The Journey of Death

She is a friend of mine.

An Italian.

A writer.

Leticia Quaranta

We have spoken at length.

About issues.

Deep.

And far ranging.

Today she shared with me an article.

Which had been translated from Italian.

The article reminds me so much of the research I did when I was writing my play.

L'otor, The Devils Pilgrimmage.

She asked me to kindly share it with Nigerians.

So that we all know.

And our collective knowledge can be a weapon of change.

This is what she shared with me.

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Below is the report of a "horrific" conference Virginia Di Vivo, a medicine student, attended at a Med conference, in Italy, in 2019. I'm publishing it in English with the authorization of Virginia and of the people who translated it. I wanted to translate it myself but I bring myself to do it. It's too awful.

Read it. Share it (people must know, african people in particular). Translate it in other languages if you can:

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I went, very sleepy, to the most inflated congress of my college career, conscious that I would probably fall asleep on the upper seats of the auditorium.

I sit down, I read the timetable, the second entry is “public healthcare and immigration”. Inevitably, I think “what a boring topic”.

I turn up Pokèmon Go, I’m still on a gym of the blue team. I’m about to conquer it for the red team.

Dr. Pietro Bartolo starts talking, I don’t know who he is.

I don’t care.

I am about to catch a bulbasaur and I hear his voice in the background: he doesn’t talk about epidemiology or eziology, he doesn’t focus on statistical data about some whatever syndrome.

He talks about people.

He goes on saying “people like us”.

I decide to listen to him with one ear and to bulbasaur with the other one.

Bartolo tells that he lives there, in Lampedusa, he treated 350 thousand people, and there is one thing he hates, and it is the corpse recognition.

Many have no fingerprints anymore.

And he has to pick fingers, ribs, ears.

He starts telling us:

“The women? They have all been raped. ALL OF THEM. Often they arrive pregnant. If they are not pregnant it’s not because they haven’t been raped, but because they have been given questionable doses of anti progestogen, so that they can be raped in front of everyone, in order to humiliate them. No risks that they get pregnant, because on the prostitution market they wouldn’t yield otherwise”.

I’m baffled.

Wasn’t this supposed to be a clinical convention? Where are the therapies? Why an internal medicine doctor’s voice is not boring me with the metanalysis about the use of the whatafakine tetraphosphate?

I decide to drop bulbasaur, just for a moment, I’ve got to understand what this dude is saying.

“On these boats men sit on the edge, as a human chain, to protect women, children and elders inside, from the cold and from the water. They are families. Families like ours”.

He shows us a picture, one well published one, but he isn’t rhetorical, nor formal. He’s out of any politically-correct scheme, out of any comfort zone.

“One night I received a call: two inflatable boats had just come ashore, I had to provide assistance. I saw everyone of them, they hadn’t got any of the disease that someone claims they bring here. They had diseases that anyone could have. Those that can be cured with banal therapies. Harmless. Some of them did. Others have been skinned alive, to be turned white. This boy, for example”

He shows another picture, which is anything but well published. A boy, he must have been 15/16 years old, sliced from the knee to the ankle.

I forget about Pòkemon.

“He survived to the awful experiments they made on him. His brother, instead, didn’t make it. He died after having been skinned alive”.

I put the phone away.

“Someone told me to go check the hold, and that it would’t be pretty. So I went below deck, and it was like walking on pillows. I turn on the flashlight of my phone and this is what I found...”

He shows another picture.

It looked like a mass grave.

Bodies crammed like lifeless cans of men.

“This picture is not fake. I took it, but this is not what newspapers show you. They died there, of asphyxia. When we cleaned them up I found pieces of wood stuck in their hands, and their fingers are broken. They were trying to breach out. They had been told that because they were younger, stronger and more agile than the others, they would have traveled in the hold, and that later they could go out to breathe some fresh air. But this is not what happened. When it got too stuffy, they tried to get out from the hatch on the deck, but they must have been pushed down, with kicks and blows on the head. If you just knew how many of them I’ve found with fracture of the skull, of the teeth. I had to go out to vomit and cry. If you just knew how much I cried in 28 years in service, you would not believe it”.

Now there’s no one in the auditorium who is not holding their breath, in silence.

“But there are also beautiful things, things that keep you going. A girl was in severe hypothermia, in heart and respiratory arrest. She was dead. She had no pulse. I started a cardiac massage, for a long time, and all of a sudden she woke up. She was in awful conditions, with many edema. She has been hospitalised for 40 days. Kebrat was her name. It is her name. She lives in Sweden now. She came to visit after years. She was pregnant.”

He shows us the picture of them, hugging.

“...and people can’t get it. Someone talks about pure race. But, in fact, pure race is subject to more disease. With mutual contamination we become stronger, more resistant.

And the economy? These people, working, have poured billions into the Europe’s coffers. And I add that they enriched us with their many cultures. In Lampedusa we have all the surnames of the world and we live in peace. There are better races than others, someone says. Of course, I answer. They are better than us, better than those who say such things."

A video begins and Dr. Bartolo describes the images:

"This is a childbirth on a boat. This woman was in a terrible state, lying on the ground. I asked the boys for a fishing line to cut the cord. But they said "We are not fishermen", and that’s fair enough. They gave me a kitchen knife. That woman didn't say a word. I took off my shoelace to close the umbilical cord, can you see that? She thanked me, she was black, black as coal. Her son, instead, had very light skin. Yes, because they are fair-skinned at birth. Their skin darkens about ten days after. And I wonder, what is the problem if they’re born white and then turn black? She called his son Pietro. How many Pietros are there around!"

We all smile.

"This other woman, instead, arrived in dreadful conditions, she had been raped, paralyzed from the waist down... She was pregnant. Her water had broken 48 hours before. But on the boat she didn't have enough space to open her legs. Amniotic fluid came out, green, great fetal suffering. A 4 year-old girl was with her, she had been raped too. She had a roll of money hidden in her vagina. And she took care of her mom. So much so that when I tried to put the drips on her mother, she attacked me. Who knows what she must have been through. I gave her some cookies. She didn't eat them. She crumbled them and she fed her mother. I even gave her a toy. We get a mountain of toys, because good people exist. But that little girl didn't want it. She was no longer a child".

Next photo.

"This photo has been spread around the world. She is Favour. People called from all over the world to adopt her. She came alone. She had lost everyone: her little brother, her dad. Her mom died from what I call the disease of inflatable boats, which kills you because of gasoline and toxic agents’ burns. Before dying, she left Favour with another woman. She didn't even know that woman, but she asked her to take care of her little girl. And that woman, before dying of the same fate, brought Favour to me. But you can't imagine how many children, instead, didn't make it. Once, I found myself in front of hundreds of body bags of different colours, some of them brought by the financial police, other by police forces. I had to recognize them all. I hoped that there wouldn’t be a child in the first one and indeed, a child was in there. He was well dressed, with red shorts and shoes. Because that's what their mothers do. They want to show us that their children are just like ours”.

Dr. Bartolo shows us another video of some divers extracting lifeless bodies from a boat under the sea.

"They're not mannequins," he says.

The video continues.

A man pulls a little body out of the water.

Small.

Lifeless.

He was wearing red shorts.

"That baby is my nightmare. I will never forget him".

I can't hold back the tears anymore.

And there’s the noise of all those who like me, in the classroom, are blowing their nose.

"And this is the result."

He shows us yet another picture.

"368 dead. But 367 coffins. Yes. Because in one of those coffins there was a mother, who arrived dead, with her baby still attached to the umbilical cord. They arrived together. We didn't want to separate them, we wanted them to stay together, for eternity."

I think that's enough.

And this is an excerpt.

Yes, because Dr. Bartolo spoke for an hour.

The other speakers left him their time.

No one dared to interrupt him.

And when he finished, all of us, students, doctors and professors, we stood up and applauded for long minutes.

And that's it.

He doesn't need help.

"Don't come to Lampedusa to help us. We, the Lampedusans, have always made it by ourselves. If you are not doctors, if you can’t do anything but if you do want to help, go and tell what you've heard here, let that people who say there is an invasion know what is happening. Invasion!"

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I can’t comment on such facts, because I don't know things properly.

But there's one thing I know. I know that this is shameful, inhuman, disgusting.

And I don't really care about why you came here, whether you are regular or not, whether you run away from war or whether you come to seek fortune: arriving in this way is not human.

And you deserve our care.

You deserve a hug.

You deserve respect.

Just like any other person, and maybe more.

#MoreMed2019

__________________

I can't add anything else.

You have heard it.

From Virginia Di Vivo, Dr Pietro Bartolo and Leticia Quaranta.

And I hope.

That as I have done.

And the three of them wants us to do.

You will share this story.

That in our collective knowledge.

We would find the power.

To invoke.

Real.

Lasting.

Change.

Abidjan

Jude Idada

August 30, 2019