A long way from home: African refugees lost in Italy

By Andrea Palatnik

ROME – Tapping his fingers with impatience, Yeboah Emmanuel watches the Roman traffic jam through the bus’ dirty window. Emmanuel, a 31-year-old refugee from Ghana, is late for Italian class. Although weary from the two-hour commute, he’s the first to jump on the sidewalk as the bus stops, moving quickly across the cobblestone streets amid cars and honking motorcycles. Two minutes later, he’s sitting inside a tiny stuffy room on the first floor of the Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church, shuffling the pages of his book to find the day’s lesson as he catches his breath. Emmanuel is surrounded by some 20 other students — who, like him, are immigrants or asylum petitioners, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, who despite being illegal have no other place to call home but Italy.

“I’m eager for a job here,” said Emmanuel.

The class, designed to give immigrants basic Italian skills, is taught by volunteers and organized by the Federation of Protestant Churches of Italy. The class is Emmanuel’s only connection with the world outside a Red Cross refugee camp in Castelnuovo di Porti, on the outskirts of Rome. Emmanuel reached Italy exactly one year ago after a nerve-racking journey that started six years earlier in his hometown of Tamale, Ghana, and ended in the Italian port of Lampedusa. Among the most harrowing parts of the journey were three days inside a Libyan prison during last year’s uprising.

Annapaola Comba, who coordinates the language program for refugees at the Methodist church, said that all three classes are full, and that she gets heartbroken every time she needs to turn someone away. A retired teacher and volunteer secretary of the church school, Comba has serene light-brown eyes and tiny hands. Stroking the silver cross that hangs from her neck, she climbs the church’s staircase to supervise the classes on the second floor with great agility, despite being well into her 70s. Comba confirmed a surge in the number of newcomers from Sub-Saharan Africa entering the country after the Libyan struggle started.

“I’d say 80 percent of them came to Italy last year in the boats from Libya,” explained Comba. “They are not Libyans, [they’re] mostly from Central and West Africa, but because of the revolution the [Libyan] authorities shipped them here.”

Comba is referring to what many saw as the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s revenge against former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In 2008, Berlusconi agreed to invest $5 billion in Libya to have Gaddafi hold back the flow of African citizens who were reaching Italy through Libyan ports. However, after Italy declared support for the NATO strikes against Libya, the deal was off and Gaddafi decided to open his gates. By some accounts (the United Nations included), at least 10,000 African migrants living in Libya were sent en masse by both Gaddafi’s soldiers and rebels as a means of retaliation against Rome.

International human rights organizations like the Red Cross and Amnesty International reckon that thousands of refugees from Libya have perished in 2011 attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea on frail improvised boats, usually overcrowded, headed for Lampedusa and Sicily. Now, local organizations like the Federation of Protestant Churches of Italy are trying to help those who survived the journey find a new beginning in Europe – with no help from the government whatsoever.

“That was Libya’s retaliation against Italy, for Libya’s hold on the immigrants used to be its prisons,” said Comba. “Now, the Mediterranean became a cemetery.”

According to Franca Di Lecce, director of the federation’s Refugee and Migrant Services, even though the number of migrants in Italy went through the roof as a result of the Arab Spring (around 50,000 since January ’11; one fifth of them just passing on their way to France), immigration is not a priority for the Italian government. “It’s almost like they wanted it to become a huge problem so that all public attention was deflected from economic to social issues like immigration,” said Di Lecce, who belongs to the Lutheran church. She speaks fast, smoking nervously behind her desk.

“The Libyan crisis is one of the most critical situations we’ve faced lately from the human rights point of view. The people who were sent back to Libya were tortured and imprisoned, many were murdered. The churches here decided to act in order to stop these violations,” added Di Lecce.

Besides Italian classes, the federation offers one-on-one legal and social counseling four times a week for refugees and immigrants — what’s called the “sportello” (“counter” in English) sessions. After receiving basic orientation at the “sportello,” the refugees are then forwarded to one of the federation’s skilled social workers, who keep track of their judicial processes until the final verdict from the Italian migration committee. The “sportello” volunteers, who are mostly Lutheran and Waldensian members of the federation, talk to an average of a thousand refugees each year — an impressive figure, considering both the small size of the Protestant congregation in Italy (1.3 percent of the population) and the estimated number of migrants living in the country (around 55,000).

“As Protestants, we are part of society and we do our part to have a more just world,” said Di Lecce.

*   *   *

For good and evil, Yeboah Emmanuel’s life has always revolved around religion. He was born to a Muslim father and a Baptist mother in the outskirts of Tamale, an muslim-majority city in northern Ghana, and raised in a conservative Muslim household. At age 26, married and with a small daughter, he finally gathered enough courage to reveal his great secret: he was, in his heart, a Christian.

“I believe in Jesus and only in Jesus,” said Emmanuel. “I went to the mosque when I was young, and when I was old enough I stopped.”

His conversion marked the beginning of a life on the run for Emmanuel. His father expelled and disinherited him, and his Muslim relatives flogged him repeatedly. He managed to escape to the house of one of his mother’s sisters, in a nearby town. Three days later, he and his aunt were attending mass when the house was set on fire by a couple of his Muslim cousins, who had followed him there. He left his wife and daughter with the local pastor and fled to another town, and another town, until he crossed the border to Burkina Faso.

“I had 20 cedis ($11) in my pocket and nothing more. I just prayed,” said Emmanuel.

From Burkina he went further north to Niger, and after almost two years living off small construction jobs there he quietly moved back to Ghana — he and his wife decided to settle in Accra, in the Christian dominated south. Life was starting to calm down when his mother died, back in Tamale. Despite the danger of running into his Muslim family, he saw no choice but to go back to his hometown to bury her.

Sure enough, his father was waiting for him, and hours after his mother’s funeral Emmanuel was threatened again by the Muslim clan. He left the country on that same night — this time, for Libya, where a pastor had given him the address of a Baptist church in the city of Gharyan. He stayed there little more than a year, saving money to return to Accra, when the Libyan revolution broke.

“I decided to go away because everybody was running for their lives,” said Emmanuel.

Hoping to reach the airport, he took a bus to Tripoli and was arrested upon arrival. After three days, loyalist soldiers removed Emmanuel and hundreds of other prisoners to a boat. Unaware of where he was heading, Emmanuel endured 48 hours at sea until disembarking in Lampedusa, a small Italian island in the Mediterranean located between the coasts of Tunisia and Sicily. After three weeks of nightmare in an improvised refugee site, Emmanuel managed to get to Rome, where he was placed in a Red Cross camp on April 29, 2011. He talks to his wife once or twice a month, using phone cards provided by the camp. The calls enable him to hear news of his children, including a baby daughter born while he was in Libya.

“I keep telling her that once I have my documents I will bring her, too,” said Emmanuel. “You know, I never met my second daughter.”

*   *   *

Emmanuel is one of the 60 refugees, most of them men, who come to the Methodist church for the Italian classes every week. Like Emmanuel, many come from Red Cross refugee camps and other shelters in the borders of Rome. Only a small number keeps coming after the second week of class – some end up being relocated or manage to land a full time job; most lack the resources to come to the city regularly. But there’s always a waiting list to begin the course.

The classes are held in the rooms used by the Methodist church for Sunday school. The books are donated by the church, which collects contributions among its members to help the refugees. A big problem for the program now is transportation for the students, who need to take trains and buses to get to class. A European Union project aimed at helping refugees used to finance transportation costs and other basic needs for migrants being assisted by social institutions, but the budget crisis in the continent forced the end of that initiative.

“Sometimes they come to us with tickets after being fined for riding the bus without paying, but we can’t afford to pay for them every time. We’re trying to get some financing for their transportation again,” said Comba.

Benjamin Tannur, a 25-year-old from Ghana, came to class that Monday with a bus fine after being caught without a valid ticket. He said it was the third since he started attending class at Ponte Sant’Angelo. But because he was fired from his last job — as a bus boy at restaurant near Termini Station — Tannur had no money to pay for the bus.

“The school in the camp was full, so a friend of mine there said I should come here. I like it, I feel very accepted,” said Tannur.

Tannur is living in a camp set up by the Red Cross and administered by an Italian NGO whose name he said he can’t remember for being unable to pronounce it. He has no documents and shares a room with seven other refugees, all in the same situation. He is now waiting for the migration committee to decide about his asylum petition, filed eight months ago.

“A lot of people are being rejected, but the lawyer said he will fight for me. The UN is paying him, and they say he will do anything I ask him to. I told him I want to stay,” said Tannur, whose expression suggests a mixture of permanent apprehension and chronic lack of sleep.

The young Ghanaian is still trying to digest the events in his life that forced him to flee the small tribe where he was born and raised, near the eastern border with Togo. When he was 20, he said, the elders of the tribe wanted to use him as a human sacrifice in a ritual to mourn the death of the chief priest. He was kept naked in a locked chamber with hens and other animals, being fed once a day.

“I didn’t believe I could leave that room. But I dug a hole in the wall and escaped,” recalled Tannur. “They chose me [for the sacrifice] because my mother and father are dead, so nobody would fight for me.”

After wandering in the bush for days, he found a cocoa farmer who offered him a job. Later on, the farmer — who was also an arms dealer — forced him to bring ammunition to local drug lords. He ended up being arrested along with the farmer, but managed to escape, once again, from the police station. Tannur crossed three borders until reaching Libya, and lived there off construction jobs for two years until the war broke. He was settled in Homs, one of the most violent fronts of the revolution. He was arrested by the police in late March and kept in a jail where he received regular beatings — he made a point of showing me his left shoulder, with a deep scar marking the place where a metal pin had to be inserted to replace a shattered bone.

One day the prison guards gathered around a hundred inmates and took them to the port, where they embarked a small ship to Lampedusa. He spent five days in the sea.

“The problem is that they don’t give you any documents when you arrive in Italy. They say there’s no war or crisis in my country [Ghana], so they can’t treat me as a refugee,” explained Tannur.

Of the 27 Ghanaians who arrived with him on the Italian island, none got documents. “The Italian [authorities] say: ‘if you’re not Libyan you have no reason to be here.”

*   *   *

Besides the Italian classes, Tannur and Emmanuel are helped by another cadre of volunteers during the “sportello” sessions, among them Vicenzo Barca. Once a week, Barca talks to illegal immigrants and refugees about ways to survive in Italy and escape deportation. A retired psychiatrist and college teacher, he still works as a literary translator once in a while — Barca, 67, speaks fluent Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French. He decided to volunteer for the Federation of Protestant Churches of Italy five years ago, after a friend told him about their outreach programs to assist undocumented immigrants. At first, Barca worked at Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist church as an Italian teacher, but he’s now a member of the “sportello” counseling group.

“Teaching is too frustrating, because you see these refugees and their situation, which is really awful, and you have to deal with the limited resources at hand to help them,” said Barca. “You feel weak.”

“Here [as a counselor] I have the feeling that I can do an extra something for them. Especially since a couple of years from now, when they made immigration laws even tougher [in Italy], these people really need all the help they can get,” added Barca.

The first thing the volunteers do is find a place for the newcomers to stay, if they haven’t been placed in a shelter or camp. On the desk he sets to receive the Wednesday appointments, Barca keeps a copy of “Roma: Dove mangiare, dormire, lavarsi” (“Rome: Where to eat, sleep, shower”), a useful guide published and updated annually by the Comunita di Sant’Egidio, a lay movement of Catholic inspiration with a broad outreach agenda in Italy. The second step is to direct families with children to the localities where they have been registered (when they have) to require inclusion in the municipal welfare system and a spot for the kids in a public school.

Refugees like Emmanuel and Tannur started pouring into Italy almost a year ago, according to Barca, and because they are in a sort of legal limbo until their asylum petition is accepted or denied, it’s even harder to help them. The process can take several months between all judicial levels – and despite the fact that in theory they can work, finding a job without any documents is almost impossible. The Italian economy being in shambles doesn’t help, either.

If the petition is denied, the immigrant has 15 days to leave the country, but few actually do. And then starts a new battle, either for citizenship or to leave Italy for some other more welcoming European country.

“Italy is an old country; we should use these young people as a motion force,” said Barca. “Instead they are kept like prisoners in those camps, doing nothing all day and getting depressed.”

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2012 at 1:43 am. It is filed under Andrea Palatnik, Features, View from Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.