Red Cross Talk

On 2nd December students from 1st BAC had the possibility of attending a talk by Red Cross explaining a lot of important details about migration. Some of them did not participate in the project directly but some others did, but all of them were attentive and made a lot of questions, making the event very interactive and fluent.

The talk lasted one hour and 15 minutes and we learnt a lot of things about  immigrants and the problems they faced when trying to adapt to a new country, namely Spain.

There is a great quantity of Moroccan people and also migrants from Venezuela. The former have a lot of problems with the language in our town, while the latter find it so easy to communicate.

What most of these people do is to apply for the programme of International Protection,consisting of helping migrants with national funds to make them adapt to the new country. They give them accommodation and money to spend on basic needs. The accommodation they are given is normally a flat shared by more immigrants, where they have access to every room, except their personal bedroom.

Once a week, The Red Cross does the shopping with migrants so that they are familiar with prices, foodstuff, supermarkets and so that they know how much they can spend.

This programme lasts for 18 months, after which they are supposed to find a job for themselves and live in the country. It is divided into three different phases: induction, adaptation and final process.

Sometimes, people apply for this programme for humanitarian reasons, like migrants from Venezuela or people from countries at war like Syria.

We discussed very important issues, such as the fact that dealing with them with respect and empathy is crucial for the acculturation process.  It was very useful for us to work on our aims and aspirations, since these are two words that we will take into full account with our  activities.

In brief, some interesting ideas came to light that gave us the scope we needed to make our project realistic, updated and different.