This Refugee Week, the British Red Cross is celebrating the contributions and resilience of refugees.
Harry Potter star Jason Isaacs travelled to Turin with the British Red Cross to meet refugees rebuilding their lives through inclusion and integration projects.
The Red Cross runs 95 reception centres throughout Italy. The Settimo Torinese centre in Turin hosts nearly 10% of the refugees that arrive at Italy’s ports. Here they’re provided with food, accommodation and health care, and helped to integrate into the country through language classes and job apprenticeships.
During his visit to the centre, the actor met 19-year-old Hannah from Nigeria. After being kidnapped on her way home from school when she was 16, Hannah managed to flee and put her life in the hands of traffickers who took her to Libya. For over two years she was forced to work for a local family, with every penny she earned going to the traffickers. Eventually she managed to escape and got on a boat that took her to Italy.
Hannah is now one of 12 young women taking part in a four-month-long catering internship and kitchen work placement, run by the Italian Red Cross. The women learn to take orders, cook new food, develop their Italian and make new friends.
The actor also played football with the Red Cross refugee football team, who train once a week at a football pitch just outside Turin. Around 25 people regularly train with this team and originate from countries all over Africa, speaking English, French, local languages and now Italian.
In the first 6 months of 2018, over 37,000 refugees crossed the Mediterranean, most on the route from Libya to Italy.
The Red Cross is the only organisation supporting refugees and asylum seekers at every point of their journey. This includes countries of origin such as Syria, countries of transit such as Italy and destination countries such as France, Germany and the UK.
To support more refugees to build a new life in safety, visit: www.redcross.org.uk/refugeecrisis
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The British Red Cross' vision is of a world in which everyone receives the help they need in a crisis. Our core purpose is to mobilise the power of humanity so that individuals and communities have the capacity to prepare for, deal with and recover from crisis.
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