Rome (NEV), January 26, 2018 – A platform was created in Naples to support the integration of migrants and asylum seekers. It is made up of various realities – medical, academic, ecclesiastic and of the civil society – present in the territory. The purpose of this memorandum of understanding promoted by the Municipality of Naples and signed last January 19, is to network those in the city of Naples committed in the reception of refugees and migrants.
Among the signatories we recall the Community of St. Egidio, the “Federico II” and the “Orientale” Universities of Naples, the Pausillipon Foundation, the Rom association “Chi rom…e chi no”.
Also some Protestant groups signed the agreement: the Bethany Evangelical Foundation, the Christian Church of Vomero and the Methodist Church of Naples, already at the forefront in the reception of some Syrian families legally arrived in Italy thanks to the ecumenical project of the humanitarian corridors. “The contribution that the Waldensian and Methodist churches of Naples want to offer to this project – said pastor Dorothea Mueller – is the elaboration and experimentation of a new model of reception that focuses on the autonomy of the people hosted, always from the point of view of working in cooperation with other subjects”.
The ‘Bethany Evangelical Foundation’, which runs the homonymous hospital in Ponticelli (Naples), has for years been engaged in the front line in the so-named “responsible healthcare”. Its president, Luciano Cirica, recalls how services are provided to migrant women without residence permit and to their newborn children, so as to Syrian families arrived with the humanitarian corridors. The evangelical hospital in Ponticelli cooperates with Medical Hope the medical activity of Mediterranean Hope (the refugees and migrants program of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI), carried out in Lebanon.
