Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
A: Also mine, after a month.
Question: Have they always worked in the same place?
Ornela: Yes, with all the necessary documents, my husband works in
a factory, they produce steel…
Persons interviewed in Central Italy describe a situation quite different, in
most cases because they are Romany. None of them have their own homes,
and many live in the squalid Gypsy camps or in the Popular Hostel in
Florence. In Rimini, a group of about 50 people shares a former vacation
hostel.
I never wanted to go to the camps. No... You lead an unhealthy life
there… how can I explain myself... it’s a habit, I’ve always lived in a
house... life in the camp seemed too strange for me, above all the hygienic
part... I must say that in Kosovo everyone had a house, we all had normal
lives... the camps I saw when I arrived in Italy… they offered us the
camps… I had never seen nothing of the sort before… [Tahir]
Tahir is an engineer, and arrived in Italy in 1991 because he disagreed with
the policies that Slobodan Milosevic enforced in Kosovo. Though Tahir
and his family all have permits to stay and work in Italy, they decided to
move to Belgium because it was impossible to find a house for a family of
five in Florence. The situation of the Romany who arrived in Italy during
the summer of 1999, however, had proven much worse at times. In the
words of Tahir:
188
My brother travelled as a clandestine in a little boat and got here… one
with five or six persons... after he had been here in Florence our Roma
community asked the prefecture, the government, that those that had
arrived, they were more or less 120 persons, had a place to stay… the
first days they were forced to live in a public garden… it was terrible…
they stayed four months in a hostel in Florence and then they were
moved to Rimini... My brother lives there with his family... he is working
because they gave him an opportunity, you know they can’t give support
to everybody... My other brother, he also has six children, daughterin-law,
nephews and so on… he saw that the employment situation here
was difficult so he continued his trip to Germany where two other brothers
live... but racism in Germany has grown, it is stronger than here… so
he decided to go to Belgium... he lives now in Belgium, with a political
asylum request… they stopped there because they received more help
there than what they got here, they even give some economical support...
he called me and I asked him if I could go there too… I have this idea …
it’s very difficult to find a job here and then there’s this rapidly growing
racism that started when the Berlin wall crumbled and it has got over to
the Austrian nationalistic government… also I think work perspectives
are scarce here... [Tahir]