MINATA

“You are free to go, take these and go to this address”
“Mais je ne connais personne, je ne sais pas…”
“I don’t understand… take these and go.”

This is perhaps the worst part of the story I picked up.
Because it is true, the story of Minata, a young Burkinabe, now 23 years old, is atrocious….
(Essentially sold by her family at age 13, she finds herself on a plane escorted by traffickers who take her to Paris; ransomed by her aunt who lives there, she is then arrested at age 14 for being undocumented and considered ‘illegal’. Freed, she is sent by traffickers on a visa to Rome. From us, she begins a new ‘migration’ from abjection to resurrection, always alone)

….but to know that someone in charge of your country’s security at Fiumicino airport, having realised that she was obviously an underage girl, bewildered, unable to speak a foreign language, dismisses her with a bus ticket and an address, without minimal accompaniment, not even a reference, a phone number, hurts.

It would be nice to locate the policeman and have him meet with Minata. Now that she has graduated from language high school, enrolled in mathematics and is working in a large company as the CEO’s personal assistant.

Now that she has a new dream “to participate in the competition to become a policewoman.”