Wednesday was a day to travel and explore. One of our goals for this trip is to investigate the city of Palermo and determine a couple of things:
- Meet as many migrants as possible
- Find where the migrants and refugees live, work, and hang out
- Determine if there are programs already in place where we might be able to partner to provide long-lasting care, meet real and felt needs, and continue with long-term follow-up.
We awoke to a fabulous breakfast made by our very own Texy Mexy chef, Sophie! Pistachio cheese from the market, Rosemary picked fresh from the back patio, and Italian sausages combined perfectly with delicate eggs! It wowed our taste buds, and we all went back for seconds.
After debriefing from the day before, we spent some time thinking through our day and packing for our two-and-a-half-day trip. Palermo is a port city on the north-west side of the island of Sicily. It is roughly three times the size of Catania, but the streets seem half as wide! After some tense driving around the city, we finally found a place to park the 9-passenger van, which is always a trick. Once parked, we made our way the few blocks to the hotel where we dropped our bags and went for a bite of lunch at a small Panini shop.
Our stomachs full, we hit the streets. We divided into groups of 2 and 3 and traveled in different directions. We saw so many migrants and refugees in the short two hours we walked! The debrief later in the even revealed some very energizing discoveries.
In two hours, we met people from 30 different nations. The migrants we met have been her from as short as 6-months to 11-years. Sophie met a woman from Spain, working with a local Mosque to help meet the needs of migrants. Curt and Anita met a man who attends a Baptist church with people attending from Zambia to Nigeria and Ghana. We also found a Mission run by the Catholic Church. The hot-link is to an article from 2015, but it gives you some insight into this Mission and the efforts in Palermo. The Mission currently houses over 700 men and is entirely self-sufficient, including a working farm and grain silos in the campus to hold their wheat for making their bread. There are also women and children hosted in another facility, but we did not get a chance to find this location.
In short, it was an incredibly fruitful day.
Today (Thursday for those who have lost track, like us), we have several appointments to visit with those doing the hard work, those with boots on the ground. We hope it will be just as successful as yesterday’s initial excursion!
