After a long sleepless night we arrived in Ventimiglia. I feel like I never even left. After some organizing time the everyday life feels just like in spring. With some new people and some people from last time missing. But things changed here around us. The Border Point is not the same as before. People don‘t use the red house for sleeping anymore, after it got evicted in april. There are almost no ways for people on the move to reach France by train, since they are stopped by the cops even in Ventimiglia already. I feel like less activists are around, yet I still meet familiar faces. Mostly at the Via Tenda/distribution place where we build up our structure every day. Our structure consists of the medi bus and the info bus, providing WiFi and phone charging and distributing food, coffee and tee. Last days have been surprisingly calm. There are less people here at daytime (30-50). In the evening with the distribution of warm food the numbers grow to 50-100. Many people are sleeping under the bridge right at the place where there was the camp before. That can be dangerous. The bridge lies right at the river and there can be floods at this time in the year in Italy. Many people on the move gladly use our infrastructure and spend the day charging their phone with a drink. Our medi team is quite busy, the next hospital is 30 minutes away with the bus. Many people on the move have to wait a long time to get minimal medical attention. Pretty busy are also the smokers of our group to match the need by rolling a 100 cigarettes a day. Our kitchen team has to cook considerably less then last time. After the daily lunch we provide at the parking lot we drive through the town in the evening, looking for people that didn‘t manage to visit or don‘t know about the distribution place to give them some warm meal. Since the border point has been evicted (after complaints of the neighbors) and Kesha Niya (a group of activists from here) is not able to cook there anymore we also drive up there to bring food. Besides we still go to the squat/red house, the beach, parks and train station to find people looking for food and blankets. We are looking forward to meet some new group member in the next days. Then we will also have the capacities to do some additional tasks like border monitoring and publications and support the other groups here.
At this point we‘d like to thank everyone who shows their solidarity and supported us financially or emotionally.