In a project like the Humanitarian Corridors, which expressly envisages the involvement of host communities in the sense of human engagement, you might expect that hosting is perceived as offering a list of concrete things: housing and food, clothes and money. In reality, interviews with the host communities and beneficiaries revealed that what many of them seek and desire is, rather, to participate in the life of the other person, and to be a part of a human relationship that starts with meeting primary, concrete needs, and then allows for building a broader relationship that engages the whole of the person’s personality.
One beneficiary described the human significance that one Caritas’ social worker’s “ordinary” gesture of going with him to pick up his residency permit had for him:
"When I went to a city nearby to pick up my residency permit, and they gave me a residency permit that had my name and my photo, and this seemed strange to me at first. Because in my country my identity was denied – I never had an ID. This is why I say, “I realize that I am a real person,” because they gave me a document, which had always been denied me, and which had led me many times to doubt that my life was important or even necessary."
One Caritas social worker described his desire to provide human accompaniment to the refugees, whom he saw establishing themselves in their host communities:
"The circle of people involved with the three [refugees] keeps growing, and adding new faces: from the women who go to cook at their house so they can test out dishes and recipes that use locally available ingredients, to W. [refugee] joining the soccer team. T. [refugee] is doing a painting workshop. Several people and families have invited them for meals in their homes. And they all went to the movies, along with an improbable collection of people. Even though they couldn’t understand a word, it was a lot of fun."
It came out in the course of the study that some volunteers and mentor families had become involved in the Humanitarian Corridors project after previous experiences hosting migrants. Two Caritas social workers told me:
"We were given this assignment with the Humanitarian Corridors because we already had experience with the “Refugee in My Home” project, both the first and the second projects. Our local Caritas took us for that reason, because we had this personal experience of hosting a boy who had [come to Italy on a migrant ship across the Mediterranean Sea]. We took him into our home, and he lived with us from 2009 to 2015. He became an engineer […] we sent him to school."
A mentor family had something similar to say:
"It’s our way of being a family. Hospitality has always been a part of our home, starting with our relatives, of course. It’s what was once called an ‘open family.’ We always had our doors open to friends and relatives."
The will and capacity to accompany the people being hosted with personal, human relationships did not activate communities in the same way across all the dioceses:
The funniest part is that I never expected there to be any issues among the Caritas social workers at the parish. I thought that, one way or another, receiving the refugees would always turn out this way. I thought maybe we would have some issues with some nonbeliever, or with someone not involved in the project. But what I realized is that the issues come up across the board. Even people involved in the parish, the most rigid of them, said things, or made them clear through their pointed indifference. It turns out that welcoming someone different from you is a very personal matter, and it’s independent of religion. We Catholics claim, or would like to claim, that hospitality is a central thing, no matter what. But the reality is that it’s not always like that.
The choice to welcome the beneficiaries of the Humanitarian Corridors project as people, and not just as refugees with practical problems to solve, was the greatest and most fascinating challenge in every diocese and every host community.
