The Youth for Peace from Rome have wasted no time. They set off for Greece immediately after the Jubilee days, confident in their mandate to be ‘missionaries of hope’. Their destination: the refugee camp of Schisto, on the outskirts of Athens, which hosts families arrived after long and dangerous journeys from different countries at war - at the moment mainly from Syria and Somalia.
There are about 50 of them, most of them university students from Rome. It is not a new experience for some of them, indeed in Schisto they feel a bit “at home”: they know well some families who, for bureaucratic reasons, have been “stuck” for years. Even this year they are organising educational activities, language lessons, games and outings: a significant occasion to build friendships, learn together and discover the power of friendship, that may unlock socially marginalised situations that would otherwise become permanent.
This is the case of Mohamed (fictitious name), an 11-year-old Somali, severely disabled, recently arrived in Greece with his mother, who undertook a perilous journey for him in the hope of finding treatment otherwise impossible. At the Summer School in the refugee camp, he experienced his first day of school. And even the young mother, who is trying to learn Greek, found language help from the other refugees. Around this family, a small solidarity movement was thus created involving the Youth for Peace, the children, the camp guests, joined by the hope of changing a fate that seemed already decided but is still to be written.
