far from solving the problem of these people, we learnt a lot about their conditions of living and realized the current gap that exists between their reality and our life of developed countries, consumers and citizens.

Through these moments with the immigrants and throughout this IPP we learn. Today we realized two things:

 First, that these immigrants actually live at the door of our consumptive society. In fact close to the shopping mall you can find the place where the immigrants live in shelters made of recycled stuff. On the one hand, as their crazy trip betrays their secret hope, they are attracted by our way of life. On the other side, this consumptive society exploits them to allow us to take the fruits of their work.

 Second: even if they live in shelters, steal to survive and are the casualties of the developed countries’ way of life, as we advertise them on TV, they stay human, friendly and grateful…
To conclude, before writing a post about our intervention on the Pateras we expect in the next few days, we could discover today the reality of the end of the immigrants’ trip, and hope that it would just be the hardest step for them to reach their dreams and fulfill their lives.