In a small Italian town, a project to accompany children to school was at risk of being cancelled due to a lack of volunteers. Thanks to the willingess of migrants staying at the town's reception center, the project will instead be able to continue.
In the Piedmont town of Omegna, a service to take children to school on foot was at risk of being cancelled due to only one Italian volunteer. Thanks to migrants staying at the reception centre, it will instead be able to continue throughout the 2017-2018 school year.
Migrants accompany children to school
The Pedibus project was launched by the Omegna Centro neighborhood committee in 2015. Given the difficulty to park near the school, the children ''meet in a square with easy access and are left by their families with the volunteers, who hold a rope at the beginning and end of the line'', ANSA was told by Alessandro Savino, one of the heads of the non-profit social cooperative Azzurra, which manages the reception center where the migrant volunteers involved in the initiative are staying.
The elementary school children ''hold onto the rope and walk together to the school'', he added. This system, he said, ''reduces traffic and enables the children to get to known those staying at the center, showing them that they are people like everyone else''. The migrants housed by Azzurra, which runs three facilities for asylum seekers in the area, have been involved in the project from the very beginning. ''The aim was to include them in activities that would have a social impact,'' Savino said. ''When the Omegna Centro neighborhood committee proposed the idea of this project, since we have always worked with volunteer projects, 6 of the guests agreed'' to accompany the children on two Pedibus 'lines'.'' One route has been closed and ''thus four volunteers are helping the children in the morning and afternoon, on their way to and from school''.
Volunteering for integration
At the beginning of the project, ''there were many volunteers'', while in the second year ''there were fewer and this year there was only 'Grandpa Pedibus' among the Italians,'' an elderly volunteer who was given this nickname by the children. Few volunteered ''because they have become accustomed to having this service and they no longer see it as socially useful volunteering. But this is not a job'', he said, and volunteers are needed to continue with it. The migrant ''guests (of the reception center, Ed.) want to do it because it is a chance for integration'' and ''they like the initiative a lot. Even if the volunteers change because they move elsewhere or leave the center, the project continues and people see the results''. For the migrants, Pedibus ''gives a sense of integration and is a way to show that they are not people who just do nothing all day, like some people would like to make the public think'', he added.