An American poet leaves the isolation of her ‘artist’s colony’ near Gubbio, and sails to the tiny island of Lampedusa to report on waves of boat-borne immigrants. One interesting passage:

While the refugees are hidden away, there are two black faces visible on Lampedusa. One belongs to the woman on the napkin dispenser at the port cafe. She smiles from every table, her face emerging from a sea of coffee beans: “The Pleasure of Black” reads the slogan beneath her disembodied head. The other face belongs to Father Vincent Mwagala, a Catholic priest and very different kind of missionary who has come from Tanzania to work among the refugees and islanders here.

Above his desk there’s a cross made of two ribs of sunk refugee boats. Orange crosses blue. The priest is as frustrated as I am about the impossibility of speaking to arriving refugees. “We know they’ve arrived but we don’t have contact with them,” he says. On rare occasions he talks to arriving sub-Saharan Africans coming from Libya. “Life is difficult for them there. They are poorly treated in different ways. Their labor is unpaid and when they go to report it, the police pay no attention to them. It’s worse if you don’t speak Arabic.” I ask him if he’s suffering here, and he says something odd. It’s in English, so I’m sure I’ve heard it right:

“I’m suffering like a woman who is bearing a child.”

I ask him to repeat it.

“I’m suffering like a woman who is bearing a child.”

I ask him to elaborate.

“Look at the faces of those arriving. The world has to change. It’s time to look in the face of one another and learn the needs of one another. Poor people in this world don’t even have a blade of grass.”

His boss enters: Father Stefano Nastas—portly, smoking. Around him swirls a ponytailed, self-styled manservant who makes a steady stream of espressos in tiny plastic cups that remind me of the dentist’s rinse-and-spit variety. Nastas seems irritated by this Italian gadfly. He’s as down to earth as they come. He’s a Franciscan, and I notice a replica of the San Damiano Cross of St. Francis on the wall, the one that spoke to the saint centuries ago.

I ask him if, in his opinion, Lampedusa is more Europe or Africa.

“Geographically this is Africa but politically this is Europe.”

“What side of the story is the press missing?” I ask.

“The human side,” he says.

He allowed five thousand Tunisians to sleep in the church when the boats didn’t stop a few months ago. Although they were Muslims, they came to Mass and made their own gestures in front of the cross when it passed before them.

Full article here.