THE RIGHT PLACE

During the matching phase, the best correspondence possible is found between the refugees’ situations (family size, disabilities, health care needs, and so on) and the resources available in the various host locations (housing resources, public social services, medical facilities with specific forms of care, work opportunities, and volunteer networks).
Matching is one of the keystones of the Humanitarian Corridors project because it is the starting point for designing a pathway towards integration that is as tailored as possible to the beneficiaries’ specific needs and will, therefore, have the greatest chances of success. In one instance, the matching process placed a refugee family with a deaf child with a diocesan Caritas branch located near a school that teaches Italian sign language.
But even when the initial matching process is tailored to answer as many needs as possible, matching them with the best resources available in Italy, this study found that attaining matching in daily life is almost never truly possible. The concrete realities of the families and individuals resettled in Italy are far more complex than the sum of their specific needs and often elude the capacities and resources of the local communities. Often compromises must be made.
One significant example is this one, described by a nun:
"We made this apartment available for a family unit, and then [Caritas Italiana] told us that they were sending four men to live in it. We told [Caritas] no at that point, because this is a convent of nuns, and the apartment is inside it."
In some cases, even if the dioceses were ready to accept large families in the sense that they had large enough living quarters to offer them, this meant that the family ended up in small towns, lacking services and public transportation to and from schools and places to work or socialize.
Other dioceses lacked sufficient numbers of qualified personnel to meet specific needs that came to the surface once the refugees were already in Italy, particularly ethnopsychiatrists, psychologists, and qualified mediators. As a result, mental health issues have sometimes become obstacles to integration, because they were not treated with the most effective methods or on efficient timelines.
In cases where matching has worked to effectively integrate newly arrived families, the determining factor was, above all, the will of the parties to forge personal relationships based on mutual trust. This was more important than the technical alignment of the beneficiaries’ needs with the communities’ resources:
"What does the person arriving have in their heart? The model works, but everything depends on the expectations of the people who come in. It works because they are welcomed by people who have made the decision to welcome and accompany them."