The landing of the 460 survivors saved by Sea Watch4 during the last mission has been completed. But the 141 unaccompanied children and young people, the many families with even small children and the other migrants had to wait almost three days to be able to touch the ground. Since the ship docked at the port of Augusta, all operations – he was forced to denounce the crew several times – have proceeded with “exasperating slowness”.
And not for health problems or tighter anti-Covid controls dictated by the fear of the new Omicron variant. As usual, on the day of arrival in port all migrants were swab again and all tested negative.
But since the ship arrived, operations have been going on in fits and starts. With the exception of a few pregnant women, plus a few castaways who necessarily had to be assisted by medical teams ashore, no one set foot on the dock before Saturday. Not even the 149 children and teenagers, some just over 12, who traveled alone.
They were the first to set foot ashore, but even the operations on the pier went on with exasperating slowness and only late at night did they manage to get on the buses that took them to the communities where they will have to go through the quarantine. All day long they were forced to wait in the open, under awnings that barely shelter from the rain, but not from the cold wind that blows over Augusta.
Wrapped in the gray blankets donated by Sea Watch, now swollen with humidity and reduced to rags by inclement weather, they spent the day waiting: the turn for identification, the turn for the new health checks, for a hot late evening meal. An organizational short circuit had him delivered on board while the boys were already ashore and it was the turn of the crew, together with the Red Cross, to ensure that he arrived at the dock.
The families – and there were many with children, even a few months old, who had to look for a makeshift shelter on the Sea Watch deck on the night between Saturday and Sunday – were forced to wait until this morning. On their feet, while the rain began to fall stronger and stronger, they awaited the liturgy of the landing: yet another health check, identification, some sweets to console the little ones, exhausted after a week of crossing.
But there are those who have been at sea for much longer. Some of the survivors were rescued after days of traveling on carts and rafts that risked capsizing with every wave. They are tired, exhausted, nervous. “Among them medical cases, families, women, men and children who have spent more than a week at sea. In the cold and in the rain. It’s a shame ”the NGO tweeted about twenty-four hours ago.
The ship has been moored for days, the quay is just a step away, everyone can see it, everyone is eager to get off, yet they are not allowed to touch land. And this creates tension, discontent, stress. Nothing that the Sea Watch crew cannot handle after years of rescues at sea, but it is “unacceptable – they say – that it took three days to complete the operations”.
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