2023-04-26 05:01:00
Nurse Marika Borettaz was born in the Alps but now serves on board military ships in the far lampedusa islandin the middle of a migratory wave that “will surely increase” due to the crisis in Sudanas predicted in an interview with EFE in the local port.
“Yes, surely there will be an increase because before this crisis Sudan was one of the countries from which we already received more immigrants, so there will surely be an increase in this nationality in arrivals to our things”, says Borettaz, asked if this possibility is feared in the rescue operations.
The young nurse is part of the medical team with which the Corps of the Order of Malta (CISOM), specialized in civil protection tasks, helps the Italian Coast Guard and the Italian Finance Guard in the rescue of immigrants in the central Mediterranean.
Although she is from the alpine Valle d’Aosta, in the northern tip of Italy, as her accent shows, she decided -encouraged by a former- to change scenery and travel to the extreme south to join CISOM and help the Italian military in assisting shipwrecks.
Since he began his volunteering, Borettaz saw numerous tragediessuch as the shipwreck at the end of February off the Calabrian coast of Cutro, which left 94 dead, many minors, but he acknowledges that these days in Lampedusa are being “very intense”.
So much so that, he comments with a smile, they had to “skip the rest day” because this Tuesday in the rest of Italy is a holiday, on April 25, Liberation Day. However, in Lampedusa it does not stop.
In these days the island has witnessed the arrival of hundreds of immigrants in barges from the coasts of Tunisia, encouraged by the summer weather and the good sea conditions, (until just two days ago the rhythm was minimal because the sea was choppy). .
This has made in the reception center of Lampedusa, with capacity for 400 immigrants, more than 2,200 are crowded waiting to be transferred to other facilities in Sicily. To get an idea, just think that less than 6,000 souls live on the island.
The volunteer’s job is to “give a first look” or diagnose the immigrants once they are transferred from the boat to the Italian military ships and, in case they present any serious problem, intervene immediately.
They are moments of “a lot of adrenaline” in which, he says, the feeling is always the same: tension. Because “nothing is needed for a perfect relief operation to lead to a tragedy,” she warns.
After the rescue, the pace on board is frantic and there is not much time or space to talk, but the young nurse says that they often try to ask the immigrants for their stories.
“They often tell us about their trips that sometimes began a long time ago, some three years before. Others even started it when they were little, when they were 12 or 14 years old, and they did it alone,” he laments.
So far this year, a total of 36,610 have landed on the Italian coasts, four times more than in the same period of 2022 (9,089), according to official data.
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