THE CALL OF ELSEWHERE

Most of the refugees taken in between November 2017 and early 2019 left Italy, most of them at the end of the one-year period or a few months later, and some earlier. In January 2022, of the 318 people taken in by the diocesan Caritas branches, 165 were outside Italy, while 86 left their original setup but remained in Italy. News about the refugees’ final destinations was collected either through direct communication with them, or through indirect contact with other beneficiaries, or thanks to communication between the refugees and their mentor families or other volunteers.
Nearly all of them went away without informing their host communities of their decision. Some had expressed the desire to reach relatives or friends in other countries. Others had shown clear signs of mistrust of the people hosting them. But in general it was very rare that beneficiaries shared their plans to leave the Caritas program.
There were various reasons for leaving, including disappointed expectations, damaged relationships with social workers and/or the rest of the host community, the lack of employment, the need to rejoin their own communities, and, often, the illusion that they would be given greater financial assistance elsewhere – an illusion often supported by people who make money transporting people.
It was common for extended families to play an important role in the beneficiaries’ decisions, whether they had remained in the country of origin or emigrated to countries other than Italy.
When relatives had remained in their home countries, they exerted pressure on refugees to find work as quickly as possible so as to send money home. This often had the effect of pushing refugees to leave the program if they did not immediately find work opportunities. When they were in other countries, however, they pushed the refugees to leave their host communities and even break work contracts, in order to reunite the families abroad.
These pressures were particular intense for single-parent families, in which the single parent was almost always the mother, and for single refugees.
After putting in so much effort, volunteers and sometimes Caritas social workers sometimes found these departures frustrating and disappointing, or saw them as failures.
However, I would suggest the opposite. That is, seeing them as having placed people in the position to make a free choices. Some Caritas branches had adopted this view, and they prepared their host communities, before their beneficiaries arrived, for the possibility that they would leave the project, perhaps without a word to the volunteers.
The difference that this approach had for the people who welcomed beneficiaries only to see them leave was immense. When beneficiaries left, the people who did not have this perspective and had not prepared for this scenario were most often left with feelings of abandonment and betrayed trust. A few of them even chose not to participate again in hosting beneficiaries of the Humanitarian Corridors.