Once again, there are now 1400 refugees and immigrants for whatever reason in an intake camp with only 250 beds. The Lampedusa holding center had been closed last year because of scandalous overcrowding, poor conditions, bad management and degrading treatment of arrivals (making people strip naked publicly to be sprayed for scabies and such). Volunteers -- pyschologists, social workers, lawyers, recreation specialists, translators -- do their best, and the people of Lampedusa, the residents, have been open-hearted. They have buried the dead in tombs without names on their island. But the authorities insist on treating this unending flow of immigrants as an emergency rather than the static, long-term situation that it is, and the rest of Europe only watches and thinks of it as Sicily's problem. The poorest people are always the most generous.
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