No Man Is an Island

Since the large waves of migration in summer 2015, many are ready to house and welcome the less fortunate people of this world. Long before that Doctor Bartolo took responsibility for Omar, an 18-year-old Tunisian who stranded on Lampedusa’s coast. Dr Bartolo offers Omar a family, a home and a job as an interpreter in the local detention centre. Around the same time also Adam, a 16-year-old from Ghana, is taken in by a hotelkeeper, who gives him a job as the hotel’s valet. Both boys have been lucky. Or haven’t they? Because a future is more than a roof above your head. And good intentions don’t suffice for true integration. We should at least listen to the boys themselves. Lampedusa: promised land or prison in the Mediterranean Sea? These 2 unique adoption stories reveal the search for freedom and happiness of both the Lampedusiani and the newcomers, and are a metaphor for the task that awaits the European continent.