Per la libertà di movimento, per i diritti di cittadinanza
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#Lesvoscalling – The island of the voiceless

While we write this, the wind is blowing harshly on the hills of Moria.

There are no words to describe what we have seen, we are trying to find them while we reflect on the shameful situation we have witnessed. This is Europe’s hell.

“These tents weren’t here today”. This is the first thing we notice during our second visit to the camp in Moria. We are following the same path as yesterday, but still the camp seems different, always more crowded and suffocating.
We are the activists of the campaign #Lesvoscalling, 23 people belonging to different associations of north-east Italy; we have arrived on the island of Lesvos on the 3rd of January, taking hundreds of hygienic kits for the women of the camp with us.

Although we have prepared for this, and we had a program to follow, the emotional load has a price: what we see in the camp is a dehumanised humanity.
The rivers are filled not with blue, clear water, but with blue plastic bags and other garbage; the children wave our way, run towards us and hug our legs, before they go back to play around the fires that have been lit near enormous hills of plastic bags.
Many people stop and are willing to talk with us, to tell their stories.

Some want answers to their many questions, most of them just want a jumper, or medicines, or simply to understand what they are doing there.

The cold is never-ending, and it is also what the migrants talk about more often. One of the most frequent questions is: “What can you do to help us?”.
The hygienic kit is a good way of earning their trust; the migrants invite us into their tents, which they call “home”, and they offer us tea, biscuits, sometimes the bread cooked in the ovens that have been built inside the camp.

Once we have collected enough data, we can understand Moria somehow better, as the camp of contradictions: an over-crowded camp, but in which everyone is feeling as alone as ever.

The Turkish coast is only 12 kilometres away. Once the migrants have arrived on the island, they think that this could finally be a safer place. It isn’t so, since they find themselves in a situation in which it is hard to even get the basic necessary goods: a tent, food, health for your children.

On the northern part of the island, three of us have cleaned the coast of the garbage created by the landings, together with the volunteers of the association Lighthouse Relief.
A huge amount of material was collected, and it wasn’t all that lay on the beach: plastic bottles, life vests, relics of the boats used by the migrants, toys, clothes, all of this is scattered along the Greek coast.

ear the beach, on the top of a hill, there is a former cheese factory, which is divided into a transit camp (with places for the migrants to rest and a clinic) and a warehouse where clothes for the migrants are kept.
Five of us – with Lighthouse Relief – have been there, and have found many volunteers coming from different parts of the world, who work to tidy the warehouse up, since it was recently vandalised by unknown.

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Tomorrow we are going back to the coast, and to Moria, to the people who work there and to the people who live there, forgotten by the world.

Nonetheless, the migrants are going to keep fighting, in this jungle in Moria, for a different life and future.
How can we answer them? Tomorrow we will be there, with them, to learn how to tear down borders once again.

#Lesvoscalling

Una campagna solidale per la libertà di movimento
Dopo il viaggio conoscitivo a ottobre 2019 a Lesvos e sulla Balkan route, per documentare e raccontare la drammatica situazione sull'isola hotspot greca e conoscere attivisti/e e volontari/e che si adoperano a sostegno delle persone migranti, è iniziata una campagna solidale lungo la rotta balcanica e le "isole confino" del mar Egeo.
Questa pagina raccoglie tutti gli articoli e il testo di promozione della campagna.
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