WHAT IS HOME?

The 45 host locations managed by Caritas Italiana use various housing models for beneficiaries, based on two essential factors: the availability of housing in the diocese and the specific needs of the refugees. Some dioceses have received multiple family units, contemporaneously or at different times from 2017 to present.
37 dioceses have always used the private residence model, with housing loaned or rented to the diocesan Caritas branch by locals. In one unusual case, an apartment was loaned out by a convent of nuns, which took in a family.
Three dioceses have used a co-housing model, pairing each refugee family together with an Italian family. Unfortunately, this method has yielded universally poor results, because it tends to bring about such deep clashes and such complex difficulties that the shared living arrangement has had to be abandoned each time.
The co-housing model has revealed just how much each family needs mutual respect for its spaces, its ways of handling relationships between family members, and its independent management of the rhythms of life.
In five locations, both single individuals and large families were housed in facilities for migrants managed by diocesan Caritas branches. These structures provided radically different levels of autonomy. Depending on the choices of the particular branch running the facility, refugees could find themselves having to follow rigid schedules for daily activities run by Caritas social workers, and very little personal space for managing their lives, or, on the contrary, in facilities that gave them total autonomy to organize their days and manage their living spaces (bedrooms and kitchens), alone or together with other guests.
In most cases, settling into their new housing has been a complex experience for refugees. Few of them have known how to manage all the factors involved in running an Italian household, from the gas stoves, to housekeeping, to using the electrical appliances and the bathrooms. In some cases it has been necessary to back up a step, as one social worker described:
"As soon as we reached [the town] with the group, I handed the keys to one of the women, just assuming that she would open the door. I gave the keys to her, but she actually didn’t know what to do with them. At that point I thought, “well, we’d better just start from the beginning.” So we got going from the very first day explaining everything: this is the door, this is a key, here’s how it all works, and so on…
In another location, the clash became clear the day after arrival, in an equally simple and dramatic way:
"The next day when I went over to see them, I noticed that the beds were just as we had left them the day before. I asked them, “but weren’t you cold?” with gestures and a few words in English […]. They hadn’t gotten into bed – they had lain down on top of the covers without getting under them because they didn’t know how to get into a bed. We got under the covers to show them how you get into a bed.