An hour after we met in a train station in the far southern heel of Italy, Selma led me through a small opening in the brush at the edge of an abandoned park, skirting the warning signs and locked gate. At the end of a tunnel of leaves we emerged in a clearing with a broken stone bench. “I don’t know why they close this beautiful place,” she said and bent to pick up a feather in the grass before we sat. We almost couldn’t hear each other over the cicadas pulsing as the sun went down, but I detected French and Arabic smoothing the sound and rhythm of her accent.
She had come from Tunisia to volunteer helping migrants from Africa integrate in Italy. Her name meant “peaceful” and she said MLK was her hero. A few weeks earlier she had persuaded another girl in the program, a volunteer from Macedonia named Maja, to hitchhike with her to Rome when they missed their bus. “It was not easy, but it was an amazing, an amazing experience,” she said, emphasizing the second “amazing.” At 6:00 am they were at an empty gas station trying to sleep when a car showed up with a Moroccan guy covered in scars and another covered in tattoos. He even had a black teardrop under his eye. “These guys were looking, for society, like criminals.”
Maja was terrified but Selma followed her instinct. They got in and the guys took them straight to the train station. “They bought for us tickets to go directly to Rome. And they didn’t want to give us even their number to pay them back. They said no, never. We have sisters. We have cousins. They stayed with us six hours. They brought for us food, water, everything.” Selma twirled the feather. “Yes, and this teach me that never, never never, judge the person with scars. You can’t know what this person needs.”
That night she glowed while Maja told her side of the story, also beaming, and they and the other volunteers at their shared house invited me into their “strange family.” When I left, Selma gave me a necklace with the feather and two beads, one of which fell into the River Liffey in Dublin.
