WOUNDED AID

The accompaniment relationship, as experienced by the host community, can be subject to clashes and frustration, particularly when volunteers and mentor families find that the refugees reject their instructions, advice, plans, and even practical assistance.
This can happen at any point in the accompaniment program. Over the course of the study, friction of this kind came about in the context of nearly any matter of day-to-day life, from frustration because the housekeeping or family dynamics of the refugees were different from Italian ones, to misunderstandings over the use of “pocket money” (the amount of which varied from diocese to diocese), to troubles surrounding bureaucratic timelines for obtaining refugee status.
Some host communities also described the origins of these clashes or frustrations in generic terms, without a specific cause, but brought about by sheer lack of trust and appreciation:
"They can’t see everything that surrounds them – all the love that’s around them. They just rejected the place […] They don’t understand how beautiful it is that there’s this entire community here for them, that puts out for them personally, in the first person. So this work that we’re doing, all the love we put in and the care we put in just goes up in smoke, because they won’t participate. That’s the big fear."
Aside from the initial causes, the basis of such clashes was always the failure to understand the other’s point of view. Sometimes the other party did not express their viewpoint, but “spoke” through their behavior – behavior that was not interpreted correctly by the person on the other side. Other times, people did speak up, but they were not heard.