The Italian Red Cross announced it will deploy more staff at the first reception center or 'hotspot' on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on Wednesday.
The Italian Red Cross has been operating the first assistance shelter on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa since June 1. By June 7, the organization had held a press conference to announce they would be deploying more staff there, to try and reduce the time migrants spend at the center, which has frequently been overcrowded in the last few years.
"There will be more staff at the hotspot, between 70 and 80: employees, volunteers, and specific professional figures. We have doctors, health officers, and nurses that offer considerable support but also persons to welcome those who arrive and cultural mediators. Basically, everything that will be necessary to make this center a model for Italy," explained Ignazio Schintu, Director of Emergency Operations and Rescue for the Italian Red Cross (CRI), during the press conference on 7 June.
The press conference was held at the hotspot on the island of Lampedusa, at a place called Contrada Imbriacola. Since the Red Cross took over the management of the center on June 1, they have been putting a priority on re-establishing family ties.
Bringing dignity and restablishing family ties
"The Italian Red Cross' mission, at the gateway to Europe, is to restore dignity to all those people who reach Italy," explained Schintu.
"We've tried to organize the shelter to help restore people's dignity from the very start. This is a pillar of the Red Cross: working to re-establish family ties,, said Francesca Basile, who is responsible for Migration at CRI.
"The people who arrive here find, from the very beginning, battery chargers for their phones and WIFI. And through the Red Cross and the Red Crescent organizations, present in 192 national societies, there is the possibility of running searches to find relatives who are trying to have information about those who left or the possibility of sending a message to them saying 'I am safe, I am well'", she added.
Maximum stays at the hotspot limited to 48 hours
On the morning of June 7, there were only 35 guests at the Lampedusa hotspot. In the previous days, following a high number of arrivals, migrants present reached the figure of 800, however over the last few days, thanks to the transfer of the migrants these numbers have been nearly brought to zero.
As noted during the press conference, the time migrants stay at the hotspot will not exceed 48 hours. In the case of multiple and high numbers of arrivals, in all cases, the migrants will only stay at the facility for a maximum of 5 to 6 days.
"Over the past two weeks, we saw that the length of stay has been mostly limited to 24 hours", declared the Prefect of Agrigento, Filippo Romano."Even with peaks of 800 arrivals in two days, we were able to facilitate their transfer to the mainland. The persons who arrive here are not interested in staying in Lampedusa, they just want to reach the mainland continent as rapidly as possible", he continued.
This is the reason why there are efforts in place to upgrade the network of ships for the transfer as well as the shelter facilities in Sicily and in Calabria to allow "the transfer to be as rapid as possible".
Police Chief Emanuele Ricifari proposed reducing the time necessary to identify new arrivals by half. This figure "has an effect on the length of stay and if the weather conditions allow it, migrants will stay at the hotspot for one or one and a half days," he declared, underscoring that this diminished length of stay is "in the interest of security, of migrants and of the inhabitants of the island" and he announced that he thought "with the on-going additional effort we could surpass this performance by far."