Lampedusa -- a Review

Lampedusa is an excellent 2016 two-part Italian mini-series starring Claudio Amendola as Coast Guard Commander Marco Serra and Carolina Crescentini as Viola the administrator of a refugee reception center.

This production gives human faces to the unimaginable numbers of refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea in dangerously inadequate water craft and to the people who try to help them.

Commander Serra is just the kind of fiercely independent hero, we love and the military brass hates. He trusts and supports his crew doing the thankless, but courageous job of saving refugees even if it means bucking orders. And sometimes saving local fishermen from an aggressive Libyan navy who tries to confiscate their boat, their only source of livelihood. (Somehow, it never occurred to me to be concerned about Italian fishermen in the Mediterranean. But of course their work can take them off the coast of the Libya, the same Libya of the infamous Benghazi attack in 2012.)

And Viola has the equally thankless and courageous job of welcoming destitute people and then trying to provide for them until they can be relocated to a more permanent encampment on the mainland. Depending on insufficient funding from the Italian government and the sporadic beneficence of the world at large, she must provide food, shelter, medical care, etc., etc., etc. to these needy people.

Commander Serra rescues a young boy Daki from the sea. He turns Daki over to Viola. Neither of them know that Daki's mother and younger sister were left in Libya until she can manage to get them on another boat to Italy.

All this in the midst of the Lampedusa community, a community with its own needs and concerns. That community is divided between those who have historically welcomed and helped people coming through in search of a better life and those who want to protect their way of life on the island.

Lampedusa's economy depends on fishing, agriculture, and tourism. Just like the real island, some of the people in this drama depend on tourism for their daily bread. And getting people to come to a beautiful island for their holidays when their enjoyment may be disrupted by bodies in various states of decomposition washed up on the beautiful beaches. Or the swim-with-dolphins excursion interrupted by a distress call from a vessel sinking with too many souls needing rescue. For them the refugees are not welcome at all, not even temporarily.

This is a fictional account of the altogether too real circumstances of Lampedusa. As the European territory closest to Libya, it has become a prime transit point for irregular immigrants wanting to enter Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It is an Italian island 127 miles southwest of Sicily. In point of fact it is closer to Libya than it is to Italy.

According to Wikipedia, Lampedusa has an area of about 7.8 square miles and a population of about 6,000 people. We are talking an island just a little more than one-half the size of Liberty Island, the home of the Statue of Liberty. And a population of about the same size as Flathead, Montana. Ever heard of it? Me, neither. Other than being in the middle of the proverbial nowhere, I doubt the two communities have much in common.

According to the UN Refugee Agency more than 150,000 refugees made the crossing between Libya and Italy with the likelihood of dying during the attempt at one death for every 47 arrivals. Can you imagine your little community of 6,000 hosting an influx of that many people for whatever short interval of time until they can move on to what they hope will be a better life.

How bad must the circumstances be for a woman to take her eight- and ten-year-old children to a country where she's never been and where she does not speak the language? On foot, many miles across hostile, unforgiving land. Then unable to all get on a questionable boat to cross the sea, she chooses to send her ten-year-old alone. She knows many people have died trying to make that crossing, but she sees the danger as less than the danger of waiting until they can all go. She sees the opportunities for him as greater than the risk. That is not only Daki's fictional story, but the real story of real people.

What do I know about refugees or, for that matter, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea? I live in Colorado. Our economy comes from the supersectors of natural resources and construction, leisure and hospitality, and education and health services. The federal government is a major economic force with military bases and offices and labs connected to all the government agencies.

Colorado has abundant National Forest land and four National Parks that draw millions of tourists every year. It is notable for its concentration of scientific research and high-technology industries. Other industries include food processing, transportation equipment, the production of machinery and chemical products, and the mining of metals such as gold, silver, and molybdenum.

Instead of the beautiful sea and sky that Lampedusa enjoys, we have the mountains and sky. Colorado now also has the largest annual production of beer of any state. Denver is an important financial center. It is home to professional sports teams from Roller Derby to Rugby and Lacrosse and includes ice hockey, soccer, and all the regulars like football, baseball, and basketball. What "white privilege?" We have "Colorado privilege."

Lampedusa the TV mini-series brings to us a visceral sense of these people's reality in a way that we can kind of begin to actually understand them.

The only access to this production that I know of is Amazon MHz. I don't know what that is, but it's out there. I just happened onto the mini-series on our local International Mysteries channel. It is worth looking for.

Zory

Today is the last day of the 2016 April A to Z Blogging Challenge. Writing has always been my most effective way to process events, curiosities, life questions. Sometimes small and easily overlooked, sometimes too big and scary to look at directly.

Today is Z and today's piece is not a story or an essay or any other organized piece of literature. It's just an exploration without making a point or even identifying the point. Maybe some day one or more of these people will become a character I can get inside of and write a story. Or maybe I can do enough research to craft an essay with a point.

Until then let's just wander through my memories and ancillary thoughts, keeping in mind that they are my memories and thoughts and, as such, are flawed.

With the plight of the refugees trying to get out of the middle east, I think of the only refugees that I've known very well.

When I was in high school, Maria, one of my best friends, was a Cuban refugee. (I'll use a fictitious surname for the family.) I don't know exactly when Maria and her family left Cuba or how they ended up in Oklahoma. Maybe she said, but I don't remember.

What I do remember is the story about Zory. Maria, who had two younger sisters, was a year ahead of me in school. Luly was my age, and Zory was the youngest.

When the family left Cuba, they were allowed to bring only the clothes they wore.

While fairly rare in Oklahoma to have girls younger than our mothers' age with pierced ears, it was not uncommon for baby girls in Cuba to. And Zory did. Mrs. Sanchez put her ruby earrings in Zory's ears. They were her engagement gift from Mr. Sanchez and she hoped to be able to keep them.

Officers at the airport took their money. They took Mrs. Sanchez's jewelry including her diamond wedding rings, but did not question the ruby earrings in the baby's ears. They let Maria's mother keep her fur coat, too. I guess the coat wouldn't have been very valuable in Cuba's tropical climate or the new communist mode.

It's the ruby earrings smuggled out in Zory's ears that I most remember about their refugee story. How scary it must have been getting the baby through the officials onto the plane that would take them to the United States and freedom. Even now, just thinking about it conjures fear in my heart.

When I heard the story, my drama-teen mind imagined communist police ripping the earrings out of baby Zory's ears. Maybe that is exactly the thought that sits in my chest today making my breath shallow as I write this.

My today's mind knows that would likely not have happened. A more frightening thought now is that smuggling ruby earrings would have been sufficient cause to stop them getting onto the plane.

Maria's family owned a school in Cuba. I don't know where exactly, but her father ran the school and taught there.

Maria told us that her father originally supported Castro against the dictator Batista. Because her father supported the rebels, the Batista people had him on a list for execution. So they were happy when Castro won. But then Castro turned communist. (That's how we American's saw the events in the early sixties.)

The Sanchezes owned two houses, one in the mountains where they spent the summers because it was cool. Then Castro closed all the private schools. He took the school property and their home in the mountains and began rounding up the country's educated and upper class people. Mr. Sanchez began working against Castro.

Maria told stories about the anti-Castro young people roaming the city at night spray painting anti-communist slogans on walls. She told us about being chased by the police.

When the Sanchezes heard that Mr. Sanchez was on a list to be arrested by the Castro regime, they decided to leave Cuba.

In Oklahoma, the Sanchezes lived in a small frame, two-bedroom, one bath house. Mr. Sanchez, who spoke English, worked in a factory until he was able to get a job teaching at a Black university. Mrs. Sanchez, who did not speak English, did alterations for a department store.

By the time I knew them, which was maybe three years after they left Cuba, the girls spoke English, their only accent -- Oklahoman. I knew they lived differently from most of us. They ate avocados with olive oil. They put beans and rice on to cook for supper every evening after school, because their mother didn't get home from work until after six. (Most of our mothers didn't work.) They weren't allowed to date. Not even after they were sixteen. They only had one car.

Back then I never thought about how different it must have been for the three girls. The Sanchezes were white upper-class Cubans. In Cuba, they had two homes, servants. Their father was a recognized intellectual. They enjoyed status. They had extended family and family friends they'd known all their lives. They celebrated holidays and birthdays with Cuban music and Cuban food and Cuban games. And attended church where they had been christened. All in Spanish.

In Oklahoma, they spoke Spanish only in their home with their family and their little dog Dukey. The Cuban exile community in Oklahoma did come together for celebrations and partied in Cuban style. But then they would all go away again, to their adopted Anglo-Oklahoma lives.

I lost track of them when Luly and I graduated high school, but I know the Sanchezes sent Maria and Luly to college. Maria even joined a sorority, which must have been sort of like the social groups she would have enjoyed in Cuba -- but still no dating.

It's not until now as an adult that I think how lonely Mrs. Sanchez must have been. To work all day, when she'd never worked before. To hear nothing but an alien language from the time she left home in the morning until she came home at night. To know what a privileged life her children could have had, had things not gone so badly wrong in the land of her birth.

I remember her dressing to go to weddings of the children of her Cuban friends and friends of her Cuban American daughters. She always wore her fur coat and the ruby earrings.

If I were writing her story, that coat and the Zory earrings would be declarations of defiance and perseverance and, in the end, victory.