NAPLES - Over the years, universal history has always witnessed the contrast between the oppressed and the oppressors. As long as Earth's resources on are not fairly distributed, there will always be a dispute between the rich and the poor. People oppressed by famine and wars struggle and put their lives at risk in search of a decent life, moved by the search for serenity and earthly happiness, such as we all instinctively seek. The pursuit of happiness is not always the same for everyone: it can vary widely based on the starting situation. And politics (both global and national), which should originally be aimed to resolve problems for a common good, has in fact become a search for consensus from one side to the other with a consequent exploitation. The issue of migrants has returned to the fore as a war between factions, between organizations and associations, as if human life were the prerogative of only an elite and not a universal priority. And in the middle there are the migrants, who have actually got a face, a name and a story to tell. Today Ben is 29 years old and has been in Italy for 9 months. His country of origin is Mali, in sub-Saharan Africa. We live in a time when distances have come closer, but not for everyone: it took Ben three years to make that journey. Ben leaves his hometown, Gao, in 2015, certainly not for a pleasure trip: he escapes from war, where boys of his age die every day, and he is imprisoned for not conforming to the Arab fundamentalists: he spends 6 months living in a room with 100 people, young people and adults together. One night when some try to escape, Ben is wounded in the head. Then he manages to escape without a clear destination or goal. The Algerian driver of a truck takes him to Algiers, where Ben remains for a year and a half and even without documents he can find work on a construction site. Then he moves to another city on the border of Libya and later arrives in Tripoli in 2018.
He does not know anyone and, lured by the promise of a job, he is literally bought by a man who obliges him to work as a farm laborer for him: the threat is very convincing because the man is fully armed and certainly would not hesitate to use those weapons... He spends 6 months there, working every day for an infinite number of hours in exchange for some food, not even distributed on a daily basis. In June, Ben manages to escape with some of his companions taking advantage of clashes between rival militias. and arrives in a village after a long journey. He has very little money in his pocket and in order to leave he has no other choice but to embark on a battered boat: there are 120 other people with him, including a dozen women (one is pregnant) and 4 children. A day and a half in the middle of the sea without food or water. When his boat runs out of fuel, together with two other boats, he experiences terrible moments, along with the terror of having to go back. Luckily enough, though, they spot a ship of the Italian Navy: tears of joy for having survived leaving behind three dead people (a woman and two boys) and after having witnessed the pregnant woman giving birth to her child. After four days of travel they arrive in Catania. From there Ben is welcomed in Naples, precisely in San Giovanni a Teduccio where he currently resides with 40 other people. Since October he has been attending the Italian school at Comunità di Sant'Egidio (Community of Sant'Egidio) in the historic center of Naples. For Ben, learning Italian is essential in order to get integrated into his new country and be able to work. Here in the Community he finally got to know what it means to be welcomed, respected, loved, the gratuitousness of fraternal help, as received from his teachers Gerardo and Francesco. Finally, Ben was able to rekindle his hope of a peaceful life in a family, because only those who have known war closely can fully understand the value and richness of peace, without any semblance of rhetoric. Ben tells his story in Italian to Erasmus teachers from Croatia, Romania, Poland and of course Italy, to testify that united Europe should take charge of the less fortunate and work for sustainable integration beyond empty words and political slogans, in the name of the human values that unite us all. Ben is now a man, he has lived through many atrocities, the most painful of which is undoubtedly having had to sever all relations with loved ones he hasn't known anything about since then. Being uprooted from one's origins and homeland is an open wound that cannot be healed even through the most successful integration in a country other than one's native land. Simply because it did not arise from a free choice.
