“When you board a rubber dinghy, you have a 50-50 chance of dying. Better to be on the front-line, where you can move and have a say in your destiny, than staying stuck on a rickety rubber boat in the middle of the sea” Nick a MOAS swimmer rescuer told me on the fo’c’s’le of MOAS Responder.
Among all the stories I have heard and situations faced in a week on board, this phrase is what struck me the most, because I immediately imagined thousands of people like chips on a huge roulette table.
Black, you live; Red, you die.
Nobody leaves home, crosses the desert, facing thirst, hunger, beatings, rapes, kidnappings, often death, for the sadistic feeling to undermine a continental identity, a vague and undefined concept. Or to replace gods and cultures, or white children with black ones. They left home because “home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying, leave, run away from me now. I don’t know what I’ve become but I know that anywhere is safer than here”, as described by the Somali poet, Warsan Shire.
The people who are moving towards Europe are the mirror of our fear to loose all we have built, without realising that our welfare is the result of an artificial growth at the expense of a multitude of people.
They harshly expose the lies and contradictions of a system which every day polarizes wealth in the hands of a few and doesn’t care about the billions of other people.
We have to become conscious that we all were and are jointly responsible for this situation.
Our way of life, with all kinds of comfort, is pretty unsustainable if extended to all the world.
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Cesare Quinto
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