Alice Silvestro, INTERSOS doctor, has been working in Apulia for two years helping foreign agricultural workers. Since March she’s in Poland on the border with Ukraine
She’s 29 and comes from Piedmont. After some experiences abroad, including in Ethiopia and Peru, two years ago she began to work with INTERSOS in the province of Foggia to provide medical assistance to foreign agricultural workers living in informal settlements. Since the beginning of March, with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Alice Silvestro has been in Poland to help people fleeing the conflict. “I received a call on February 25, as soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began”, she recalls. “In little time I prepared everything, filled a backpack with warm clothes and left Foggia within a few days”.
Alice is on the Polish border with Ukraine and works in a former shopping centre 2 km from the Korczowa border crossing, where she helps Polish paramedics. In a few days, the centre has become a strategic reception point for people arriving in Poland, especially women, children, elderly and disabled people fleeing the war and passing through to reach other destinations.
“The first impact at the border made me discover a different face of migration. Until now, a refugee to me was a person dressed in makeshift clothes and showing the signs of the migratory path and exhausting jobs. Here at the border it’s different. The people I met in Poland, especially those who arrived during the first weeks, did not have economic or health problems: they were just people who had to quickly leave their lives and homes to find refuge elsewhere overnight.” Alice says. “During the first few days, thousands of people arrived in Korczowa. We worked twelve hours a day visiting between 200 and 300 people. I hardly had time to realise what was really going on, so many were the requests for immediate medical support. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, with inflows starting to decrease, that I had a chance to process”.
The health needs of people fleeing Ukraine
Alice explains that the health needs of people on the run are many and change over time. At first it was very cold and most of the patients, especially children, arrived with flu and rhinitis, now they instead suffer from gastroenteritis, linked to infections contracted during the days spent in basements and shelters where hygienic conditions and the availability of drinking water are often lacking. “Here we also visit a large number of people suffering from chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism and asthma with acute manifestations due to not taking medicines because of the fleeing. Who is also arriving are people with more serious diseases, for example cancer patients who need hospital care or hemodialysis and HIV-positive patients who need treatment. There have also been injuries caused by explosions or firearms, but fortunately the cases have been few” she concludes.The psychological situation has also changed over time: in the first few days people did not arrive from bombed cities and therefore, although upset, they did not have those traumas that instead increased with the passing of the weeks, with people arriving from places more violently hit by the attacks.
The people who live in settlements in the Foggia area, where Alice Silvestro works all year round, are also fleeing war and violence and are forced to leave their homes. But the main difference between the informal settlements of the agricultural workers and the centres on the border with Ukraine concerns the nature of these places. “This reception centre, as well as others in the area, are transit points from which most people manage to leave on the same day they arrive, moving to urban contexts in Poland or other European countries where they can find a decent accommodation thanks to friends and relatives or to networks of local associations.The Capitanata, on the other hand, is too often a point of arrival of a much longer and unfortunately failed migratory path, with people who in some cases live in the so-called “ghettos” for more than ten years even. In these settlements it’s difficult to find hope in the words and eyes of people, stuck in a “limbo” reality full of everyday obstacles that prevent them from integrating socially and professionally.” Alice Silvestro concludes.