La Voz de Galicia – November 27, 2020 →
I see the images and, as always, I wonder about the stories behind them. How much suffering there must be behind the decision to risk their lives in a journey as dangerous as it is uncertain to reach a place where, if they arrive alive, they don’t know whether they will have the chance to forge ahead.
The scene repeats itself constantly. The ports and the routes change, the means of arrival (on foot or in a barge)change, the point of origin and the destination change, but what doesn’t change is the daily reality of each one of the human beings who make this complex decision, a reality that perhaps we are not capable of even imagining. We are no one to judge those who wish to have the right to have rights. And I wonder what we can do, as a society, to contribute to the solution to a problem that is neither new nor passing. I ask myself constantly, and with sadness I always reach the same conclusion: I honestly don’t know.
The media, for whatever reasons, does not always help us to understand the complexity of this situation. It creates a single story for all those who arrive and another for those who receive them, and in the case of the Canary Islands, there is also a third narrative that is the central government. And in that brief image shared of Arguineguín there is no room for the thousands of stories of desperation of those who arrive in barges, of those volunteers and workers who receive them without the necessary means.
Perhaps that is the first step, to endeavor to want to listen to the story of each person, so as to be able to understand the depth of a problem that is as global as it is local, and that will not pass us by while we turn somewhere else.
