Traveling together between encounters and borders
Hello! My name is Julia, I am 31 years old and have a life full of encounters, even with people whose geographical origins, social conditions and life paths could have had a completely parallel story to mine…. And instead, in the suburbs of the city of Milan that I pass through every day, in places on the fringes of other parts of Italy and the world, and on the frontiers of Italy and Europe, our paths have crossed and intertwined for a stretch, which, however brief, has often been enough to leave deep traces in me. Sometimes the time of an evening is enough to become someone’s “sister. Hearing myself called that by people with whom I have shared some fragment of life, in the experiences lived sometimes as a volunteer and sometimes by profession (I am an educator in social work), has taught me the concreteness of human brotherhood/sisterhood, giving wings each time to the desire to know how to be a home for those I meet: a home-port, a welcoming place of landing, exchanges and departures…
I met ASCS in 2022, participating as a volunteer first in a ConFine Trieste and then, together with my sister, in the Io Ci Sto camp in Borgo Mezzanone, in the Foggia area. In the following winter we also stopped in Oulx. Meanwhile, I began to collaborate with the other young activists of More Bridges Less Walls in the preparation of the camps ConFine e Through (Agro Pontino 2023 and Cosenza 2024, in particular). Here and there, I have also had the opportunity to have some groups of people play The Game. Then I currently have a professional collaboration with ASCS as part of the Remix project in Milan.
If I had to choose a few frames for each of my experiences with ASCS, perhaps I would say that Trieste for me is Lorena taking care of the feet of the boys who arrived from the Balkan Route in Freedom Square/World Square and explaining that being there and caring are political gestures.
Of Io Ci Sto I would remember: waking up before dawn to the call to prayer coming from the track; how I recognized Assima for her gesture of caring, seemingly insignificant and perhaps absurd in that context, and instead indicative and generative of a giant dignity; and Vincent who asked me in Italian class, “What does welcome mean?”.
Of the experience in Oulx I am first reminded of the intense snowfall under which we crossed the border with France on foot, thinking of those who have to cross that border on the sly.
Through Agro Pontino, however, perhaps, first and foremost for me was to find myself search for the names of people who died of slave labor in the Italian countryside, out of a bi-need for justice and humanity, to try to wrest some stories from invisibility, making memory with the shrewdness of one who knows that remembering is a verb in the future: it asks one to take responsibility for seeing, listening, caring and intervening in the present, knowing and feeling responsible for the lives of others.
With respect to The Game, which is always an opportunity to deepen and introduce others to the politics of migration and, more specifically, to the reality of the Balkan route, I would recount the excitement I felt when, during a trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina with a group of young people from Caritas Ambrosiana with whom we had played before we left, in Tuzla I met in person Senad and Nihad, volunteers active in solidarity with migrant people, whom even in the Tuzla box of The Game those who are lucky can cross paths.
Finally, Remix and Through Cosenza for me are first and foremost about the gratitude of being able to come alongside young cross-cultural balancers and world citizens in bringing out each of their voices, building friendly relationships and trying to care for the city and the world we inhabit. Today there is such a need to weave bonds between people, histories and cultures, to learn to live together even if different, indeed turning diversity really into an extra resource to make every place a hospitable home for all, where everyone can be free and no one is a stranger anymore….
Beyond individual experiences and activities, perhaps, however, for me. Meeting ASCS was mostly about entering a circle (always open!) of lights, finding fellow walkers. Here I met people who asked me where I came from and what I dreamed of, wanted to enhance what I already carried in my backpack and invited me to walk together, to go, one small step at a time, toward the horizon that unites us: that of a world in which we know how to recognize ourselves as brothers and sisters, we become truly equal in dignity and rights, and every “border” is just the meeting territory in which to live in peace together with each other.
