Constant recourse to mediation, at least during the twelve months when Caritas Italiana funds the program, turned out to be one of the cornerstones for successful accompaniment of refugees toward independence and social integration. One mediator explained why, in her own experience with mediation, this was true:
"It was an occasion to really do this work – mediation – and I have to say one thing: I thought it was going to be about translating, but it’s not just translating. There’s a whole world in the background that you have to mediate, that is, you have to make comprehensible. And even when you are just translating, you have to use a tone of voice, and a general framework for your explanation – otherwise it’s a waste of time, and a waste of the social worker’s time, and of the people who need access to the information. So, it means doing a lot of extra work. I have begun to truly understand this job – and it’s one that can’t be overestimated. I truly have a responsibility to mediate, to bring these two cultures closer, so that something new and different comes of it. […] I see the importance of the value in this."
The study of the successive arrivals coming in under the Humanitarian Corridors program revealed that few dioceses had structured the project to include permanent, salaried mediators who were funded by the diocesan Caritas branch and part of the team of social workers. One mediator who was called in occasionally put it succinctly:
"They didn’t even have a single mediator in the program – how can you talk to people if you don’t have a mediator? It’s something I do once in a while, when I can fit it in with my studies. The [refugees] are totally isolated. I think of them as people who have been shut in for two months. They don’t even know where the town is."
In fact, Caritas Italiana did not ask for mediation as a fundamental term for accepting refugees as part of the planning process for the first Humanitarian Corridors resettlement projects. However, it quickly did focus attention on this role and on the skills needed to carry it out effectively. By 2019, Caritas was offering workshops and trainings, especially for its social workers, led by mediators coming from the home countries of the refugees’ resettled through the program.
The data put together for this study showed that, in almost all the cases in which the beneficiaries abandoned the program before the twelve months were up, mediators were not available on a constant basis, or there were conflicts involving the mediator. And the interview questions I asked about mediation revealed that some challenges were difficult to resolve, like the lack of potential mediators in a given area who speak the language of a specific ethnic group, and the fact that, if mediators were called only when disputes arose between Caritas social workers and refugees, and no personal relationship was built over time, then the beneficiaries tended to view the mediators as biased in favor of the Caritas social workers.
One last finding here came from interviews with Eritrean refugees. They underscored that, for mediation with Eritrean immigrants, it is crucial not to draw mediators from the old Eritrean diaspora, which tends to favor the Eritrean regime, from which the refugees have fled. Some dioceses in the program discovered that the mediators they had engaged precisely because they had lived for many years in Italy (and were, therefore, bilingual), were political supporters of the Eritrean dictator, and were forced to change mediators several times. These cases had a detrimental effect on the trust relationship with the beneficiaries, to the point of destroying it entirely, and all of them ended with the beneficiaries quitting the program and departing, unannounced.
