Mediterranean Sea of ​​Peace. Children in transit between two worlds

(by Santa #Fizzarotti Selvaggi) On the occasion of the Conference "Mediterranean Sea of ​​Peace" organized by the Bari section of the Crocerossine d 'Italia Onlus Association, there were valuable interventions that we like to bring to the attention for a reflection. The intervention proposed below is by Prof. Filippo Maria Boscia, gynecologist and AMCI National President,
"Thank you for this invitation, which was very welcome to me and which honors me and the entire Association of Italian Catholic Doctors, who have the delicate task of presiding. I am proud to share with you this meeting that I would define as "Mercy and hospitality", of reflection and commitment that is part of a great project.
I thank the Bari section of the Associazione Crocerossine d'Italia onlus and HE Msgr. Francesco Cacucci for having involved us in this meeting which translates into a new lymph for the whole diocesan community and which places us in a privileged space of thought and daring debate on key issues of our contemporaneity that concern peace, integration, acceptance, support, solidarity and subsidiarity of a humanity so often defrauded of its dignity.
We are here with the help of all of you, so many intervened, to be all promoters and witnesses of peace, to question our consciences, to excite our minds, to stimulate them to recover wisdom, wisdom and to promote every possible and necessary challenge with ambition to carry out a genuinely true comparison.
Dealing with all aspects of today's society of intergenerational and multicultural relations supported by migration is extremely ambitious, to be shared across the board, in a profound and convinced ethical project of life. When we look after children, cross-cultural children, often unaccompanied, but always looking for their parents, often not found! and when we want to support the effort of innocent souls called to grow on two worlds, then, even more our commitment becomes a duty and inescapable.
More and more often these children are born in a foreign country, in a nest that so often places a radical distance with the primary affections, condemned to a solitude of intimacy and perhaps also in a climate of abandonment.

The living conditions of foreign children, especially those unaccompanied minors or those in disarray, always children of immigration, represent the essential peculiarity of the effects of globalization on people. They emigrate to a foreign country not by their direct choice and not always following their parents, very often sent alone, without protection to cross a perilous sea that has already been grave for many. Others are born in foreign territory always and in any case: the choice is made by adults, not by them!

Today we talk about all these children, that is, transcultural children! Their presence is "inevitable", "irrepressible".
As minors, children and adolescents are recognized - at least on paper - with a series of rights: the right to health, to education, to grow up in a family, to speak the mother tongue, to have stable roots and I am not referring only to the their biological roots. As they come, and even if they were born in Europe, they are recognized "in words" with rights that are all too often paper rights, that is formal and not de facto.
Recent epidemiological studies on the children of immigrants in Italy and France reveal a higher rate of hospitalization; greater pre-school and scholastic difficulties have been highlighted, and above all in learning not separated from a considerable poverty of language and much more (Moro 2001). This means that these children, these boys, these brothers of ours, children of immigrants are more fragile, more vulnerable. Their vulnerability does not depend so much on the fact that they come from disadvantaged families, nor on the fact that they live in the peripheral and often marginal neighborhoods of large industrial cities. Their vulnerability can be traced back to the peculiar fact of being "immigrants awaiting trial". Their vulnerability is linked to a main fact, that of living a trans-cultural situation. And this means more simply that good information campaigns of a cultural-health type are not enough, nor the guarantees of simple access to social and health services to improve their health conditions, nor can it be enough just to support them with a good support teacher to improve language learning and promote literacy processes. Much more is needed because what we offer certainly does not solve their problems. This is where the core of the relationship between formal rights and substantive rights lies! For them, the peculiar characteristic of support actions cannot be referred only to the more or less successful outcomes of social integration and / or inclusion in the country of arrival versus that of birth, as to the need for their life to be always well integrated and protected. despite the fact that they straddle two cultures. Above all, we must keep in mind that it is the first childhood experiences that mark foreign children in these terms. This assumption claims that in the relationship with them, anyone, parents or educators, volunteers or other operators should always be available, even if with a different degree of intentionality, to actually mediate a cultural horizon of reference, an intercultural horizon, even if at times this horizon could be conflictual. All proximity workers, including parents where present, should never be on the sidelines. Conversely, it often happens that there is loneliness because it is often necessary that ideally distances are taken and respected.
On the other hand it is always necessary to keep in mind that "growing in exile is a challenge, also because there are so many interferers: the social position, the socio-economic status, the reception policies, religious affiliations, the different ethnic and cultural profiles, the composition of society of origin of the host society, the peculiar anthropological characteristics: All these are specific coordinates that could influence and determine disruptive socio-environmental, psychological-emotional and psychosocial actions ”.
“Yes, growing up in exile is a challenge. Being children of migrants or becoming migrants in any place is in fact a critical, complex and at the same time adventurous event, which today marks the future of our modern societies ”(Moro 2001: 3). Moro well describes the goal of those who welcome: That of allowing migrant children or adolescents, or children accompanied or not, to be “The weavers always at work to locally mend two distant worlds, which are separated by a sudden stop. The tear made more acute also in reference to mourning by the dramatic break that unites the survivors to the dead, to the shipwrecked of those sinking, real human catastrophes.
other factors of vulnerability often present from birth are aggravated by the processes of difficult socialization that the host community and the available structures, educational agencies and schools are unable to fill. Wounds are often marked and "chronic" rather than cured.
I would like to highlight some points:

  • for example we think of particular situations such as, for example, a pregnancy experienced with difficulty by the mother, loneliness, lack of sharing with the peer group, the absence of social aggregations, for example with other women;
  • often we record in the interpretation of maternal thoughts unpleasant sensations related to fear, anguish and distrust;
  • certainly the maternage is different!
  • the mother can lose the original certainties, she can present herself in a confused way to the child, unable to transmit to the child that serene and beautiful kaleidoscopic perception of the world capable of positively conditioning the sensory repertoire and the formation of the child's neuro-psychic imprinting .

These are some of the reasons why the child of migrants in most cases is a "subject without a guide".
We are all called to a daily and regular action of interchange and cultural communication in order to achieve maximum integration between the culture of their country and that of the country of arrival. This integration called "familiarization" makes every socio-cultural hybridization comprehensible, intelligible and positive. Children are the main actors called to mend two separate worlds locally: These children must connect two worlds: they must be able to avoid the dilemma of having to betray one for the benefit of the other. The challenge - as well as the risk - of trans-culturality lies precisely in the difficulty of rebuilding a whole! Starting from small and disordered fragments a new metabolism capable of transforming differences and differences into opportunities must be reconstructed. It is a very heavy job, often very difficult, but possible.
These are strong, irreversible and unstoppable changes that require a new and different political and cultural sensitivity: multiculturalism becomes the new ethical challenge of our post-modernity and forces us to try and reflect on the real extent of the phenomena, on the meaning of terms such as cultural identity and "Identification", on the meaning and nature of "belonging" today, on the reassuring stereotypes of the foreigner and the different. Denying legitimacy to diversity, closing up as a hedgehog, raising barriers is a short-sighted and losing strategy: short-sighted because it does not see that the foreigners who live among us help us to highlight and bring to light the differences and differentiations that are also in us; loser because, as Baumann would say (2002), "cultural convergences", which feed more than what unites and unites, rather than what distinguishes and divides, are a fact. It is necessary that the convergence processes never stop, so as not to create unbridgeable cultural fractures and harbingers of violence and hatred, it is necessary not so much and not only to promote integration policies, to avoid that the cultural conflict covers the conflict in the facts of class (with the outcome of giving way to the 'war of the poor!'), as, above all, policies to promote a different civic culture and to implement a new citizenship which, while enhancing and recognizing diversity, finds convergences strong and binding for both natives and foreigners on shared and respected norms and values.

Think, for example, of the "nannies, domestic workers and caregivers", the new protagonists of the "global care market" who are revolutionizing care relationships in our homes. And in action a karstic river that, in perspective, will impact our lives much more deeply and pervasively than we might think or fear.
We need to get used to accepting and integrating those "transnational families".
It is also necessary to reflect on the many emotional, emotional and psychological traumas connected to other situations that concern the children of others left in their nations. While mothers and fathers are in a foreign land for humiliating jobs, arms for working their children are orphans even if still infants in swaddling clothes.
I refer to those specific situations that do not only concern housing conditions. Many are the women who are divided between two units of belonging: the one in which they live and the one they have left. Many are the neo-established realities of mothers who come to work here with us from foreign countries, even those far away in the care services sector (children and the elderly), leaving their children at home, often entrusted to their husbands, relatives or "tate" local: children who become the "children of nostalgia" (Favaro, Colombo 1993).
Controversially it has been said that Western women owe their emancipation from care work and the opportunity to dedicate themselves totally to the profession, to those immigrant women who work to emancipate themselves and their families, relieving them of poverty and indigence: They "sell "The work of caring, of care, an increasingly scarce and increasingly necessary resource in our western society. And so, while we ask ourselves if and how many immigrants let us enter and welcome, while we still expect only "arms" to work and not people, in reality not only do our lives meet more and more frequently with the "lives of others ", But more and more frequently they include pieces and fragments of the" lives of others ".
There is a positive work of commingling and contamination that starts from the intimate, from the relational heart, from the bonds of solidarity and reciprocity between the generations and that goes to open breaches and gaps in communication up to make weaker barriers and borders. It is not only the global market of production and trade that puts women, men, children and adults on the paths of migration, but it is also the global market of care that is changing relations and relations between different countries.

What can you do?
First of all we must learn to see and interpret the problems related to freedom of migration. We must look for some ideal tools to offer in fragility and that allow us to efficiently re-establish the depth and richness of relationships, or to offer the tools to walk together: This is the ontology of the era we live.
The second aspect is education, which must always be a strengthening of freedoms in view of the good. Education is the help to incarnate in ourselves the concrete situations that we are called to solve.
For the other, it is a guide that leads by hand into the dynamics of existence.
The work of the educator consists in this: knowing how to live a convincing ideal for himself and for the other, for others who are our children or the children of others, all however have the right not to lose their way.
Man must decide to work for good, but also for beauty. Good and beautiful are absolutely the most attractive attractive forces compared to all other alternatives.
If we do not convince ourselves in this sense, we will only work for pious illusions, for things that are not concrete that could perhaps be considered convenient but that do not promote the objectives of good and that leave us enslaved, while a mad society ends up swallowing the best part of our humanity.
The educational paths are not only attributable to the parents, but it is the whole society that must propose ideals, spaces of sharing without ideologically closing itself in pre-packaged and unmotivated waste and for other also immoral.
Any such refusal constitutes real violence and abuse of power.
We do not need veiled relationships, but sincere relationships! "

Our gratitude goes to Professor Filippo Maria Boscia for his scientific commitment to great humanity.

Mediterranean Sea of ​​Peace. Children in transit between two worlds